> 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.
Pls don't resent anything, coz I anyway can't associate you with those
attitude (you from an opposite region of the continent). I merely
expressed my opinion. To me, too much emphasis is put on this
pastoralism in the context of Romanians and Albanians (in this
order). Simply out of an uneasiness because of the difficulties in
the theories aimed at explaining how on earth managed these
ethnolinguistic communities to resist the overwhelming Slavic
environment. But pastoralism is nothing else than some kind of...
primeval type of economics: breeding animals. In the case of that
ancient Romance populace bereaved of the links to the Roman
state (so, without everything that state had meant), this was kinda
salto backwards (socially-historically), the ways of living becoming
quite similar to those of the invading Turks plus Indoeuropeans
from the East&Northeast (and these were not only breeders of
cattle but also of sheep and goats).
According to T. Peisker, "The Asiatic Background." in: The Cambridge
Medieval History. Volume I: The Christian Roman Empire and the
Foundation of the Germanic Kingdoms, ed. 2 (Cambridge
University Press, 1924), pp. 323-359, even says that Romanian
could see themselves as sons of Turan. :-) Excerpts:
<<sustained with its rich summer pastures such a number of
grazing-camps (Roumanian catun, Mongol. khotun), that the
nomads in the favourable winter quarters of the Roumanian plain>>
[So, the author must've been told that even pastoralists living
in the mountains have to descend in *favorable winter quarters*.
Perhaps he knew something more of the meaning and the
necessity of the <Almabtrieb> than many other authors of the
Reich or Österreich. :-)]
<<were finally able to absorb the Slav peasantry, already almost
wiped out by the everlasting passage through them of other wild nomad
peoples. In Macedonia, too, a remainder of them still exists. Were they
not
denationalised, the Roumanians to-day would be by far the most
numerous--but
also the most scattered--people of South Europe,--not less than twenty
million souls.
The Roumanians were not descendants of Roman colonists of Dacia left
behind
in East Hungary and Transylvania. [Hunfalvy. On the contrary, Iorga,
Gherghel, etc.] Their nomadic life is a confutation of this, for the
Emperor
Trajan (after A.D. 107) transplanted settled colonists from the entire
Roman
Empire. And after the removal and withdrawal of the Roman colonists (c.
A.D.
271) Dacia, for untold centuries, was the arena of the wildest
international
struggles known to history, and these could not have been outlived by
any
nomad people remaining there. To be sure, some express the opinion that
the
Roumanian nomad herdsmen fled into the Transylvanian mountains at each
new
invasion (by the Huns, Bulgarians, Avars, Magyars, Patzinaks
[Petchenegs],
Cumans successively) and subsequently always returned. But the nomad can
support himself in the mountains only during the summer, and he must
descend to pass the winter.>>
<<subsequently always returned.>> :-)
<<But south of the Danube also the origin of the Roumanians
must not be sought in Roman times, but much later, because
nomads are never quickly denationalised. For in the summer
they are quite alone on the otherwise uninhabited mountains,
having intercourse with one another in their own language, and
only in their winter quarters among the foreign-speaking
peasantry are they compelled in their dealings with them to
resort to the foreign tongue. Thus they remain for centuries bilingual
before they are quite denationalized, and this can be proved from
original
sources precisely in the case of the Roumanians (Vlakhs) in the old
kingdom
of Serbia. Accordingly, the romanising of the Roumanians presupposes a
Romance peasant population already existing there for a long time and of
different race, through the influence of which they first became
bilingual
and then very gradually, after some centuries, forgot their own
language.
In what district could this have taken place? For nomads outside the
salt-steppe the seacoast offers--precisely on account of the salt, and
the
mild winter--the most suitable winter quarters, and, as a matter of
fact,
from the earliest times certain shores of the Adriatic, the Ionian,
Aegean,
and Marmora, were crowded with Vlakhian catuns, and are partly so at the
present time. Among all these sea-districts, however, only Dalmatia had
remained so long Romanic as to be able entirely to romanise a nomad
people.
[Jirecek (Denkschriften Acad. Wien, xlviii. pp. 20, 34) assigns the
centre
of the oldest Roumanians to Serbia and its neighbourhood (where the
district
in which the Latin language was spoken was most extended) because the
Roumanian language is very different from the dialect of the ancient
Dalmatians. But because these central lands offer few suitable winter
pastures on account of their rave climate and heavy snowfall, it must be
assumed that the district in which the Romanic speech adopted by the
ancestors of the Roumanians was spoken, somewhere reached
notwithstanding to the Adriatic Sea.] From this district the expansion
of
the Roumanians had its beginning, so that the name Daco-Roumanians
is nothing but a fiction.>>
[A bit earlier, the author mentions that for the Romanian term <cãtun>
there is one Mongolian which is almost the same: <khotun>.]
