--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, g <st-george@...> wrote:
> ... 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. (...)
What I have been talking about is societies primarily geared to
certain types of subsistence. That doesn't prevent marginal phenomena
and local variation and people knowing about bovines and perhaps even
handling them if they get the opportunity.
> (And after the Hunic intermezzo, Gepidic was also in use even
> in Serbia. Serbian archeologists say Gepids were also buried in
> Christian necropoles.)
I've no quarrel with that in principle, although I would like to see
the original research. In ex-Yugoslavia, as elsewhere, there has been
too much naive reliance on the Kossinna method by which cultural
details that can easily be borrowed (say the shape of fibulae) are
interpreted as reliable indicators of ethnic groups, or even
languages. Florin Curta has been stressing the limitations of that
method with great effect for some years now.
----
On the relationship between linguistics and unpleasant ideologies I
would like to express my emphatic agreement with you that it is
obvious that pathological phenomena can and do happen anywhere (cf.
Wiiiiik) and that authoritarian regimes have the tendency to impose
scholarly consensus by force if they see the need. Both with infinite
local variation.
In that context I'd written:
> > And even then you could often feel
> > that scholars disagreed with the prescribed ideology to the extent
> > that that was possible.
Then you wrote:
> During the dictatorship? You make me laugh.
Don't laugh too soon. Dictatorships differ strongly among each other.
In the post-Stalin Soviet Union it became something of a sport to
write between the lines and to experiment with ambiguity. This
reached fantastic heights in the seventies and eighties. Not all
subjects are equally sensitive and the Soviet authorities knew that
public overreacting was bad propaganda, as became clear during the
trial against Sinjavskij and Daniel' in February 1966, which was a
catastrophic blunder from a public relations point of view. I wrote
yesterday about the way the regime tended to overdo Pushkin's
involvement with the Dekabrists. Interestingly enough, at a certain
point the Dekabrist cult was adopted by people with obvious anti-
regime attitudes, who started stressing the way the Dekabrists had
been motivated by their individual consciences, which is a very un-
Marxist perspective. There are many examples of this.
It often takes inside knowledge to understand what is going on and
one hopes the history of the phenomenon will soon be written, now
that witnesses are still alive.
Ex-Yugoslavia was exactly the same, but unfortunately an anti-regime
attitude was nearly always expressed as nationalism and racism, with
horrible consequences.
In his recent book about the Igor Tale, Andrej Zaliznjak writes that
the Soviet regime's stress on the genuineness of the Igor Tale led
him to suspect that it was really a forgery. Then when he started
investigating the text from a linguistic point of view he discovered
that the linguistic information required to write the Igor tale was
unavailable in the eighteenth century, so that the text can only be
genuine. (I think it is this that surprises outsiders about the
Romanian situation: the dictatorial regime used to stress the
transdanubian hypothesis with so much brute force and lack of finesse
that one would expect at least some scholars to have assumed for that
reason that it cannot be true and to have explored that possibility
as soon as that became possible.)
-----
> 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.
I agree. However, what remains unusual about the Romanian scene is
the persistence of what looks like forced consensus *after* the
collapse of the dictatorship fifteen years ago. Almost everywhere
else the disappearance of the dictatorships has given rise to a
considerably larger variety of opinions (including a lot of crackpot
opinions and pathological stuff), even in ex-Yugoslavia, with its
traumatic war.
(I don't exclude the possibility that Du Nay, whoever he is, may turn
out to be a Romanian. He often makes the common mistake of failing to
transpose internationally known names or technical terms to a form
that would be acceptabel in English. In all cases I have seen he uses
the Romanian form, e.g. the Roman poet "Ovide", or the archeological
culture "Cerneahov" instead of "Ovid" and "Chernyakhov"
(or "C^ernjaxov" or some other variety that would be acceptable in an
English text). I've not yet come across examples where he chooses the
Hungarian variant. But the number of examples is small and it may be
a chance phenomenon reflecting his reliance on Romanian sources.)
Thanks for the historical overview, which I'm not going to comment on
because it is too far removed from linguistics.
-----
> 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).
Don't forget that it was the Albanian-Serbian relations in Kosovo
that started things off in the eighties. Moreover, you can very well
be convinced of being inherently different from your neighbour even
if you speak the same language and understand each other perfectly.
Croatian and Serbian have never been completely identical and
attempts to minimize or even eliminate the remaining differences and
to push through the use of the word "Serbo-Croatian" (which had
always been a technical term) in daily life in the fifties and early
sixties added enormously to mutual ill-feelings. At a certain stage
the Serbian word for 'comma' and the Croatian word for 'full stop'
(both of which are borrowings from Russian) were forbidden. That
sounds even-handed until you realize that the word for 'full stop'
also means 'point' or 'dot' and is a word of daily occurrence,
whereas 'comma' is a technical term. So Croatians felt discriminated
against. And Serbs felt discriminated against on similar grounds.
Existing differences were small, but quite numerous. It has never
been possible to speak or write SC in a way that is completely
neutral. Countless differences show up in derivation. The Croatian
word for 'female colleague' is "kolegica", the Serbian
word "koleginica" (or vice versa). There are reports about terrific
rows in Bosnian schools in the fifties or sixties about teachers who
used what was perceived to be the wrong word when referring to their
fellow-teachers. On the village level too there are nearly always
perceptible linguistic differences between Serbs and Croats (and
Muslims) that have traditionally been taken into account by
dialectologists. Speakers of Serbian/Croatian have always displayed
their identity by their use of language even though (nearly)
everybody can understand (nearly) everybody else.
[On religion.]
> (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.
Even so religion was an extremely divisive issue in Holland until the
late sixties. The entire society had been constructed in such a way
as to minimize the amount of personal contact between carriers of
different religions, e.g. separate schooling, newspapers, bowling
clubs etc. There were even one or two minor linguistic differences. I
was warned against saying "op vakantie" 'on holiday' because that was
considered Catholic (I had to say "met vakantie"). There was
considerable concern about differential population growth, which was
much more rapid (indeed Kosovo-like) in Catholic areas than
elsewhere. But the whole thing (including the demographic aspect)
evaporated rapidly in the late sixties and early seventies as
religion ceded its place in daily life to television.
< After all, your language is in a similar
> relationship to common German as is Aromanian to Romania's
Romanian.
Fair enough.
(...)
Willem