Exhibition: 50 years of the Istro-Romanian language

About the event:

From the Oxford Hurren Collection to the ISTROX project

Opening hours:
10:00 - 13:00 & 19:00 - 21:00, closed on Sundays and on holidays

The ISTROX project has been implemented since 2018 by the Faculty of Linguistics, Philology and Phonetics of the University of Oxford. Scientific project combines linguistic research with the involvement of the Istro-Romanian community through fieldwork in Istria, the USA and Australia, as well as analyzes, transcriptions and work on metadata and internet platforms. Istro-Romanian is probably the least researched living Romance language and therefore its phonology, morphology, syntax and lexicon are of great interest to the academic linguistic community, especially the one dealing with Romance languages. The project is based on an analysis of unpublished linguistic material collected from Tony Hurren.

Tony (Anthony) Hurren, an English linguist who studied Istro-Romanian, taught at Oxford University from 1985 to 1997. After his death, Hurren's widow donated a large amount of unpublished material on the professor's research into Istro-Romanian in the summer of 1966 and 1967. in Istria, which includes:
- about 30 hours of sound recordings (on rolls or cassettes) recorded by T. Hurren in several Istro-Romanian villages in the 1960s.
- eight fieldwork notebooks collected during Hurren's research visits to Istria, containing transcription and / or translations of part of the audio material, as well as linguistic questionnaires, information on speakers and participants, etc.,
- bound, as yet unpublished grammar Istro-Romanian: functional phonology and grammar,
- 50 photographs of the Istro-Romanian community from the 1960s taken during Hurren's research visits to Istria.

The mentioned material has not been made public so far, it is almost unknown. Despite the fact that Tony Hurren used materials from Istria for his review of Istro-Romanian grammar and for some published scientific articles on the Istro-Romanian aspectual system, his legacy is an exceptional and almost intact treasure trove of information on Istro-Romanian language, especially Istrian history, heritage and multiculturalism.

The spoken Istro-Romanian language was almost not recorded before the beginning of the 20th century, so Hurren's material from the 1960s makes a recorded history of the Istro-Romanian language and its speakers, some of whom are still alive.

Organizers: Museum-Museo Lapidarium, Novigrad-Cittanova and Faculty of Linguistics, Philosophy and Phonetics of the University of Oxford / Faculty of Linguistics, Philology & Phonetics University of Oxford,

Authors: Jerica Ziherl and ISTROX team