Re: Slovanik, Enamyn, and Slavic slaves

On Thursday 01 August 2002 16:11, Thomas R. Wier wrote:
> Quoting Peter Clark <peter-clark@...>:
> >         In fact, I really can't think of any time or place *here* in
> > which a population of Slavs could have ever come under Roman domination.
> > While, as you later pointed out, the Slavs were not unknown to the
> > Imperials, they never came under Roman cultural influence to any
> > significant degree.
>
> As I tried to point out in my earlier post, this depends on which
> period of history you're talking about, and what you mean by "Romans".
> The Byzantines, for example, did not call themselves Byzantines;  they
> called themselves _Rhomaioi_, the Greek word for "Romans", and continued
> to do so for centuries after the Empire officially ceased to exist in
> 1453. This was more than just a name:  the Byzantine nobility met in a
> _Senatus_ with _Senatores_, and when Justinian composed his code of
> law, it was written in Latin, not Greek.  It was not for nothing that
> when writing _The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire_, Gibbon ended
> in 1453, not 476, because no obvious cut-off point can be made to define
> when the Byzantines ceased behaving like the Romans of antiquity did.
        All true...but the common language was Greek, not Latin, despite the
continued "official" use of Latin. My fault, however; I should have made it
clear that I was refering to the possibility of a Slavic-Romance language
developing, as Jan initially imagined. Now a Slavic-Hellenic language is most
certainly not out of the question, in fact much more likely. (But probably
much harder to do, since there are far fewer languages stemming from Greek;
in fact, other than modern Greek, I do not know of any--comments?)
        Of course, if we want to reduce things to the absurd, we could call Russia
"Roman" since Moscow is the Third Rome. Or at least it was, until Stalin
decided to tear down most of the nice old buildings and build his concrete
monstrosities. Thank goodness he disliked Leningrad and never bestowed his
architectual "vision" upon the old city. The Soviet-block apartments are bad
enough as it is. But I digress...

> >         In the meantime, several scholars are compiling the Enamyn
> > Language Manual (ELM) with the intent to produce both a grammar and
> > language instruction book for linguists and archaeologists alike...
> >         ...and when it will appear is anyone's guess.
>
> This is a fascinating and very believable account of your
> language's "recovery";  I especially like the Stalinist
> purge.  Maybe you can work in Ressovsky's objections to
> Marrist language theory in there somewhere, or something.
> Keep up the good work!
        Well, from a Stalinist viewpoint, Ressovsky was "contaminated" on several
grounds: he had visited the West, he was in active correspondance with a
Westerner, and he had risen to the professorship during the tsars. He could
have parroted Marxist language theory and that still would not have saved
him. Although now I'll have to go and study Marxist langauge theory as
developed under (and by!) Stalin; I remember that Stalin himself proposed
several ideas that were, naturally enough, quickly adopted.
        :Peter

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