<<The Spanish and Italian nomad shepherds too can have had no other
origin.
Alans took part in Radagaisus' invasion of Italy in 405, and, having
advanced to Gaul, founded in 411 a kingdom in Lusitania which was
destroyed
by the Visigoths. The remainder advanced into Africa with the Vandals in
429. Traces of the Alans remained for a long time in Gaul. Sarmatian and
Bulgarian hordes accompanied Alboin to Italy in 568, and twelve places
in
northern Italy are still called Bolgaro, Bolgheri, etc. A horde of
Altaian
Bulgars fled to Italy later, and received from the Lombard Grimoald
(662-672) extensive and hitherto barren settlements in the mountains of
Abruzzi and their neighbourhood. In the time of Paulus Diaconus (797)
they
also spoke Latin, but their mother tongue was still intact, for only on
their winter pastures in Apulia and Campania, in contact with Latin
peasants
in whose fields they encamped, were they compelled to speak Latin. The
old
Roman sheep-rearing pursued by slaves has no connexion with nomadism.
Therefore neither the non-Mongol appearance, nor the Semitic,
Indo-European
or Finno-Ugrian language of any historical mounted nomad people can be
held
as a serious argument for their Semitic, Indo-European, or Finno-Ugrian
origin. Everything speaks for one single place of origin for the mounted
nomads, and that is in the Turanian-Mongol steppes and deserts. These
alone,
by their enormous extent, their unparalleled severity of climate, their
uselessness in summer, their salt vegetation nourishing countless herds,
and above all by their indivisible economic connexion with the distant
grass-abounding north--these alone give rise to a people with the
ineradicable habits of mounted nomads. The Indo-European vocabulary
reveals
no trace of a former mounted nomadism; there is no ground for speaking
of
Indo-European, Semitic, Finno-Ugrian nomads, but only of nomads who have
remained Altaic or of indo-europeanised, semiticised, ugrianised nomads.
The Scythians became Iranian, the Magyars Ugrian, the Avars and
Bulgarians
Slavic, and so on.>>
(I leave out the paragraphs where racist talk is overt. But the text was
written in the early 20s. :))
> That is true but irrelevant.
I don't know how much of theories such as this one, of Peisker's, are
correct when analyzed with modern scientific (sociologic, ethnographic
and history) methods, but nomadism is possible both in high mountains
and in low steppes. And if we see the way of life of nomads or
seminomads
in, say, Kazakhstan, Üzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Uyguria, the inner & outer
Mongolia and other regions (incl. Afghanistan & al.), up to the tundra,
we realize that the conditions can be or are much more brutal for
survival than they could and can be in European mountain valleys.
I am not a specialist, but my impression is that the withdrawal and
isolation in the mountains is not something sine qua non. On the other
hand, I suppose any community can switch to other types of subsistence
whenever the community is constrained to do it (I'm sure any philosopher
or IT specialist or surgeon can become a good shepherd and nomad
(ie, a good... cowboy) if this need be. :)).
> The geniuses who devised and implemented
> the Mongolian invasion were able to concentrate enormous resources on
> tasks that were of limited duration.
Without the skills alluded to in the above paragraphs, they woldn't
have been able to concentrate anything. (Even their horses were
perfectly
adapted to enormous climate/temperature differences etc., compared
with the "Kaltblütler" and "Haflinger" of the central and W-Europeans,
enormous animals that could carry knights clad in tons of iron. Methinks
the comparison of Ferdl Porsche's tanks with the Soviet T34 in WW2 isn't
just trivial. It's said that Porsche's "Tiger"'s steel burst in
temperatures
20-30-40 below zero C in Russia.)
> the beautiful book "On the psychology of military incompetence" by
> Norman Dixon.)
Thank you, I put it on my list.
> Well, that depends on whether or not they needed to. (No sane person
> takes up mountain pastoralism if they don't really have to.)
If it gives you good profits, why not? And breeding sheep is not
a monopolly of the Alps region, you can encounter it towards the
coasts of the Baltic and Northern seas (at least in Germany, but I
suppose in Holland, too).
