--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Abdullah Konushevci <akonushevci@...>
wrote:
> Sorry Willem, but your assumptions are very strange to me. From this
> point of view, maybe you have right. But, do you really believe that
> all Albanians were Willems and they learn Latin in University.
I agree that the parallel is in many ways unsatisfactory. What I have
in mind is something along the lines of the following:
(1) First a period during which the language that was to evolve into
Albanian was spoken by a community of people many of whom dealt with
Latin-speakers on a daily basis on markets and various other social
configurations. People were confronted with Latin all the time and and
there were big advantages in knowing it. The borrowings of Albanian
show that in the society it came out of knowledge of Latin was normal.
It goes without saying that you acquired that knowledge in real life.
(Although I don't exclude the possibility of good speakers of Latin
giving informal instruction in it to their fellow Albanians. Why not?
It was a useful skill and where you have useful skills you have people
who are willing to pay to learn them and people who aren't above
earning some money imparting them to others to others.) Many people
sooner or later even shifted to Latin, and the language that was to
evolve into Albanian may have been heading for extinction (like
Etruscan, Gallic and so many others) at the moment Roman power
evaporated, so that shifting to Latin suddenly made no sense any more.
(2) Then the period after the disappearance of Roman power. Knowing
Latin had become useless. Most speakers of Latin may have fled. On the
other hand remaining members of Latin-speaking communities may have now
started shifting to Albanian, for instance because in the new
circumstances the Albanian way of life was suddenly the most
attractive, or least unattractive optino to stay alive.
It is important to realize that what you learn in school is often
relatively superficial. If you look around in Dutch society it is not
difficult to see that people do not really learn their English in
school (although they learn _some_ English there), but from television
and youth culture and holidays etc., and even more importantly: they
expect each other to be fluent in English (or something like DUT). If
you aren't fluent in English you are regarded as a loser whereas
anybody who knows some German (let alone French) is regarded as a nerd
or at best a dweep. (I'm sorry, I just watched the classical tap dance
episode of "Married with Children".)
Then you bring up a very important point:
> Despite
> five centuries of Ottoman rule in Balkan, I declare without hesitation
> that Ottoman language has very little impact, compared with Latin
> impact, in Albanian. So, as deeper we go, as hard is to explain the
> shift of language, without any educational system, to not speak about
> any integrated market.
Different societies are different. If you look at the social structure
of the Ottoman empire, you see lots of factors that make it different
from the Roman empire, often having to do with differing administrative
concepts, sometimes with other matters. Let me mention a few:
(1) Ottoman rule was concentrated in towns. Roman rule, on the other
hand, was much concerned about developing the countryside, notably
agriculture. Veterans would be settled all over the Roman empire. After
fifteen or twenty years of army life they would have spoken Latin for
most of their life, moreover, they were usually settled among strangers
and Latin would be the only common language. There was nothing remotely
like this during the Ottoman centuries.
(2) Turkish was the language of an elite one could not hope to
penetrate. You could not become a member of the elite just by being
ambitious. Contrast this with all those "Illyrian peasants" who made it
to emperor. Justinian started off as a destitute refugee from southern
Serbia and see where it got him! It was a completely different type of
society.
(3) Generally speaking, life in the Roman empire must have been
perceived to have been preferable to life outside it. (People tried to
get in all the time.) Once conquered people had overcome the trauma of
losing their political independence, they rarely looked back and just
became Roman citizens. (I know there were exceptions, but they were
exceptional.) This is signally different from the situation in the
European part of the Ottoman empire.
(4) There are other factors too. For instance, it was much less
complicated to become literate in Latin than in Turkish+Arabic.
So the analogy of the Ottoman empire is misleading.
Willem