20-24 septembrie 2009 - Biblioteca Metropolitana Bucuresti

The first aromanian writers and their relationship with the Greek... 761Affirming his Aromanian consciousness, Daniil spoke in his dedicationto the Pelogonian metropolitan and in the name of Bulgarians (MacedonianSlavs) and in the name of Albanians also, mentioning that his work, TheIntroductory Teaching contains “ the four common dialects, meaning thesimple Rome language, the language of Vlachs from Mesia, the languageof Bulgarians and Albanians”. Daniil thus showed that he was fully awareof the multiethnic reality and, as a result, of the multi-language area fromthe Moscopole surroundings, and also that there was an urgent need ofthe speakers of those language and dialects mentioned to understand eachother, everyone knowing the other’s language 12.Daniil’s Lexicon, included in The Introductory Teaching, is not adictionary per se, but a kind of manual reading in four languages, addressedboth to young students and adults, in which the phrases talk in a free orderabout primary elements of an immediate universe, about domestic and wildanimals, cultivated plans, trees, human pursuits, customs and practices,human body parts, diseases and cures, moral teaching, numbers etc., whichfully demonstrates the author’s teaching intentions. On the other hand,using dictionary technique, Daniil collocates the words and words groupsin columns, so that lexical-grammatical units from the Greek columnmatches the other equivalent, Aromanian, Bulgarian, (Macedonian Slavic)and Albanian.The result is “not an inventory of basic words of the four Balkanidioms (considered in general in terms of their rustic aspect), but a kindof comparative grammar of these idioms. (Brâncuş, 1992: 39) Daniil thusput into practice, in illuminist spirit, the same as his predecessor, Cavalitidid, Leibniz’ ideas of comparative linguistics. In his Lexicon, Daniil put the’Barbarian” languages, Aromanian 13 , Bulgarian (Macedonian Slavic) andAlbanian “in an unusual equality of treatment” for that time and place, withthe holy language of the Greeks. (Papacostea, 1983: 388, 400)of the great European romanianist Eugeniu Coşeriu who was asked if Aromanians andDaco-Romanians knew about the existence of each other after their separation from thecommon base for so many centuries, he answered: ”The ordinary speaker didn’t know it,and we do not have documents. But most of the speakers who knew how to write or whohad national and historical consciousness knew it very well. From a history written in 1620in Dalmatia results that its author knew very well that there where two Vlachias: Daciais called Small Vlachia and the Large Vlachia was the one from the Balkans. Meaningeveryone who could write knew that they were the same Vlachs (s.n. N.B.). You imaginethat in their trips, they never met?” (Eugeniu Coşeriu, 1996: 114).12See in this matter Kristophson’s observation, 1974: 78.13For Neofit Doukas (1760-1845), a philologist of Aromanian origin, but of Greekfeelings, Aromanian was a dirty and stinking language; Peyfuss, 1994: 24.