ISTROX. The Oxford University Hurren Donation and the Istro-Romanian language What is this folder? In the 1960s the Oxford linguist H. Antony (Tony) Hurren investigated the ‘Istro-Romanian’ language, closely related to Romanian and then spoken by only a few hundred people in the Istrian peninsula, in Croatia. This folder contains various kinds of material gathered by him during his linguistic fieldwork in the Istro-Romanian-speaking villages in the summers of 1966 and 1967. It constitutes a precious document of the language, and of its speakers, as they were in the 1960s. Although Hurren drew on these materials to write various linguistic studies, the bulk of the material he assembled remains unpublished and might easily have been lost for ever. Tony Hurren died in 2006. We are deeply grateful to his widow, Mrs Vera Hurren, for her foresight and generosity in donating to the University of Oxford (in 2010 and again in 2017) unpublished sound-recordings, fieldwork notebooks, photographs, and other material from Hurren’s fieldwork in 1966 and 1967. Mrs Hurren accompanied and assisted him on these visits and took many of the photographs herself. We are also very grateful to Oxford University’s John Fell Fund for funding the ISTROX project (https://istrox.ling-phil.ox.ac.uk) which has enabled us to analyse and document the Hurren material, and to upload most of it to the Oxford University Research Archive. We thank the members of the communities in Žejane and Šušnjevica for receiving us so kindly and giving so freely of their time to help us, and to all speakers of the Istro-Romanian language willing to put time into helping us complete this stage of our project. Our thanks go also to Dr Robert Doričić and Mrs Viviana Brkarić for their generous assistance in putting us in touch with members of the Istro-Romanian community, to the photographer Bojan Mrđenović, who documented our encounters with the members of the community during the spring of 2019, to the late Professors Goran Filipi and Petru Neiescu, and to Professors August Kovačec, Richard Sârbu, and Zvjezdana Vrzić, for their interest and support. What is in this folder? This folder contains the following elements from the Hurren Donation, plus some other material: •Approximately thirty hours of sound recordings (originally on reel-to-reel and cassette tape) made by Hurren in several Istro-Romanian villages in 1966 and 1967. They fall into two categories: free narration (e.g. folk tales and fairy tales, childhood memories, descriptions of the village life, local occupations or festivals) answers to various sets of questions meant to elicit specific information on a number of phonological, grammatical and lexical points, as well as to throw light on differences between the two Istro-Romanian dialects. •Eight field notebooks written by Hurren during his research visits (each approx 20cm x 26cm with 120 pages), containing transcriptions and/or translations of some of the audio material, as well as linguistic questionnaires and information about the speakers/participants etc. The notebooks sometimes contain loose sheets of paper; these have been included where they were found. •Some fifty photographs taken during Hurren’s research visits. Many of these were taken by Mrs Hurren. We have added to this collection two other unpublished fruits of Hurren’s research, which are not formally part of the Hurren Donation •Hurren’s 1971 Oxford University doctoral thesis: A Linguistic Description of Istro-Romanian. •Hurren’s 1999 unpublished grammar and phonological study of Istro-Romanian: Istro-Romanian: a functionalist phonology and grammar. A part of the Hurren material is not visible here. The ISTROX project respects the highest ethical guidelines regarding privacy and data protection. It has been necessary to redact very small portions of the material because we have not so far been able to obtain the appropriate permissions from individuals (or their surviving relatives) to publish their words, or to use images of them. Who is this material for? Naturally, it is for absolutely anyone who is interested in it, for whatever reason. We anticipate that it will be primarily of interest to linguists, and especially to linguists concerned with the history of Romanian and closely related speech varieties. In particular, it offers a substantial body of unpublished sound recordings in the language, and the complete set of Hurren’s field notebooks containing various linguistic questionnaires and the responses obtained in different localities, and a variety of texts in the language. If you wish to cite material from this source please use the convention: Hurren, A. 1966-1967. Title of individual recording/notebook. [sound recording/manuscript]. [date of access]. Available from: URL. Contents A. Recordings folder contains both the recordings and the images of the associated tape covers. B. Notebooks folder contains: Hurren’s field notebooks (Hurren did not provide separate identifiers for each of his these, but we have assigned to each a distinguishing letter of the alphabet from A to H); a list of Hurren’s linguistic consultants containing their abbreviations by which they are identified, their full names, their ‘nicknames’, their place, and their age group; a list of the notebooks with an outline of the contents of each (including indications of correspondences between material in the notebooks and in the recordings). This folder also contains Hurren’s 1999 unpublished grammar of Istro-Romanian. C. Photographs folder The folder contains some fifty photos scanned at 300dpi and saved as TIFF. All the photographs included here were produced by Tony Hurren and Vera Hurren during his fieldwork visits to Istria. We are very grateful to Mrs Hurren for lending us the photographs in connexion with the ISTROX project. We have acted in good faith when making this material available online. During a field trip to Istria in spring 2019, we identified the majority of the people who appear in the photographs and obtained the consent of those who appear in the photographs - with a few exceptions, where we were assured by the former participants in Hurren’s research that those who appear in the photographs have either passed away, with no known relatives, or have moved outside Croatia, with no known means of contacting them or their descendants. Comments? If you have any specific comments, or if you find anything on this site which you feel that should not be here, please email us at istrox@ling-phil.ox.ac.uk. Let us know if you believe that some of the material included here needs to be ethically cleared with you: we will be happy to do that, and to remove the respective material, normally within 48 hours from receipt of your message, if that is what you wish. Please indicate your full name, your contact details, and details of the material that you believe includes you or a relative of yours.