--- g <
george.st@...> wrote:
>
> >What I had intended to convey under THIS
> >hypothesis is that the PR might have been those
> whose
> >contact with Christianity (unlike that of their
> >equally Latin-speaking neighbours ==perhaps those
> of
> >the cities above all==) was rather
> superficial.
>
> Of course it was superficial if we understand by
> superficial the circumstance that flocks of sheep
> stay for long periods of time without higher
> ecclesiastic
> hierarchy and/or links to bishopric sees, and being
> attended more or less by scarce priests (if at all).
******GK: One problem is to find out what if anything
can be securely dated to the period before the
collapse of the Roman Empire and the evanescence of
the hierarchy (high and low). Perhaps Marius can help
a bit when he comes back. In the meantime we have at
least one word, "biserica" which goes back to a
situation arising in the early 4th c. AD. But this
word only refers (for a brief period) to buildings
where worship is conducted. And now we have to make a
big assumption, viz., that "ecclesia" just didn't make
it in that sense to the PR population (at least on the
basis of hypothesis 1). And further, that the word for
"building" somehow made it and was preserved, but not
the other senses of "ecclesia", esp. those which
existed BEFORE the ecclesiastical acception of
"biserica/basilica". And still further, that there
were no other words to convey these alternate meanings
of "ecclesia". To assume that "biserica" did the trick
right away is just not credible.The only way to
explain all of this on the basis of my hypothesis 1 is
to imagine that the PR lived in very remote locations,
and were not Christianized in any solid sense, but did
pick up some of the words common to their Christian
neighbours. But let's move on to another "essential"
word to test this out: the mass. What is it in
contemporary Romanian? Is it anything like the Latin
"missa", French "messe" etc. ? Or is it something else
entirely?******
>
> To a certain extent, Christians in the ex-Soviet
> Union
> experienced something similar
******GK: I can't in good conscience accept the
analogy. There was an underground Church, there were
contacts with clerics. There was no loss of
ecclesiastical vocabulary. And of course there was
also the official Russian Orthodox Church. On top of
that there was persecution of dissident denominations.
I just don't see any similarity to the situaztion of
PR in the 4th and 5th c.*******
> Pax vobiscvm, :-)
Et amor proximi secundum legem Domini nostri (:=)))
>
>
__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
SBC Yahoo! DSL - Now only $29.95 per month!
http://sbc.yahoo.com