--- willemvermeer <
wrvermeer@...> wrote:
>
> What I find unsettling about the Nestor argument is
> that it has no
> conceivable bearing on the problem, even if we grant
> that
> Nestor's/Sylvester's Walachians were speakers of
> Rumanian.
*****GK: Let's face it. There's really no way to avoid
the conclusion that both Nestor and Sylvester were
rabid Slavic imperialists. They assumed that the
Slavic expansionism of the 5th-7th centuries into the
Balkans, as a result of which Slavs settled massively
in areas previously inhabited by various Thracian,
Dacian, Illyrian, and other populations (the push
against Romans being delicately ignored), and the
successful partial assimilation into Slavdom of some
of these ethnicities somehow made them (the Slavs) the
heirs to the identities of the assimilated, but in
such a way that the latter's "Slavicity" was pushed
back by centuries. And the Roman conquest of Danubia
was reinterpreted as an assault against
"Slavs"...*****
we can't
> exclude the possibility that Latin was adopted by a
> local population
> and survived the dark centuries in Transsylvania or
> another suitably
> mountainous district to emerge and spread at a later
> stage.
*****GK: There is another aspect of the
Nestor/Sylvester approach to historical events which
needs to be mentioned. When they talked about
"peoples" they almost always referred to these
peoples' aristocracies. So we see for instance the odd
contention that the "Carolingians" were a "people". On
that basis my conclusions about the non-presence of
Wallachians north of the Danube in 1116 according to
the Kyivan Chronicle is not necessarily devastating
for the Romanian claim. All this really meant to the
Old Ukrainian writers is that the Wallachians were an
irrelevant political and social factor in the
territories of "Hungary" and "Bulgaria" at that time.
If they were there, they were a leaderless (as the
chroniclers understood "leadership"), insignificant
set of "lower class" individuals (these writers were
not only imperialists but also chauvinists...). Their
erstwhile aristocracies, stemming from the Romans, had
been historically eliminated ("chased away" as the
Chronicle put it). So it is as if the ethnos no longer
"existed"... I started to emphasize this approach in
my 1995 article. Were I to rewrite it today I would
emphasize it even more, and possibly conclude that
Nestor/ Sylvester cannot be used to defend either the
presence or non-presence of Wallachians north of the
Danube if one abstracts from political organization
and looks only at numbers.(I reread the piece after my
initial response to Marius)*****
> If all non-sequiturs and invalid arguments are
> removed from the
> record, we are left with a limited number of points
> that appear to be
> hard enough to build on, but may well turn out to be
> compatible with
> an entire range of fundamentally different stories.
*****GK: For instance your points about Nish and Shtip
could be (and perhaps already were) made into an
argument that historical Dardania (including the
Paeonian conquests of 239/229 BC) was the "original
homeland" of Albanians, a people constituted by the
fusion of Illyrian and Dacian elements, and
subsequently displaced westward.******
__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail - Easier than ever with enhanced search. Learn more.
http://info.mail.yahoo.com/mail_250