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Love, Loss, and Life between the Biobío and the Danubio

This anthology embraces a physical stretch of land, sea, mountain, marsh, desert, and woods that lies between the two rivers, the Biobío originating in the Chilean Andes and flowing into the Pacific at Concepción, Chile, and the Danube flowing through central and eastern Europe. This space is not measured in miles but in the spiritual and creative journeys of Jewish women writers from Latin America and the Balkans. Spanning novels, memoirs, and poetry, their diverse voices create a unique literary landscape where two seemingly distant regions find common ground in shared histories of refuge, marginality, and sanctuary.
 

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This paper describes some linguistic peculiarities of Romani-origin words in the ethnolinguistic repertoire of the Romungros (ERR), a non-standard Hungarian variety spoken by the descendants of South Central Romani speakers. Based on empirical data, we examine various linguistic features, showing that ERR exhibits reduced morphological complexity alongside increased lexical and phonological complexity. We demonstrate that the innovative features of ERR, such as its flexibility in incorporating Romani roots, the use and the reinterpretation of Romani linguistic features and the violations of the grammatical rules of standard Hungarian are rooted in linguistic creativity and serve to mark group identity.
 

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This paper examines the use of spatial adverbs and preverbs, such as ‘up’, ‘down’, ‘in’ or ‘out’, in combination with toponyms in directional and local expressions in a number of nonstandard varieties of Alpine Gallo-Romance, Burgenland Croatian, Hungarian, Romani, Upper German and Slovenian. This feature has been described as a form of geocentric orientation system that refers to salient landmarks characteristic for the route between a reference point and a remote place, such as a river or a mountain. However, the adverbs and preverbs do not serve as an orientation system per se but rather enable a speaker to perspectivize his/her utterance. The choice of an adverb or preverb depends on the speaker’s sociogeographic point of view which is, in turn, shaped by the community a speaker belongs to. Our paper aims at offering a different approach towards this feature by analyzing the social references, the pragmatic function as well as the use of these adverbs and preverbs with regard to aspect and aktionsart. Based on this, we propose a function-based approach to explain the fact that this feature is found in a variety of languages since we consider topography-based models not to be sufficient to explain the spread of this feature over the topographically diverse regions and typologically diverse languages of southern Central Europe.
 

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