Page:The nomads of the Balkans, an account of life and customs among the Vlachs of Northern Pindus (1914).djvu/18

 Owing to this deplorable dispute it has been extremely hard for any one to acquire accurate information about the Vlach villages. As Weigand found many years ago when the quarrel was in its infancy and no blood had been spilt any one enquiring into Vlach dialects was viewed with the utmost suspicion and liable to be told the most fantastic tales. Thus on one occasion we overheard the school children being ordered to talk only Greek as long as we were present; in another village which we were assured spoke only Greek, Vlach proved to be the common tongue. Nearly all modern Greek books and pamphlets on the Vlachs which might other¬ wise be of extreme interest and value, are owing to their political theories almost entirely worthless. Political philology has shown that Kutsovlach means ‘ little Vlach ’ and that ‘ a little Vlach ’ means one who is mostly a Hellene. This result is apparently reached by deriving the word first from kuchuk and confounding it with the meaning of κουτσός. Another work purporting to be a sober historical enquiry ends with the wish that our foes may hate us or better still fear us. Such literature can hardly be taken seriously, but at the same time its authors, often hellenized Vlachs, possess a knowledge of the country that no stranger can hope to acquire. Roumanian books on the Vlachs like the Greek are not impartial witnesses. From the nature of the case however they are less liable to fantastic theories; as regards the language they often minimize the number of Greek loan words in common use, in history and in folklore Rome plays a larger part at times than is either likely or possible and the numbers in the Vlach communities are calculated on a liberal basis. Estimates of population are all exceedingly doubtful; the Turkish figures take no account of race and are only concerned with religion, so that a Greek may mean a Bulgarian, Vlach or Albanian member of the Patriarchist Church. Nationality too in the Balkans is still in a state of flux; and classifications according to descent, language or political feeling would lead to different results. To take a simple case from Greece itself; by descent nearly all the Attic villagers are Albanians, a linguistic test would still