Odp: Slavic or Slavonian?

----- Original Message -----

From: Mark Odegard

To: cybalist@eGroups.com

Sent: Monday, January 17, 2000 6:48 AM

Subject: [cybalist] Slavic or Slavonian?

The reference in another question to the Dalmatian language, and the description of its geographic location as  'coastal Croatia' brings to mind the 'problem' of the words 'Slavonia', 'Slavonian' and 'Slavonic'.

Croatia is sort of like an up-side-down U, with its 'legs' tilted to a northwest-southeast axis. The leg on the coast is indeed Dalmatia. The other leg is called Slavonia. The online Merriam-Webster describes it as  "region E Croatia between the Sava, the Drava, & the Danube".

Thus. The people native to that place are Slavonians,  and it is perhaps possible to speak of the dialects there as 'Slavonic'. Logically (and not too incorrectly) Old Church Slavonic should be the Slavic analogue of Church-Latin used in that province.

Now. In some references, I see the Slavic branch referred to as 'Slavonic', but these seems to be either British, or by someone with a European tilt in his academic background. A Bulgarian I sometimes correspond with was suprised that 'Slavic' is the nearly-universal American term for this branch of the IE family, and that 'Slavonic' is never applied to the Slavic peoples as a whole, or to their languages as a whole.

Aside from Old Church Slavonic (which I gather is essentially proto-South-Slavic), my impression of American usage is that 'Slavonic'  and it's various inflections are limited to references to the Croatian region. What I am saying is I learned about 'Slavic' first, and didn't hear the word 'Slavonic' till I hit college.

Do the Slavs here have anything to say about this?

Mark.

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The Slavic word for the Slavs is *Slowe:n- (of disputed origin). The earliest sources which mention them seem to suggest that as late as in Attila's times only one group of Slavic tribes used that name, but it soon became a general term of self-designation.

 

I don't know if there is a pan-Slavic preference for either English term. As you correctly observe Slavonic is frequent in Britain and Slavic is all but universal in the States. I prefer the latter, despite my generally pro-British linguistic sentiments, mostly because it does the same job just as well as the longer word, and is more transparently related to the noun Slav. The last-mentioned form is, to be sure, an unpleasant mutilation of the full ethnonym. Latin Sclavus came to mean "a captive northerner", hence English slave :(. Well, gotta live with it. On the brighter side, I'm told that Italian ciao comes from a dialectal form of sclavo "your humble servant, sir".

 

BTW, there are also Slovenians, Slovaks (who call their country Slovensko) and Slovincians (an extinct ethnos close to the Kashubians in northern Poland).

 

Finally, Mark, OCSl is a few hundred years too young to be identified with Proto-South-Slavic for all intents and purposed (quite apart from the question if it's legitimate to consider the southern Slavic languages a single genetic, as opposed to geographical, unit). It was originally just a peripheral (Thessalonian) dialect of Old Bulgarian, and it owes its importance to historical accident.

 

Piotr