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256 John nandriŞ
Weigand was a considerable linguist and an indefatigable traveller
in Greece and south-east europe, who made an outstanding contribution
to studies of the Aromâni based on original fieldwork. he founded the
romanian Seminar of the period 1893–1906 in leipzig, and edited the
Jahresbericht des Instituts für Rumänische Sprache from 1894–1928.
From 1925–1928 this became the Balkan Archiv. It contains a great deal
of linguistic material on the Vlahs, such as the Codex Dimonie 32 which is
an important Aromân liturgical text from Monastir incorporating a life of
St Anthony. the MS was discovered by Weigand in ohrid. It dates from c.
1800–1825, and relates to the Aromân dialect of lânga [lunga] in Albania.
When Weigand was in tirana he heard the dialect being spoken among
some Aromâni who had come to tirana in about 1650.
Weigand’s report on the romanian Seminar, giving names and courses,
is to be found in Cordescu 1906 ; 218-26. Biographical notes on him and
reviews of his onomastic and toponymic work are given by Frăţila 1981 33 .
one of Weigand’s earliest works and among the most valuable is Der
Sprache der olympo-Walachen, of 1888. In it he quotes a letter from an
Aromân of Kruševo dated April 1887, which shows that he was well aware
of some of the pitfalls of Balkanology:
Many German, French, english and other travellers have travelled in
our regions in a spirit of scientific enquiry, but alas ! - what has been
the result ? these honorable gentlemen have as a matter of course been
conducted on their travels by Greeks or hellenophiles, and as a result
have been misled into taking the Aromâni for pure Greeks. 34
even Curzon did not wholly learn to discriminate between Vlahs and
Albanians.
Although Weigand’s books are of their time in having a strong narrative
component, this is no loss, and he is full of sympathy for what he observed
with such comprehension and exactitude. the personality of this German
scholar, who was able to appreciate the subtle qualities of a remote and
mimetic people behind the obtrusive facade of Balkan national character,
merits recognition and more profound study.
the continuing influence of the leipzig school is discernible in the
contributions of modern German scholarship to south-east european studies,
‘oprostite, Gospodine, mi smo Vlasi; u Vlaškijem kučama ovako se živi’ ”. [Karađić Srpski
Rječnik 1818; sv .“Vlach”].
32 Jahresber. d. Inst. Rum. Sprache zu Leipzig. Vol. 1, (1894) : 1-78/Vol. 4, (1897) :
136-227/Vol. 5, (1898) : 129-297/Vol. 6, (1899) : 84-173.
33 Frăţilă, V., Revue des Études Sud-Est Européenes, xIx/1 (1981).
34 WeIGAnD, G., Die Sprache der Olympo-Walachen (leipzig, 1988) : 3.