La singularité des Aroumains dans leur poésie populaire

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Achille Lazarou

Abstract

The author begins with a well-documented introduction to the Latinisation
of certain Greeks of the north, who survive under various names, but
call themselves Aroumanians. He then goes on to discuss the unequal nature
of their diglossy, which he attributes to the fact that they have continued to
use their ancestral tongue, Greek, almost unceasingly down the centuries,
even in the dark period of Turkish domination, founding at their own expense
Greek schools in the Vlach mountain villages. Indeed, such was their zeal and
love for the Greek language, that they played no small part in its spread among
the neighbouring peoples with whom they had dealings.
Their gradual acquisition of the popular Latin of the East gave these
bilingual Greeks, the Aroumanians, a certain Romanic character. But they
differ from the other Romanic peoples, such as the Dacians and the Getae,
for instance, whose ancestral tongues were so culturally inferior to Latin that
it eventually supplanted them completely. The Aroumanians, however, never
discarded their ancestral tongue: they used Latin primarily in their dealings
with the Romans and thereafter only within a close family or professional
context. Consequently, since Greek remained their principal linguistic organ,
the Aroumanian tongue inevitably atrophied to the extent that it became
inadequate for the composition of verse. This is precisely the reason why there
is no genuine Aroumanian demotic poetry. Amongst the Romanic peoples,
the Aroumanians are unique in this respect. With a few possible exceptions,
the demotic songs which have been presented as Aroumanian from the nineteenth
century onwards are not genuine. The Aroumanians do indeed have
splendid demotic verse of their own, but it is in Greek, because, as T. Papahagi
so correctly observes, Greek is incomparably superior to the Aroumanian
language.

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