> (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.
I agree on this.
> (2) The selective use of evidence, e.g. ignoring Aromanian or the
> implications of Albanian dialectology.
I agree on this, but I underline that one must differentiate: scholar
work vs propaganda work. Scholar work actually has always taken into
consideration all these aspects. OTOH, every implied party has had its
own pieces of smoke screens, exaggerations and myths. Good western
libraries are fulla books on Hungarian protochronism: not only
amateurs, but also professionals have taken care of a theory that says
Magyars are *direct* descendants of the Sumerians! For decades now
there have been published Magyar-Sumerian dictionaries and grammars. So
Romanians' and Albanians' modern obssession with their imaginary
DacianThracianIllyrian remote pasts is almost nothing in comparison.
The Hungarian afficionados of the Sumerian theory are, e.g., convinced
that the tablets discovered in the 60s in Tartaria (a village in SW
Romania) is an attestation to the Hungarian Sumerian past and, hence,
Hungarians "dismounted" (colonized) the region for the 1st time 4
millennia ago, thus, Attila's was the second, the Avar's the 3rd and
the Magyars' 4th coming to the "Carpathian mountains basin". (The
mainstream historians limit themselves
to maintaining that Arpad's Magyars immigration was the 2nd one. Of
course, if only the
Turkic (I'd prefer Turkish) "upper crust" is to be taken into
consideration, then Hungarians
could have seen themselves within a tribal succession entitled to the
Hunic possessions
much as the Mongolians saw themselves later on when they occupied the
Cumans realms
and asked the Hungarian king to extradite tens of thousands Cumans who
had gotten
asylum in Hungary.)
Atta magnitude! Similar to that of Turks who also say they are direct
descendants of Sumerians, but at the same time of the Hittites, or to
that of Persians who say/write that the P-l-s-t in the Egyptian & al.
scribblings millennia ago were Persians. (Some Romanians only quite
recently concocted some weird theories saying that the territory of
today's Romania is the cradle of the european civilization, the
Romanians being descendants of the ancient carriers of that
civilization. The vain attempts at illustrating that Romanian isn't a
Romance language but some distorted variant of an ancient one, derived
from PIE without any intermediary, are only reflections of the
peripheral variants of that theory.)
It can become a real problem whenever some *professionals* part'ly or
compl'ly
support such theories (or follies). (BTW, theories of such
para-historians as Heribert
Illig (the "non-existing, invented" time period betw. circa 600-900)
and Fomenko
could very well explain the... quasi-"spontaneous" birth of both
groups: Vlachs and
Albanians from the (Semi-)/Romanized, non-Slavicized, populations in
SE-Eur. :-)
> (3) The politicizing of the issue at hand.
It is always because of this # (3)! Whenever an aspect of history can't
be exploited
to extract from it some... glory or other kind of projection to be used
in today's
politics (and/or psychological stimulation), that thing of history will
remain
obscure to the "public opinion"; it'll be known only to experts and
small groups
of afficionados. (In the world of Germanic peoples: anybody knows of
Walhalla,
Odin/Wotan, Thor etc., heroic supermen and women and berserkr. But only
experts and no-nonsense amateurs know that, according to some set of
criterias on civilization, up to certain history epochs, ol' Germans
were nothing
compared with Romans or even Celts. Today, this is written and explained
with Genuss (relish) by periodicals such as DER SPIEGEL. But imagine the
publishing of such articles in the same country 60 years ago: the
authors and
the publishers would've landed in a concentration camp -- or "an der
Ostfront"
to resist the advancement of the Red Army.)
Of course it's politics! <<Zoon politikon.>> (Even the whole PIE thing
cannot
be completely kept away from certain tendencies of thought...)
> 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.
Even if linguists had such standards as other professions (physicians,
jurists etc.),
the decisive thing comes into existence whenever they can't escape the
pressure
exerted by the political class, by "the national interests". (I was
amazed months
ago to hear in a German TV documentary dedicated to Vikings/Warangians
that,
in the 50s, Soviet researchers dealing with these topics were
prosecuted by the
political police and even jailed for supporting scientific things
pertaining to the
Scandinavian contribution to the history of the Kievan Rus. (They even
showed
one scientist of Jewish extraction who had once been in jail in this
context.)
In the next Brave New World, history and linguistics must be prohibited.
(Verboten - Maaann, ist das ein tolles Wort! :^))
> Willem
nice holidays,
g