CHAPTER
XI
THE VLACH LANGUAGE 'H
yKai(T(Ta jxas
Our language
dvai is
fiia fieyaXr]
(raXdra.
one great salad.
Cretan Saying
VLACH but
is
a Latin language
and a
dialect of
Roumanian,
naturally owing to the isolation and dispersion of
those
who speak
it, it
has remained in an undeveloped
condition and from time to time adopted
many
foreign words.
But although the adoption of foreign words may obscure the language for those who have only a slight acquaintance with it, for all that the grammar, which is the essential base of any tongue, retains fall
its
dom and
Roumanian dialects Roumanian of the king-
true Latin character.
into the following groups
Transilvania with
:
—the
many
subdivisions, the Istrian
Vlach with its own subdivisions. Some Roumanian philologists say that Vlach is in the condition in which Roumanian proper probabl}/ was several hundred years ago. Its isolation and the fact that it was not reduced to writing have kept its syntax in a very simple Like all Roumanian dialects Vlach has one great state. peculiarity which marks it off from all other Romance landialect,
Meglen and
lastly
The article instead of being placed in front of the attached as a kind of sufhx at the end, and it is through the declension of the suffixed article that the nouns themThe article is of course derived from selves are declined. guages.
noun
is
ille, for example the Latin ilium vicinum becomes French and Italian le voisin and il vicino, but in Vlach
the Latin in
This peculiarity in the position of the article the Roumanian dialects have in common with two neighbouring
vitsinlu.