>> NB: the Romanian spoken south of the Danube down to South of
>> Serbia and as far in the West as Croatia (amazingly until today in
>> some
>> spots - of which one knows only because people from there went to
>> Romania a couple of years ago to participate in appropriate festivals
>> and cultural encounters)
>
> We've already been over this on the list. The so-called IstroRomanians
> in
> Istra in Croatia are very well known and there is a very good grammar
> and
> dictionary of it etc. If somebody doesn't know of them, that can be
> attributed only to ignorance or lack of interest...
No, sir, I don't refer to the Istroromanians, who speak a different
dialect.
I refer to people who speak *our* dialect. Even the German-Austrian
writer Peter Handke (1/2 Slovenian) discovered Romanian villages in
the Serbian part of Bosnia. People over there, nationalistic Serbs,
disclosed
that they in fact were Romanians and that the oldest of them (granpas
and
granmas) were still able to talk Romanian (i.e. "Dacoromanian" and not
Macedoromanian or Istroromanian).
It is important to underline these things because they are barely known
in Romania, let alone outside of it. Especially since those minorities
are ill at ease whenever the surrounding population realizes that they
aren't Yugoslavs or Bulgarians or Greek. The most striking situation is
that of the Romanian in the Timoc region, a "couple" of kilometers south
of the Romanian province of Oltenia: they don't have Romanian priests,
no Romanian schools, and Serbian teachers forbid Romanian schoolchildren
to present themselves as Romanians, they have to say they are Vlakhs, if
they don't wanna be Serbians. This in spite of the fact that Serbia
acknowledges
a Romanian minority farther West, in the regions of Vrs^ac and Novi Sad.
Only very recently appeared some signs of improvement, based on I don't
know what negotiations betw. Bucharest and Belgrade. And that Romanian
population neighbors Romanian regions such as Mehedintzi and Banat,
speaks the same *sub*dialect, and is not as remote (geographically and
historically) as the population in S-Albania and N-Greece or on the
Istria
peninsula.
(BTW, the Istria-Romanians: based on some specificities of vocabulary
and
phonetics, some scholars assume that they must have migrated over there
in the 14th century coming from the Serbia+Banat region. Their dialect
is
anyway somewhat closer to Romania's dialect than it is the case of the
so-called Macedonian Romanians and the Meglenites.)
> No such thing. The only Romanians in Croatia are those already
> mentioned
> in Istra.
Approx. last year I saw a Croat living at the seaside. He and his
relatives
were interviewed by reporters of the Romanian TV and they disclosed that
they belonged to the now extinct Romanian minority of the so-called
"Morlacs" (Maurovlachs) who once were quite numerous in Dalmatia and
who came there from the East. They are/were not the same as the
Istria-Romanians. The Croat guy who mostly spoke in that interview (and
who is about 60 years old, and having a typical SerboCroatian name)
pretended that he was able to speak a li'l bit of the dialect of his
ancestors.
But he couldn't in front of the camera. Perhaps he knows a few words,
but
that's all. However, it could've been that his grandparents or the
parents
of these were in command of the dialect.
And the fact that you say "No such thing." is a further confirmation:
the
Morlacs disappeared virtually completely and for good. And of those
scattered Romanians speaking the Romanian dialect (ie, neither Istrian,
nor Morlacian, nor Epirote & the like) are so few and keep mum to such
a degree, that Romanians themselves, say, in Vojvodina aren't aware of
them, let alone the majority populations that surround them.
> Mate
George