--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, g <st-george@...> made a number of
interesting points:
> I don't know up to which altitude was/is there possible for the
> specialized populations to make a living in the high Dinaric Alps,
> Albanian and Greek mountains as well as in the Rhodope mountains.
> But as far as the Romanian Carpathians are of concern, I'd mention
> the neglected fact that Romanians, a population deemed as a
> "ur"-pastoralist population never live higher than approx. 1000 m.
> Which is in stark and amazing contrast with the whole lotta of the
> same living culture of the peoples (both Romance and German)
> in the vast Alpine area (at whose northern slope I have been living
> for almost three decades now) -- where namely rural life is alive
> and kickin' at so high altitudes that whatever Romanian shepherd
> would be flabbergasted to see.
Everything is relative, of course. (What medieval Balkan shepherd can
have known about the Alps?) Ultimately it is not absolute heights
that are relevant but the skills needed for taking advantage of a
type of terrain that is unsuitable for agriculture on any but the
most limited scale, but allows for a lifestyle that primarily relies
on sheep. In the Dinaric area that type of terrain starts virtually
at sea level.
> So, I'd rather refrain from insisting on such vage (and romantic)
> ways of seeing these pastoralist economics (which have been the
> utmost hobby-horse esp. of Hungarian historians who have tried
> to explain why Romanians couldn't multiply in Transylvania prior
> to 1241 or, better, prior to Maria Theresia's imperial reign. ;-))
I don't go into romanticizing or the reverse and resent being
associated with those attitudes, which have tended towards racism and
have been taken advantage of by people with unsavoury political
agendas. Anybody who realizes how eager mountain pastoralists have
always been to move to the valleys (a potent factor in Balkan
demographics) knows that there is no reason whatever to romanticize
their harsh lifestyle.
> During the spectacular Mongolian invasion, the Mongolian armies
> were able to master mountain ranges compared to which the
> Carpathian range is made of hillocks, and those rapid fellas were
> able to conquer in a couple of months regions so vast and difficult
> (based on so rudimentary logistics) that modern sofisticated armies
> of the US and Nato aren't able today (in such regions as
> Afghanistan).
That is true but irrelevant. The geniuses who devised and implemented
the Mongolian invasion were able to concentrate enormous resources on
tasks that were of limited duration. That requires entirely different
skills from those needed to survive in the mountains indefinitely
using only the meager resources those mountains have on offer. (I
agree with the point about those modern armies, which reminds me of
the beautiful book "On the psychology of military incompetence" by
Norman Dixon.)
> So, I doubt that slavic populations couldn't adapt to mountainous
> regions in periods as long as 2-3-4 centuries. :-)
Well, that depends on whether or not they needed to. (No sane person
takes up mountain pastoralism if they don't really have to.) The
early medieval pastoralist phase of Romanian and Albanian seems as
well authenticated as the agricultural bias of the early Slavs. Even
as late as the medieval Serbian state the Slavic-speaking element
appears still to have been specialized in agriculture and the
Romanian- and Albanian-speaking element in pastoralism, at least in
Serbia. But it goes without saying that there is nothing *inherently*
agricultural about speaking Slavic or pastoralist about speaking
Romanian. Eventually we have ended up with Romanian-speaking farmers
and Slavic-speaking pastoralists. But that has taken centuries and it
won't do to underestimate the magnitude of the shifts involved.
> (Even within the
> Hungarian nation, one branch (possible of Turkic extraction), the
> Szeklers, are today the most specialized populace in mountain
> life (living & economics) in Romania.
OK. (In the Serbian/Croatian-speaking area the same holds for the
speakers of Neos^tokavian. But they inhabit areas where Vlachs taught
them the names of the mountains ... They may well be the descendants
of Vlachs who shifted to Serbian.)
...
I had said:
> > I would like to stress again that I regard the matter as basically
> > open...
Then St George countered:
> Of course it'll stay forever open, until a... newspaper or a
fragment
> of some document issued by a monarch or by a... House of
> Commons :-) will be unearthened saying confirming or contradicting
> this hypothesis.
That too is possible. We have seen how the study of medieval Russian
has been revolutionized in the past decades by the study of private
letters on birchbark that have been unearthed in Novgorod and many
other old towns since 1951.
But I for one see great possibilities for methodological puritanism,
notably the abandonment of practices like the following:
(1) The use of smokescreen evidence, i.e. evidence that becomes
evidence only because people in authority say it is, but that really
isn't. In the case of Romanian there is a remarkable lot of
smokescreen evidence around, on both sides, but most conspicuously on
the autochthonous side. Indeed, on the autochthonous side the only
evidence I am familiar with so far is of the smokescreen type.
(2) The selective use of evidence, e.g. ignoring Aromanian or the
implications of Albanian dialectology.
(3) The politicizing of the issue at hand.
Once you remove the cobwebs and stick to acceptable methodology you
can start evaluating and comparing the merits of different solutions
and see where it gets you.
In the context of (3) St George remarks aptly:
> How about other places, such as Israel ...
Exactly. Acting on the basis of anachronistic territorial claims is a
reliable way to fuck things up for a lot of innocent people who just
want to live. And ever since I started studying Serbian/Croatian in
the early seventies I have been amazed about the reckless way our
eteemed colleagues don't hesitate to provide fuel for such claims,
which more often than not they know very well are phoney to boot, and
I have wondered to what extent I'm responsible because, after all, I
belong to the same profession and consort with those people and refer
to their publications.
Real professions have publicly acknowledged ethical standards which
are subject to ongoing debate and guarded by ethics committees etc.
Linguistics lacks ethical standards altogether. That bothers me.
Willem