On Mon, Dec 29, 2003, at 03:00 PM, Mate wrote:
> I know what you're talking about but you got the location
> wrong.
> The language is Istro-Romanian and it is spoken in 3
> villages in Istria (not in Dalmatia and not farther south).
Well, perhaps I didn't pay attention enough and they
really were IstroRomanians.
> They came from the interior of the Balkans indeed
> to Istria via Lika (an inland part of Croatia between
> Istria and Dalmatia but inland). Their language is
> well-known and described
Some linguists have said they must have come from
Serbia (or South Banat plus the Timoc Valley), since
this dialect has some peculiarities making it closer
to Daco-Romanian, and especially with Western DR
subdialects (inter alia certain types of rhotacisms).
> but they are known as very reluctant in speaking it
> in front of strangers.
In the case I was talking about (the TV report), they
weren't reluctant at all, since their guests were
from Romania. Yet they weren't able to sustain real
conversation with the guests without interprets or
without resorting to a foreign language. Symbolic
for the disappearance of a further European linguistic
group at the end of the 20th/beginning of the 21st
c.
> Mate
George
PS: Many (if not most) of the Romanians who are still
able to speak some variant or another of local Romanian
in Croatia, Serbia and Bulgaria have Slavicized surnames,
esp. of the kind suffixed with these endings <-ic^> and
<-ov + -ev>.