ZAGREB, 13 Aug 2021 - Researchers from the Oxford University Faculty of Linguistics, Philology and Phonetics have invited the remaining speakers of the severely endangered Istro-Romanian language to help them translate and understand the collected audio recordings of that language in a project called ISTROX.

This interdisciplinary project was launched in 2018 and is based on sound recordings made in the 1960s by Oxford linguist Tony Hurren during field research in the areas of Croatia where Istro-Romanian is spoken. The recordings were donated to the Taylor Institution Library in Oxford.

During the first stage of the project, the audio recordings were described in detail and catalogued, and the content of Hurren's notebooks was matched to the recordings. In the second phase, the less intelligible recordings were uploaded on the citizen science web portal Zooniverse.

The remaining speakers of Istro-Romanian who live in Croatia and those who live abroad have been invited to register with the platform and help researchers clarify the problematic linguistic elements.

All of the data resulting from the research and all other materials that are currently part of the Hurren donation will be uploaded on the Internet to make them available to the scientific community and public, the ISTROX research team has said.

This material has never been published, and its existence has hitherto been virtually unknown to the wider world. Hurren used it for his doctoral thesis.

"The recordings, which include folktales, accounts of local traditions, and autobiographical remarks and stories, are not just of crucial interest to linguists, but also contain unique documentation of the history of the community that spoke, and still speaks, the language," the researchers said.

Hurren worked with a large representative sample of speakers of all ages and covered nearly all the villages in which Istro-Romanian was spoken, thereby capturing material for a description of the major linguistic subdivisions (there are two major dialects), the researchers said.

Istro-Romanian is possibly the least-known of the surviving Romance languages and its phonology, morphology, syntax, and lexicon are of enormous interest to linguists generally, and to Romance linguists in particular, the researchers said.

Istro-Romanian is a Romance language and is historically descended from the Latin of the Roman Empire. The language is most closely related to the one surviving major Romance language of Eastern Europe, namely Romanian.

It is one of four major branches of what linguists call 'Daco-Romance', which refers to the surviving Romance (Latin-based) languages of south-eastern Europe, continuing the Latin assumed to have been spoken in the Roman province of Dacia.

It is not known when exactly Istro-Romanian broke away from the ancestor of modern Romanian, but the separation may go back as much as a thousand years.

The place of origin of the language, and the question whether it branched off from varieties spoken in Romania or from other varieties spoken in the Balkans, or whether it represents a dialect mixture, are still controversial.

The language is still spoken in Žejane, northwest of Rijeka, and around the village of Šušnjevica on the western slopes of Mt Učka in Istria. The speakers in Žejane call the language Žejanski and those in Istrian villages call it Vlaški. An estimated 250 inhabitants of those villages are believed to still speak that language as do those who emigrated to bigger cities or abroad.

The Croatian Culture Ministry in 2007 included Istro-Romanian on its list of protected intangible cultural heritages.

Those who speak or understand Istro-Romanian can help preserve a record of this disappearing language by going to www.istrox.uk. More info about the project: https://istrox.ling-phil.ox.ac.uk/. Both platforms are bilingual (English and Croatian).

December 7, 2020 – The Department of Mathematics of the Faculty of Science, University of Zagreb, introduces a new and the first graduate biomedical mathematics study in Croatia, which is also the first such study program in this part of Europe. It will be taught entirely in English.

As Jutarnji.hr reports, the news was announced on Friday, December 4, at the final press conference of the BioMedMath project, funded by the European Union within the Operational Program Effective Human Resources European Social Fund.

Project manager prof. Dr. sc. Hrvoje Šikić points out that the basic idea of the need for such a study has been present for some ten years, but the support of the European Social Fund has given a great impetus to the implementation of this project, which comes at the right time.

"The growing role of mathematics in biology and medicine is already noticeable to the general public, mainly due to the realization of the famous Human Genome project. Recent events related to this year's pandemic and daily reporting on various predictions based on mathematical models highlight the need for collaboration between biologists, medical professionals, and mathematicians.

Among other things, today, sophisticated mathematical methods are present in genetics, bioinformatics, tumor growth modeling, brain research, cardiovascular system, organ growth processes, aging processes, evolutionary processes, ecology," said prof. Dr. sc. Šikić.

The study of biomedical mathematics is a two-year international program taught entirely in English and is primarily intended for students who have completed university undergraduate study of mathematics or equivalent study anywhere in the world. Along with additional mathematics courses, it will also be open to students who have completed various other related undergraduate studies.

Since this is the first of such a study program in Croatia and beyond, the project has established cooperation with an institution with many years of experience in this field – the University of Oxford, one of the world's leading centers for biomedical mathematics. The project manager also notes that the lecturers at the study will be experts in mathematics, biology, and medicine.

"Fortunately, we managed to gather a fantastic group of associates from the Department of Biology and Mathematics, School of Medicine, and the Ruđer Bošković Institute. We can offer a modern, globally competitive program, which is based mainly on research that project associates regularly conduct in their scientific work," said Šikić.

Dean of the Faculty of Science, prof. Dr. sc. Mirko Planinić said that the Faculty's mission is to change our society with knowledge.

