Here then are two ancient races, the Greeks and another race, not indeed
so advanced, so important, or so widely spread, but a race which equally
keeps a real national being. There is also a third ancient race which
survives as a distinct people, though they have for ages adopted a
foreign language. These are the Vlachs or Roumans, the surviving
representatives of the great race, call it Thracian or any other, which
at the beginning of history held the great inland mass of the Eastern
peninsula, with the Illyrians to the west of them and the Greeks to the
south. Every one knows, that in the modern principality of Roumania and
in the adjoining parts of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, there is to be
seen that phenomenon so unique in the East, a people who not only, as
the Greeks did till lately, still keep the Roman name, but who speak
neither Greek nor Turkish, neither Slav nor Skipetar, but a dialect of
Latin, a tongue akin, not to the tongues of any of their neighbors, but
to the tongues of Gaul, Italy, and Spain. And any one who has given any
real attention to this matter knows that the same race is to be found,
scattered here and there, if in some parts only as wandering shepherds,
in the Slavonic, Albanian, and Greek lands south of the Danube.
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