From: willemvermeer
Message: 35702
Date: 2004-12-28
--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, g <st-george@...> wrote:
....
> Even if it can, for various reasons animal breeding can be more
> feasible for certain groups of people (certain cultures).
Yea, but what I'm referring to is the type of terrain where the
proportion of arable land to pasture is heavily weighted in favour of
pasture.
> ... The only thing that seems to bother me a li'l bit
> is the stubborn insistence on the nexus Vlachs-sheep, whereas
anywhere
> else nomadism is okay with cattle and horses as well.
That's surprising for me too, because like you I'm from cow country.
To me too animal husbandry is stuff with cows and all the rest is
marginal. But it is different when you get to more southern latitudes
and why that is I've no idea, also because cows were first
domesticated in Turkey, which puts them close to the Balkans both
geographically and ecologically. I understand sheep are more flexible
and less demanding in crucial ways. Horses can't beat sheep or cows
as the foundation of food production. There is a huge amount of
literature about all of that.
---
> (I ad-hoc remember the parts of the
> account by the Greek diplomat and chronicler who describes his
journey
> to Atilla's court - which must've been either in the Tissa plains
or in
> what's today's South-Western plains of RO (roughly in the Banat
region
> or perhaps in Oltenia). Those who served them with food and mead
and
> "services" seem to have been non-Hunic, perhaps local, people.)
That's Priscus. I quoted him in an earlier posting. He has some
remarks on language which may well be correct: "the subjects of the
Huns, swept together from various lands, speak, besides their own
barbarous tongues, either Hunnic or Gothic, or -- as many as have
commercial dealings with the western Romans -- Latin; but none of
them easily speak Greek, except captives from the Thracian or
Illyrian sea-coast ..." Even though one woudl perhaps expect
something like that on general grounds anyhow, it is nice to have it
confirmed by somebody who has actually been there and it is downright
interesting to hear about the status of Gothic as one of the
two "Verkehrssprachen".
I had mentioned
> > The constant movement of people from the mountains
> > into the valleys ....
and StG wrote:
> This also looks different if one includes in this... equation a
> component of tremendous importance: the custom of transhumance
> ("Almauf- & Almabtrieb").
No I don't mean that at all: I mean people moving into the lowlands
to abandon their ancestral way of life and take up agriculture and
never come back.
Then StG mentions:
> the most recent speculation that a Krakatau erruption in the 6th
> century may in the end have been the primordial cause for the
entire
> Asian waves of people that moved in such a short time to the West -
as
I've been wondering about the reception of that idea. Basically it is
about a volcano exploding in Indonesia or thereabouts (which has
happened from time to time) around, I think, 530, and giving rise by
a complicated chain of causation to both the rise of the Avars and
the epidemic of Justinian that has been referred to earlier in this
exchange (and much else besides). Does anybody know what has become
of the idea? (To my taste it sounded just a bit to neat to be true,
but that's only intuition.)
[On pathological linguistics]
> Yes, but if Sumerians had something in common with the Altaic
> branch, then automatically, part of the Hungarian heritage must
> have something in common too. :^)
OK, but please ... And the Finns have that guy called Wiiiik or
something like that.
> That's typical of the whole area - of course, today to a lesser
extent
> than 60-80 or 120 years ago. Western Europe didn't stay on a much
> better position. (I happen to live in the "Hauptstadt der Bewegung",
> so I know what I'm talking about. :))
I'm afraid I disagree. Despite much chaff there was always solid work
unencumbered by ideology, in both eastern and western Europe, apart
from the blackest periods during which totalitarian governments
inculcated prescribed orthodoxies. And even then you could often feel
that scholars disagreed with the prescribed ideology to the extent
that that was possible. But where is the Romanian linguist who writes
in neutral terms about the transdanubian hypothesis? The impression I
get (but I would be a happy man if you could show me wrong) is of a
self-imposed orthodoxy, of a profession that has collectively left
sanity behind and wants us outsiders to think that that is a normal
areal phenomenon. But it isn't. I recall a Serbian linguist at the
Kraków congress of 1998 explaining that all speakers of S^tokavian
are "really" Serbs, irrespective of their own affiliation, and he was
shouted down by his fellow-Serbs, who were ashamed of him.
I agree there is reason for pessimism,
Willem