> Yea, but what I'm referring to is the type of terrain where the
> proportion of arable land to pasture is heavily weighted in favour of
> pasture.
BTW, in the context of Vlachs, the oldest Hungarian chronicles and
prior or contemporary chronicles from other countries refer to Hungary,
or more precisely to Hungarian plains, as to "pascua Romanorum". (Only
one of the oldest chroniclers, Simon of Kéza, refer to Vlachs in the
region of West-Transylvania's mountains (the highest peaks there aren't
higher than 1848m), which was for a while the easternmost border of
Hungary prior to the resettling of the Szeklers West of the Eastern
Carpathian range. Also: the other chronicler, the anonymuous notary who
wrote his account approx. 100 y. earlier doesn't insist on "Blackis" or
"Blazi" living in the mountainous regions of Transylvania (where they
were led by a duke called Gelou).
> That's surprising for me too, because like you I'm from cow country.
> To me too animal husbandry is stuff with cows and all the rest is
> marginal. But it is different when you get to more southern latitudes
> and why that is I've no idea, also because cows were first
> domesticated in Turkey, which puts them close to the Balkans both
> geographically and ecologically. I understand sheep are more flexible
> and less demanding in crucial ways.
That's right, and AFAIK these theories referring to Romanian
pastoralisms aren't actually wrong. But the populaces must have dealt
with cattle too. After all, the Romanian vocabulary concerning cows,
bulls, oxen, calfs etc. is not or hardly influenced by Slavic or Turkic
vocabularies. (Also note Wallach in German: "dark horse" or "castrated
horse, gelding".)
> That's Priscus.
Exactly.
> interesting to hear about the status of Gothic as one of the two
> "Verkehrssprachen".
Indeed. (And after the Hunic intermezzo, Gepidic was also in use even
in Serbia. Serbian archeologists say Gepids were also buried in
Christian necropoles.)
> No I don't mean that at all: I mean people moving into the lowlands
> to abandon their ancestral way of life and take up agriculture and
> never come back.
I had gotten it, and just because of this I added that transhumance
also has to be taken into consideration (and this kind of movements "to
and fro" was even a characteristic of those Altaic tribal federations
who covered way vaster areas).
> I'm afraid I disagree. Despite much chaff there was always solid work
> unencumbered by ideology, in both eastern and western Europe, apart
> from the blackest periods during which totalitarian governments
> inculcated prescribed orthodoxies.
I don't contest that there had been solid work, but the Germanic
hysteria, esp. in the German-speaking countries (perhaps minus
Switzerland), was big enough. It was just this background on which a
Bavarian-Austrian halfpeasant Hüttler or Hiedler (as some of his
relatives' names have been spelled) could get his sick fantasies
(heavily influenced by Wagner's opera renderings of Germanic
mythology), that after Jan 30, 1933, became... state religion. Romanian
crackpots and oddballs never reached such peaks of craze, not even in
those five months when a fascio-mistique anti-semitic organization was
the political junior partner of the Romanian general Antonescu. (I
read some years ago in the German press, that in Sweden some of those
racial segregation principles were applied by some physicians in
psychiatric hospitals up to the seventies.)
Neither the neo-nazi and skinheads movements (typical of the
Germanic-Celtic world) cannot exist without this collection of myths
and ill-interpretation of ancient history.
> And even then you could often feel
> that scholars disagreed with the prescribed ideology to the extent
> that that was possible.
During the dictatorship? You make me laugh.
> But where is the Romanian linguist who writes
> in neutral terms about the transdanubian hypothesis?
For example most of Du Nays writings are actually compilations based on
the works of Romanian luminaries such as Philippide, Pu$cariu, Onciul &
al. Romanian historians and linguists haven't been a monolith, as
publications of the last, say, 25-30 years in Romania might suggest.
> The impression I
> get (but I would be a happy man if you could show me wrong) is of a
> self-imposed orthodoxy, of a profession that has collectively left
> sanity behind and wants us outsiders to think that that is a normal
> areal phenomenon.
Of course, the positions have hardened for about 2.5 centuries: it was
a highly politicized thing. Up to the 18th and 19th centuries, very few
were bothered by the assumptions that the Romanian population was the
continuation of Roman colonists or of Romanized Dacians. Moreover,
these assumptions were cultivated and transmitted from generation to
generation by Hungarian chroniclers themselves along with the
intellectual elite of the Transylvanian Saxons (some of them even
believed some hundred years ago that they themselves had had Dacian
extraction, and not... Flemish, Wallonian and German origin). Only when
the Romanian nation - which since the 13th c. wasn't any longer
acknowledged as an official nation - began to be perceived as an
emerging, waking-up something, did the authors (in the beginning
Austrians, Eder and Sulzer) concentrate on the theory of immigration
from South Balkans and primeval coexistence with the Albanians. The
chief work in this respect was that of the German Rösler around 1870.
The memoranda of the Romanian nation to get more and more rights was
based on the old traditions - ie, even Hungarian traditions - that
Romanians belonged to the nations found in the territory when Arpad's
Hungarians arrived, conquered and started colonization.
Those recent new interpretations of history and linguistics had become
radical: not only was stated that Romanians did not existed north of
the Danube prior to the Mongolian invasion (1241), but various scholar
works tried to demonstrate (and it does today too) that prior to the
18th century the Romanian population in Transylvania and Banat and
other regions was quite negligible. Only in the 18th century did
Romanians get numerous due to massive immigrations from Moldova and
Walachia caused by the so-called Phanariote regimes (Greek princes who
were put on the throne by the High Porte). This in spite of the massive
archive evidence showing that the movement of the masses in the
opposite direction, fleeing the more civilized realm, surpassed the
alleged one. Therefore, region near region alongside the Carpathian
range in the South, from the border to Serbia up to the border to
Ukraine, the Oltenian, Muntenian and Moldavian populations are of
Transylvanian origin. (Even important elements of the Romanian
populations in East Moldavia way into Ukraine is of Transylvanian
origin: in many cases you can prove it by sheer onomastics.)
This is why this was so important. The surrounding nations (every one
of which has similar myths and legends) have contested the historical
right of Romanians in those territories. On top of that, Romanians got
more numerous in Transylvania and in the end they were got the province
at the end of WW1 and of WW2.
> But it isn't. I recall a Serbian linguist at the Kraków congress of
> 1998 explaining that all speakers of S^tokavian are "really" Serbs,
> irrespective of their own affiliation, and he was shouted down by his
> fellow-Serbs, who were ashamed of him.
Well, from the viewpoint of outsiders, this Croatian-Serbian enmity
anyway cannot be understood: it is the same ethno-linguistic group. The
same people (including the Bosniacs). The only thing that divides them
is religion (and some different cultural history because of this).
Similar to Catholic and Protestant Irishpeople. (Or it would be a
similar thing to the Netherlands if Germans would have insisted after
1648 that half of Belgium and Holland are German territories with a
German population. After all, your language is in a similar
relationship to common German as is Aromanian to Romania's Romanian.
From a *written* Aromanian text I am not able to understand more than I
am able to understand from a Niederländischtext based on my German
knowledge, incl. some peculiarities of Plattdeutsch phonetics.)
> I agree there is reason for pessimism,
I am even quite pessimistic as to how the UE will manage to stay
prosperous and stable. (As soon as people will start to get
disappointed economically and socially, they'll remember all those
theories that enhance the merits (imaginary or not) of their
ancestors.)
> Willem
George