Re: Slovanik, Enamyn, and Slavic slaves

Quoting Jan van Steenbergen <ijzeren_jan@...>:

> --- Thomas R. Wier wrote:
> > So, if you're willing to call the Byzantines "Romans"
> > (as they themselves did), then there were plenty of instances in
> > which Slavs both lived within the Empire, and were influenced by
> > it culturally.
[snip]

> [...] But as Peter pointed out already, the common language of
> the Byzantine Empire was Greek, not Latin.
As I tried to explain in my last post, the Romans always used
whatever was most convenient to rule subdued populations.  In
the East, this meant Greek, and they had no hesitation in doing
so.  The point of this debate, it should be recalled, was whether
the Slavs were ever near or in Roman territory, and my argument
has been that the Byzantines were fundamentally a continuation of
ancient patterns of government as established by the Romans in
the immediately preceding centuries. (This is especially true
after the Principate was abolished by Diocletian and replaced
by the Tetrarchy with its rule unfettered by theoretical
restrictions placed upon it by the Senate -- I should have
mentioned this fact earlier.)

> It seems that the Greeks weren't such cultural/linguistic
> imperialists as the Romans, since their language left little
> or no trace at all; nor did the Turks in the four centuries
> afterwards.
That's not really a valid comparison at all.  The Greeks were
more or less contiously colonizing parts of the Mediterranean
world from about the 7th-8th century BC onwards. It is not an
accident that as late as the 10th century AD, most of Southern
Italy, Sicily, Corsica, and above all Asia Minor was Greek
speaking: these areas had been from the remotest antiquity
centers of Greek demic expansion.  After Alexander conquered
most of the known world, he made it an active policy to literally
colonize Greek settlements all across Asia and Egypt, and his
policy was continued both by Antigonos Monophthalmos and his
successors the Seleukids, and to a much lesser extent the
Ptolemies as well.  The first phase of Greek colonialism was
more like English policy in North America and the Antipodes:
wipe out the inhabitants and set up your own population centers.
Alexander's policy was less successful, and ended up being
somewhat more like British policy in Africa and India, though
considerable populations of Greeks lasted down to at least
50 AD in Bactria.

The Turks, by contrast, only truly succeeded in making Anatolia
Turkish-speaking when Atatürk ethnically cleansed the Greeks
back to Greece.  Turkish colonial policy had always been more
interest in the revenues that derive from conquest than any kind
of abstract social policy as the Greeks had been.

 =========================================================================
Thomas Wier
Dept. of Linguistics  "Nihil magis praestandum est quam ne pecorum ritu
University of Chicago sequamur antecedentium gregem, pergentes non qua
1010 E. 59th Street   eundum est, sed qua itur." -- Seneca
Chicago, IL 60637

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