"Opening a new study of biomedical mathematics in English is one step in that direction. Our greatest treasures are talents, and through this study, these talents are developed and connected with Croatia due to the stimulating environment at our Faculty, which managed to gather a team of internationally recognized experts," said Planinić.

Work on the project ends at the end of this year when the program goes into the accreditation process. Since the University of Zagreb already has significant experience with the influx of international students (student visas, organization of stay, accommodation, learning about the Croatian language and culture), they expect that the study will start very soon after the international evaluation.

"We are sure that the experts we will educate in this program will be ambassadors of scientific excellence. There will be places for such trained staff on the labor market and in a society in which trust in scientific expertise should be constantly developed," concluded the dean.

To read more news about Croatia, follow TCN's dedicated page.

As Poslovni Dnevnik writes on the 1st of May, 2020, the worldwide search for a vaccine against the new coronavirus has paralysed public health and the global economy and completely changed the way in which we live our lives, even down to the way we conduct our social relations.

Of the nearly 400 medicines and vaccines currently being tested, 5 or 6 have shown good results and have entered the clinical trials phase in humans. One, perhaps the most promising research, comes from England's prestigious Oxford University. That's where Croatian molecular biologist Kristijan Ramadan works.

The whole world is wondering if this is finally going to be a coronavirus vaccine that will be both reliable and safe.

''Nobody can answer that, the vaccines are stil being developed,'' Ramadan told Zajedno za zdravlje/Together for health (on HRT4).

''We have about 70 different groups and vaccines that are close to reaching clinical research worldwide. We're proud of our university for coming to the conclusion that our vaccine has shown excellent results in testing on monkeys. Six monkeys were infected with a large amount of human coronavirus and after receiving the vaccine ,they were completely healthy within 2 or 3 weeks, ie, they didn't show any symptoms of disease development and the new coronavirus couldn't reproduce in them. And in the control group, symptoms of coronavirus developed. This shows that a vaccine intended for human use also works in monkeys,'' Ramadan explained.

The sequence between the monkey and human genome is strikingly similar.

''This should mean that this vaccine will have an even better effect in humans. The question now is how harmful the vaccine will be or how much of a benefit it will be. With each vaccine, the postulate is to do less damage and provide more benefit. This vaccine is significant because the group that developed it has already had success with the previous development of the MERS vaccine,'' he said.

The development of technology has contributed to all of this.

''Until about ten years ago, and until molecular biology evolved with the help of technology, most vaccines were made by using a virus, a living virus that would have its pathogenicity reduced. Today, with new technologies, we no longer have to use the virus itself, we just use one piece of genetic material from it and insert it into another virus or another vector, the carrier of that virus,'' he explained.

''This vaccine was patented at Oxford by director Adrian Hill, who has worked on it for twenty years. His idea was to develop a good malaria vaccine. He never succeeded in that, but success came from that failure when he developed a specific technology used today to develop this coronavirus vaccine,'' he said.

"The knowledge that he has been accumulating over the course of 20-30 years has proven to be essential for the development of this vaccine at this time," he concluded.

The human testing phase has begun, and every vaccine must undergo extremely stringent rigorous testing. We'll just need to wait with our fingers crossed to find out if and when it will be ready for mass use.

Make sure to follow our dedicated coronavirus section for more.

March 27, 2020 - According to Oxford University, Croatia has the strictest coronavirus measures in the world. 

Although some members of the Croatian Civil Protection Headquarters are dissatisfied with citizens' behavior and threatening even harsher measures, judging by the state measures tracker in the fight against the coronavirus, Croatia is currently implementing the most rigorous measures in the world, according to Oxford University.

Namely, British researchers are looking at basic criteria such as school closures, travel bans, and public gatherings bans, and then compares these measures to the number of people currently infected, thereby obtaining an index of the rigor of the measures implemented.

The purpose of the meter is to offer transparent insight into the measures taken by world governments to combat the coronavirus, and the published data will be updated frequently.

Judging by the coronavirus meter, Croatia is currently implementing the most rigorous measures in the world, with Serbia and Syria not far behind. Thus, it should be kept in mind that countries with few cases that responded quickly were highlighted.

Croatia closed schools, playgrounds, banned public gatherings, closed cafes, restaurants, and all shops that were not necessary very early on, and public transport was suspended. Croatia urges citizens to stay at home and some parts of the country, such as Murter, are quarantined.

While Croatia is at the top, some countries, such as the United States, where the infection is expected to explode, as well as the United Kingdom and Canada, are below the midline of austerity measures.

Health Minister Vili Beros commented on this analysis for RTL Danas, saying that Croatia is at the European top because of these measures.

"Our results so far show that we are among the countries that have slower growth in the number of patients. I think the measures are introduced on time and very carefully balanced. We have announced a certain reduction in these measures relating to shops around the markets that provide supplies because life should not and will not stop. We need to carefully balance the preservation of normal life flows and the possibility that the infection continues to spread," he said.

We also must remember, however, that the Oxford tracker does not have country-specific data such as India, which has become the world's largest quarantine. Namely, 1.3 billion people must stay in their homes, and the media is flooded with videos of the police attacking everyone who they find on the street. 

You can see the Oxford Government Response Tracker here.

Source: Direkno.hr

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March 17, 2019 - The Croatia rugby team and Oxford University continue their years of comradery with a rugby match in Dubrovnik next month.