From: willemvermeer
Message: 35547
Date: 2004-12-22
--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "tolgs001" <st-george@...> wrote:
[About Du Nay]
> I've got a copy of that as an online version (I don't know whether
> the paper and online versions are identical).
I've not compared them but it is my impression that it is basically
the same text. (Put on the WWW, predictably but sadly, by Hungarians
with territorial claims.)
> Indeed, it makes sense. But I for one assume that in addition
> the Romanization of those populaces also must've played an
> enormous role, along with their belonging to the Christianity,
> since all pagan religion things disappeared, I'd say, completely.
> (In Romanian, there are very few vocabulary vestiges reminiscent
> of pagan *Latin* festivities.
Yes, but is that so much different from what you find elsewhere? How
much demonstrably pagan stuff (whether Latin or Celtic) do you find
in France or Portugal, for instance? For most of Europe, as for the
Balkans, the middle of the First Millennium is basically a Big Bang
that obliterated most previously existing information and created
entirely new structures. That is why any attempt to move beyond the
middle of the First Millennium to create political realities strikes
me as both silly (from a scientific point of view) and irresponsible
(from a political one).
> ... a
> Romanization which for parts of the population (esp. those
> who were to become Albanians) was slow and by far incomplete;
> this also could be valid as interpretation for the Romanian
> language if one takes into consideration big chunks of
> Romance vocabulary absend in Romanian (due to oblivion, ie,
> replacing it by autochtonous substrate vocabulary and esp.
> Slavic one? or due to the fact that those parts were never
> learnt? ...
But that type of thing happens on a regular basis. If people shift to
another language a lot of information tends to be lost. By the time
Germanic and Greek became Germanic and Greek they had lost quite a
bit of Indo-European stuff and acquired a lot of stuff from
elsewhere, both lexical and structural.
> I once found a text by Belgrade archeologists concerned an
archeology
> area called GradiSka (approx. SW of Belgrade). According to the
> authors, everything unearthed shows that late Roman life continued
> there (where they assumed there was an important Roman bishopric),
> and along with... Gepidic neighbors (mixed local Christian
cemeteries
> including Germanic tombs with the characteristic inventories). And
> all that ceized to exist with the advent of the Avars, around 600).
This illustrates my story: on the one hand the way Serbia tends to
attract people from all sides, on the other the fact that it can be
easily disturbed, after which the population disappears. I'd left out
the Avars from my little experimental story, but at times the Avar
presence created conditions that were just as difficult to tolerate
for sedentary populations as the Huns did, or more so. And they
remained active for much longer. And the information about them is
even less abundant and somehow less specific. In some way the Avars
are involved in the spectacular spread of Slavic (appr. 600), but
nobody can claim to understand what happened. How on earth can the
presence of the Avars in the Hungarian Plain be responsible for the
adoption of Slavic by speakers of Finnic in northern Russia?
> A good map shows us which mountainous regions could have been
> adequate for refugees; so, along with those not far away in the
> South, South-West and West, a good region could also have been the
> mountains in the neighboring North, which is the region of Banat
> adjacent to Serbia. This could've been valid for the Romance
> population, for the earliest Hungarian chronicles/documents
> mentioning Romanians mention them in the context of this region,
> both left and right of the Danube and in the context of events in
> the 10th century, ie, contemporary with those Vlakhs mentioned
> by Greek sources in the opposite area of mountainous refuge places,
> namely in Greece.
Basically there are so many more or less suitable mountanous areas
that it is impossible to arrive at a unique solution. (In the absence
of specific information to the contrary I'm inclinced myself to
regard Albania-Epirus as the area where Albanian and Rumanian
interacted, preferably the southern half of that area, but I'll be
the first to admit that that is based on very little. Note that even
tenth-century documents report about conditions half a millennium
after the most important events took place.)
>
> On top of that it seems that some Avar kagan moved some Romance
> population (about 200 thousand) from western regions into other
> regions ...
Sounds drastic. But perhaps no more drastic than other stuff that
happened at the time. There must have been quite a few Romance-
speaking populations before the arrival of Slavic. Romance is somehow
involved in the rise of Serbo-Croatian and Slovene. One of the most
important and oldest isoglosses separating Rumanian from more western
types of Romance (e.g. Italian) runs straight through Serbo-Croatian.
Willem