> 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).
Yes, indeed. Unfortunately, this kind of approach is still very ...
alive
'n' kickin', terribly influencing current political affairs in many
parts
of the world (having even indirect repercussions on budgets like that
of the EU :-)).
> 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)
AFAI could understand those movements, the Avar impact seems to
have been much more important for E-Eur than the previous, Hunic
one.
> 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.)
To me, the decisive interactions seem to have been in Northern
areas (of what's now Serbia + Banat + Timoc region + W-Bulgaria
& perhaps Slavonia in the West; in other words, much on the territory
of the incipient and ephemerous "Moravian Empire" of the 9th c.
whose center was rather between the 3 Moravas of Serbia and the
river of MureS (Hung. MaroS) which is the Northern natural border
of the Banat region, where there were the important strongholds
Kuvin (Hung. Keve) and Morisena (since the 9th c. Csanád; Rum.
Cenad)).
And the A-R coexistence in the southernmost Balkan regions of
the spreading of these populations must have started only when
those populations reached the territories as refugees. Various
interesting discussion threads here, on Cybalist, also seem to show
that various pieces of the common Romanian-Albanian vocabulary
must be older than the spreading of those populations in the
aftermath of the destruction of the late Roman administrative entities
that had existed... North of the Skok and Jir^ec^ek lines.
AFAIK, the idea of A-R coexistence in so remote areas was based
(esp. in the 18th-19th c., esp. in Austria and Hungary) on the idea
that (1) Albanians were considered as... Illyrian continuity in the
same place; and (2) for the Romanian-Albanian common vocabulary
was no other explanation as that Romanians borrowed every word
from the Albanian language in a time span reaching up to the 13th
century. And this kind of judgment persisted way until after WW2,
although already in the 19th c. various groups of scholars built
theories around the Balkan substrate out of ancient idioms of the
Thracian (perhaps plus of the Illyrian-Pannonian) kind, a substrate
that not only influenced Albanian, Romanian, but also the Slavic
languages of the region plus Hungarian (yes, Hungarian also borrowed
vocabulary from this substrate, either via Slavic or via Romanian).
> 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.
In medieval times, Romanian dialects speaking people were quite
numerous in all those areas, despite the fact that Romanians
concentrated
north of the Danube. They were assimilated esp. by Serbo-Croats and
Greek (but also by Bulgarians). Again: only few researchers are aware
of the studies dealing with the Ottoman Empire documents giving
information
on the Romanians living south of the Danube (and to whom the Romanians
living north of it barely had connections).
NB: the Romanian spoken south of the Danube down to South of
Serbia and as far in the West as Croatia (amazingly until today in some
spots - of which one knows only because people from there went to
Romania a couple of years ago to participate in appropriate festivals
and cultural encounters) belongs to the same dialect as Romanian of
Romania and Moldova and Transcarpathia and Northern Bulgaria, namely
the "Dacoromanian" dialect. The other sorts of Romanian, spoken in the
Epirus, Thessalia, Macedonia as well as in Istria (almost extinct) and
some
spots in Dalmatia (with the native-speakers barely able to utter
something
in that dialect, whereas their 1st perfect language is Croatian), well
these
are so remote lexically and semantically and even phonetically, when
compared to North-Romanian, that some are tempted (esp. those under
Greek jurisdiction) to say these are as different languages as Italian
and
Romanian. This is, linguistically, not true (and one can realize this
without
professional training), but the differences are big enough - approx. as
between Flemish and German; or betw. Low German and High German
or betw. Czech and Slovakian.
> Willem
g