Author: Francesca Lughi

Romance philology, as is known, is the science that studies neo-Latin languages ​​and texts written in these languages. The perspective of this discipline is threefold: on the one hand, it examines the development of these languages ​​(called diachronic aspect), that is, their historical and comparative evolution. On the other hand, it deals with grasping the morphology of a given language as a system in itself (called synchronic aspect). Finally, it provides the scientific foundation for the creation of critical editions of texts written in Romance languages. It was born, like modern philology in general, towards the end of the 18th century, thanks to the impulse given by Romanticism to the study of languages. Dante, in De vulgari eloquentia, clearly saw the affinities between the Romance languages ​​of Western Europe. His is the distinction between language of oc, oil language elanguage of yes. Later, Poggio Bracciolini and other humanists observed how Italian and other Romance languages ​​derived from Vulgar Latin. The father of Romance philology as a modern scientific discipline, however, can be considered the Frenchman François Raynouard (1761-1836), although other important contributions in the systematization of philology came from the work of the German Kassian philologist Karl Lachmann towards the middle of the XNUMXth century, from the observations of the French scholar Joseph Bédier at the beginning of the XNUMXth century and from the subsequent intuitions of the antiquarian Giorgio Pasquali in the XNUMXs. Finally, it should be noted that in Italy this discipline also covers linguistic aspects, mostly linked to historical linguistics, which concern the evolution from Latin to the Romance languages. In examining the Romance linguistic derivations, the first thing one might ask is whether Latin is a dead language. The answer is that, in reality, the Romance languages ​​are clear proof that Latin continues to be spoken in a large area of ​​Western Europe. Dalmatian, therefore, fits into the panorama of Romance languages, where with the adjective romance refers to those languages ​​that were derived from Latin following the expansion of the Roman Empire. The term Romance derives from the Latin adverb romance which refers to speaking in the vernacular (Romance languages) compared to speaking in Latin (latin speeches). According to this brief premise, it could be said that the number of Romance languages ​​corresponds, roughly, to the number of varieties spoken in the territory of Roman domination which form the so-called continuum novel, but to simplify things, Romanists distinguish nine languages: Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan, Occitan or Provençal, French, Sardinian, Italian, Ladin or Alpine Romance, Romanian. To these nine should be added a tenth, Dalmatian, of which the last speaker died in Veglia in 1898 due to the explosion of a land mine. For this reason, today Dalmatian is an extinct Romance language, once spoken on the coasts of Dalmatia and of which two variants were distinguished, northern o old man and southern o Ragusa. According to the linguist Carlo Tagliavini there was also a third dialect, the river, very similar to the Venetian of Istria and therefore classifiable under the latter idiom. With the fall of the Western Roman Empire, the Romanized populations of Illyria were left at the mercy of the barbarian invaders who were mainly Avars and Slavs. In the 50.000th century the region was divided into two entities: Dalmatia, that is the coast, and the internal mountainous area. The latter had been Slavicized, despite the survival of neo-Latin groups such as the Morlachs, while the former resisted the invasions and maintained its original identity: in fact, the population had managed to take refuge in fortified ports such as Zara, Spalato and Ragusa. The populations of Dalmatia maintained contacts with the Italian peninsula, thanks also to their proximity to the sea. In the 1897th century, according to the historian Giovanni De Castro, Dalmatian speakers numbered over XNUMX. With the conquests of the Republic of Venice, Dalmatic was replaced by Venetian: it seems that, for example, in the city of Zara this change occurred before the Renaissance. The Ragusa dialect, which was spoken by the majority of the population of the Republic of Ragusa until the mid-XNUMXth century, became extinct in the XNUMXth century also because of the massive migrations of Slavs who sought refuge in the Christian lands, protected by the Serenissima, to escape the invasions of the Turks. Only in some limited areas, such as the islands of Quarnero, did Dalmatic continue to be spoken until the time of Napoleon. Some direct XNUMXth-century transcriptions of the Veglio dialect remain. Bartoli, the greatest scholar of Dalmatic, managed to collect in XNUMX from the voice of the last speaker of Veglio, Antonio Udina Burbur, what are the last testimonies of this language. Additional sources of knowledge of Dalmatic are Serbo-Croatian and Venetian, which replaced it and which preserve many of its lexical elements. At a morphological level, Dalmatian presents archaic characteristics, such as for example the diphthongizations i> éi (déigoòu, dòuroki and ke velari: veilskenur "ash", dik "you say", loik < lucet) [Bartoli, 1906, II, par. 425]. It also presents a series of traits common, in part, to Tuscan and central-southern Italian which distinguish it from Venetian: conservation of t intervocalic and before r: for instance, patruno and not padron o paròn; ANDai such as vegl. akait«vinegar». Dalmatian, therefore, due to its physiognomy is rather original compared to Italian, even if it cannot constitute, as Bartoli claims, a conjunction towards the «individuality» of Romanian, in the East, in the heart of the Balkans. BIBLIOGRAPHY MG Bartoli, Dalmatian. Remains of an ancient Romance language spoken from Veglia to Ragusa and its location in Apennine-Balkan Romania, edited by A. Duro, Rome, Institute of the Italian Encyclopedia, 2000. MG Bartoli, The Dalmatians. Other information from Veglia bis Ragusa and further Stellung in the Balkan Apennines Romania, Nendeln/Liechtenstein, Kraus, 1975, 2 vols. (1906st ed. Wien, Halder, XNUMX). G. Inglese, How to Read a Critical Edition. Elements of Italian Philology, Rome, Carocci, 2003. P. Maas, Text criticism, Florence, Le Monnier, 1984. G. Pasquali, History of tradition and text criticism, Florence, Sansoni, 1974 (1934st ed. XNUMX). L. Renzi - A. Andreose, Manual of Romance linguistics and philology, Bologna, Il Mulino, 2006, pp. 178-179. LD Reynolds - NG Wilson, Copyists and Philologists: The Tradition of Classics from Antiquity to Modern Times, Padua, Antenore, 1987. A. Varvaro, Classical and Romance Text Criticism: Common Problems and Different Experiences, in Id., Linguistic and literary identities in Romance Europe, Rome, Salerno publisher, 2004.