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(Istro-Romanian/Die
österreichisch-ungarische Monarchie in Wort und Bild, 10. Band, Das
Küstenland, Wien 1891/Public Domain) |
Oxford
University Invites Speakers of Istro-Romanian to Join Research Project
[Source:https://www.croatiaweek.com/istro-romanian-language-speakers-to-join-oxford-university-research-project//]
ZAGREB, 14 Aug (HINA) - Researchers
from the Oxford University Faculty of Linguistics, Philology and
Phonetics have invited the remaining speakers of the severely
endangered Istro-Romanian language to help them translate and
understand the collected audio recordings of that language in a
project called ISTROX.
This interdisciplinary project was
launched in 2018 and is based on sound recordings made in the 1960s
by Oxford linguist Tony Hurren during field research in the areas of
Croatia where Istro-Romanian is spoken. The recordings were donated
to the Taylor Institution Library in Oxford.
During the first stage of the
project, the audio recordings were described in detail and
catalogued, and the content of Hurren's notebooks was matched to the
recordings. In the second phase, the less intelligible recordings
were uploaded on the citizen science web portal Zooniverse.
The remaining speakers of
Istro-Romanian who live in Croatia and those who live abroad have
been invited to register with the platform and help researchers
clarify the problematic linguistic elements.
All of the data resulting from the
research and all other materials that are currently part of the
Hurren donation will be uploaded on the Internet to make them
available to the scientific community and public, the ISTROX
research team has said.
This material has never been
published, and its existence has hitherto been virtually unknown to
the wider world. Hurren used it for his doctoral thesis.
"The recordings, which include
folktales, accounts of local traditions, and autobiographical
remarks and stories, are not just of crucial interest to linguists,
but also contain unique documentation of the history of the
community that spoke, and still speaks, the language," the
researchers said.
Hurren worked with a large
representative sample of speakers of all ages and covered nearly all
the villages in which Istro-Romanian was spoken, thereby capturing
material for a description of the major linguistic subdivisions
(there are two major dialects), the researchers said.
Istro-Romanian is possibly the
least-known of the surviving Romance languages and its phonology,
morphology, syntax, and lexicon are of enormous interest to
linguists generally, and to Romance linguists in particular, the
researchers said.
Istro-Romanian is a Romance language and is historically descended from the
Latin of the Roman Empire. The language is most closely related to the one
surviving major Romance language of Eastern Europe, namely Romanian.
It is one of four major branches of what linguists call ‘Daco-Romance’, which
refers to the surviving Romance (Latin-based) languages of south-eastern Europe,
continuing the Latin assumed to have been spoken in the Roman province of Dacia.
It is not known when exactly Istro-Romanian broke away from the ancestor of
modern Romanian, but the separation may go back as much as a thousand years.
The place of origin of the language, and the question whether it branched off
from varieties spoken in Romania or from other varieties spoken in the Balkans,
or whether it represents a dialect mixture, are still controversial.
The language is still spoken in
Žejane, northwest of Rijeka, and around the
village of Šušnjevica on the western slopes of Mt Učka in Istria. The speakers
in Žejane call the language Žejanski and those in Istrian villages call it
Vlaški. An estimated 250 inhabitants of those villages are believed to still
speak that language as do those who emigrated to bigger cities or abroad.
The Croatian Culture Ministry in 2007 included Istro-Romanian on its list of
protected intangible cultural heritages. |