St George comments on my notes on Schramm:
I mentioned:
> >... Du Nay ...
> BTW, do you know the real name of this scholar (from Romania, I
> suppose)? "Du Nay" must be a pseudonym (a Hungarian one =>
> <dunai> ['du-nO-i] "Danubian," or "Donauer").
I wish I did. And I don't approve of people pulling stunts like that,
but the book amply makes up for it.
-o-o-o-o-
> BTW, isn't it strange that neither Romanians nor Albanians have
> preserved names of people, of deities, creeds, namely to such an
> extent and clarity that experts can make better conclusions than
> those forever vague statements referring to a blurred "substrate"?
> All existing foklore, old traditions etc. are obscure, no one knows
> what's a genuine inherited Thracian, Dacian, Illyrian (and even
> Hunic, Avar, Sarmatian) element and what nor.
> Compare this state of affairs with, say, what happened in the Slavic
> and esp. Germanic worlds where so much old onomastics has been
> preserved even through and esp. thanks to the Church. (In the case
> of Romanians, even the genuine Italic onomastics disappeared, being
> replaced by Christian names of Greek, Hebrew as well as by Slavic
> names. Neither exists in the Romanian vocabulary any reflex of
> <ecclesia>, unlike in Albanian. The term used is a reflex of
> <basilica>.)
I don't think it is strange at all. Both Albanian and Rumanian are
obviously the languages of small (possibly tiny) traumatized refugee
populations who went through periods with living conditions too
painful to contemplate, perhaps more than once. In addition Albanian
looks pretty much like the language of a population that was on the
verge of completely shifting to Latin (hence forgetting about their
collective past) when Roman power structures crumbled, robbing the
shift of its usefulness. Germanic and Slavic are not suitable as
models.
-o-o-o-o-o-
I wrote:
> >the Ottoman empire never penetrated the area either.
Then you wrote with justice:
> Well, it depends on the content of "penetrated". Most of Albanians
> became Moslems about four centuries ago.
What I meant was that there were no secular power structures in place
and that (hence) people had to police themselves. Such a state of
affairs does not prevent inhabitants of inaccessible areas of being
acutely aware of what goes on in the great world and of adopting
Christianity or Islam or whatever happens to be hot if they think
doing so promises success.
-o-o-o-o-o-
I'd written vaguely:
> >If anywhere you expect the retention of what Schramm chooses
> >to call "Barbarensprachen" it is here [sc. in inacessible
> > mountainous areas].
So that you said:
> But it's exactly this the question: where was that "here"? The
> Nish and Shtip phenomenon shows that the initial linguistic area
> must've been much closer to an imaginary Belgrade-Sophia line
> than to the Mediterranean.
Given the type of things that happen in Balkan demographic history
you can't say "where" without "when" because linguistic boundaries
shift all the time. A possible scenario is the following. Note
carefully the word "possbile", I'm not saying that is the way it
went.
Albanian survived Romanization because at the crucial moment it was
spoken in an inaccessible area, e.g. present-day North Albania (or
whatever). At an earlier stage the same language may have been spoken
in more accessible areas (say the Morava valley), but if it was, it
had surely been given up in favour of Latin by the end of the third
century at the latest. Chances are, by the way, that the outcome was
a Latin dialect strongly coloured by Albanian. Then the Huns
appeared, making the Morava valley uninhabitable (that at least is an
undisputed historical fact). Latin-speaking inhabitants of the Morava
valley fled to the mountains and took up mountain pastoralism, giving
rise to a new phenomenon: pastoralists speaking Latin. Let's call
their dialect pre-Romanian. When conditions in the Morava valley
improved somewhat after Attila's death, people speaking Albanian and
pre-Rumanian moved into the valleys again where they taught speakers
of Slavic the names of Naissos and Astibos a few generations later.
Such a scenario allows for ample interaction between speakers of
Albanian and pre-Rumanian, but we can't hope to tease out what
exactly happened because each movement and change of lifestyle
obliterated a lot of information (linguistic and otherwise) about
what went before.
> On top of that, the pockets of
> linguistic-ethnic resistence of Protoromanians quite coincide
> with those of Protoalbanians (at least partially).
The real tragedy is that Albanian linguists are paid to prove that
Albanian is a continuation of Illyrian and has occupied the coastal
strip since time immemorial, whereas their Rumanian colleagues are
paid to prove that Rumanian is the descendant of Latin as
spoken "north of the Danube" after Roman rule collapsed there in or
around 275 CE. Neither position is completely reasonable. In addition
they cannot both be true, barring some idiotic miracle. And what so
hot about the coastal strip anyhow, given the fact that it was a
malarial swamp for most of recorded history? It is a sad world.
Willem