From: mkapovic@...
Message: 35582
Date: 2004-12-22
>Oh but I'm pretty sure that I would know about such a thing... It would be
>>> 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.