Name: Carl
Country and
Region: GA, Marietta
Native
Language: English
Student or
Teacher: Student
Age or Grade:
junior
Subject of
Question: Dalmatian Language
Question:
I need to find
out the exact date of when the last person to speak the Dalmatian language
died....I know it was in 1898 by a land mind but I want to know the EXACT date.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________
Dear
Carl:
Hello. I am
writing you on behalf of Ask-A-Linguistic-Tutor in response to your 1/28/01
question. Antonio Udina (the Italian
version of Tuone Udaina-his real name) was the last speaker of Dalmatian, an
extinct Romance language once spoken on the coast of Croatia. According to “Das Dalmatische: altromanische
Sprachreste von Veglia bis Ragusa und ihre Stellung in der
Apennino-Balkanischen Romania,” a book by the Italian linguist Matteo Bartoli,
Udina died June 10th, 1898, at around 6:30 p.m. The following is an excerpt from Encyclopedia Britannica:
“He was the main source of knowledge for his
parents' dialect (that of the island of Veglia [modern Krk], though he was
hardly an ideal informant; Vegliot Dalmatian was not his native language, and
he had learned it only from listening to his parents' private conversations.
Moreover, he had not spoken the language for 20 years at the time he acted as
an informant, and he was deaf and toothless as well. Most of the other evidence
for Dalmatian derives from documents from Zara (modern Zadar) and Ragusa
(modern Dubrovnik) dating to the 13th-16th centuries. It is possible that,
apart from isolated pockets, the language was then replaced by Croatian and, to
a lesser extent, by Venetian (a dialect of Italian). It is certain, even from
scanty evidence, that Dalmatian was a language in its own right, noticeably
different from other Romance languages.”
Here are some web sites worth checking out just for
fun:
1.)
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Parthenon/6502/
= New Dalmatian Web Page
2.)
http://www.britannica.com/bcom/eb/article/8/0,5716,118108+4,00.html
= Encyclopedia Britannica’s
entry for it.
Sincerely,
Andrew
Pollak
Ask-A-Linguistic-Tutor