Page:A simplified grammar of the Roumanian language.djvu/11



is hardly a language, or even a dialect, to be found unworthy of the philologist’s attention. The Roumanian tongue can claim that attention on more grounds than one. It is the language of an European country as independent as England itself, and is spoken by a population numbering eight millions of souls, extending beyond the bounds of Roumania itself into Bulgaria, Servia, Transylvania, Hungary, the Austrian province of the Bukovina, and the Russian province of Bessarabia. These are the people who speak the Roumanian proper, the language whose Grammar is treated of in the following pages, called also, for the sake of distinction, the Northern or Daco-Rouman. A closely allied dialect known as the Southern or Macedo-Rouman is spoken by a scattered population of about half a million, in Macedonia, Thessaly, and the adjoining highlands of Albania. The popular element it contains is rightly considered a rich treasure by philologists and students of folk-lore. The Roumanian Language owes its origin and distinctive character to the influx of heterogeneous words and expressions into “the