Re: Walachians are placed far North the Danube in Nestor

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, g <st-george@...> wrote:

> I haven't read Gamillscheg's paper myself, but I know his & others'
> theory via presentations (such as the one by Chr. Schneider). IMHO,
> it is relevant regarding other aspects, esp. the spreading of
> Romanian speakers in the territory of today's Romania (ie, North
> of the Danube). ...

> IMHO, these things fit both theories saying Romanians
> came from remote areas in the South of the Balkans (but I
> strongly doubt Romance ethnogenesis South of the Skok and
> Jirecek lines) and from adjacent areas (namely from the former
> provinces the Romans once called Dacia mediterranea, Dacia
> ripensis, Moësia superior, Dardania and, farther in the N-W,
> Pannonia).

Sounds perfectly reasonable (and interesting). As for the Jirecek&Skok
(&Gerov) line three minor points: (1) my "Ohrid" is to be taken in a
very general sense, (2) to me it seems reasonable to expect
significant numbers of Latin-speaking people to the south of the line
after the disturbances of the mid fifth century and (3) one does not
expect the end process of the formation of Common Rumanian to be
dependent any more on the exact location of the line before the
process started.


Willem

> The continuity thesis fans have been much farther than that - since
> the 19th c. now. Namely saying that the area for the Romanian
> ethnogenesis was until the Skok and/or Jirecek lines. And that part
> of Romaniandom once moved thither just because of the impact
> caused by the Slavic... "asteroid". (This also fits the other

direction

> of movement: the numeric concentration North of the Danube,
> where the Slavic element was in the end indeed vanquished by
> the Romanian-speaking one. In fact, in Eastern Europe there are
> three "oases" of non-Slavicity: the Albanian, the Romanian and
> the Hungarian - if we leave aside the extremities (Greece, the
> Baltics and the Uralic group).)

Interesting background. Questions: is the asteroid metaphor commonly
employed? And where is the impact assumed to have taken place? (I
hope it isn't southern Serbia because we need plenty of non-Slavs
there to plug the gap between Serbian and Macedonian/Bulgarian.

>
> The linguistic phenomena mentioned by Gamillscheg (there are more,

but

> his paper is a good introduction though) shows that Muntenia wasn't

the

> primeval area.

I was immediately sorry about mentioning Muntenia. You can't do
anything against sheer stupidity.

>
> Ohrid seems to have had a great importance from a different point

of

> view: the Church; there was the primordial see of the local highest
> hierarch of the Orthodox Church. All Romanians belonged in the
> beginning to this diocese; the North Danubian Romanians got their

own

> metropolitan sees much-much later on.

I've seen that, but my understanding of Church history is so limited
that I don't know what to do with it.

>
> PS: ...
> So, these and myriads of other cases illustrate that the carriers

of

> the DR were once thoroughly exposed to a coexistence with both
> south-Slavic branches: the Serbo-Croatian and the Bulgarian. And

where

> could that have happened? Of course to a far less extent in those
> "Walachias" mentioned by Greek chroniclers in Greek regions for the

9th

> c. (those must've been only the outer waves after the Slavic

impact).


I would like to see a thorough modern analysis of the Slavic
component of the DR vocabulary from the point of view of determining
the origin of the various elements. In lots of cases nobody can tell,
probably. Then there is a strong Church Slavonic element, which is
useless from the point of view of the study of the living language.
If I'm correctly informed people generally assume that the earliest
Slavic dialects of what is now Hungary to the east of the Danube and
Rumania (to the extent that Slavic was spoken there) were
linguistically Bulgarian. An example is the Hungarian toponym Pest
(as present in Budapest). But by the time everything that is either
not indicative or Church Slavonic is eliminated, not much may be
left. There is a general feeling that initially Bulgarian was very
big and Serbian+Croatian+Slovene small in comparison, contrary to
today.



Willem