Re: Slovanik, Enamyn, and Slavic slaves

On Fri, 02 Aug 2002 04:21, Peter Clark wrote:
> On Thursday 01 August 2002 05:00, Jan van Steenbergen wrote:
> >  --- Peter Clark wrote:
> > >         Anywho, the Crimea is somewhat out of the question as an
> > > urheimat for your Slavs. [...] Anyways, all that to say that the Slavs
> > > weren't really in Crimea en masse until 1783, when the Russians
> > > occupied the Crimean Tartar state. Sorry.
> >
> > I never even thought of the very possibility of locating my
> > Slavs-to-be-romanized on the Crimea. I didn't know all the interesting
> > details you gave, but they prove once more that the Crimea - no matter if
> > there were Slavs or not - is not the right place for such a language.
>
>         Well, I misunderstood Tom Wier as vaguely hinting that you might
> want to consider the Crimea. So I jumped in to point out that if you were
> considering the Crimea, you would be in for some major tinkering with
> history. Not that there's anything wrong with that; see Brithenig.
>         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. So, in
> my mind, you have two choices; either make a *there* in which Rome managed
> to extend Dacia north and east up around the Black Sea, or (this would be
> the way I would do it) have your Slovaniks migrate west and south into
> Dacia (modern-day Romania). Maybe they were fleeing the Huns or something.
> Anyways, there's a map of the Roman Empire at its peak in 120 AD at
> http://www.dalton.org/groups/rome/RMap.html that can get you started. Just
> out of curiousity, does anyone know much about the substratum of Romanian?
> IIRC, Spanish, French, and their ilk have a substratum of Gaulic and
> Iberian Celtic; what about Romanian?
>
> > Your Enamyn BTW seems to fit in perfectly. I would be interested to learn
> > more about the language and its conhistory.
>
>         Part of the fun of Enamyn has been integrating it into *here*. My
> only problem so far has been that since I have never visited the Crimea, I
> don't have a good feel of the land. Which means that I have hesitated to
> nail down where the Enamyn people lived. Ok, the Crimea is pretty small
> (about the size of Maryland or Belgium), but geographically diverse, and
> while the Enamyn were tenacious people, they were never numerous, so I need
> to eventually be more specific about the locations of their towns.
> Currently, I am thinking locating them in the mountains, along the north
> slope (since the south slope would have had too much Byzantine influence),
> but I don't know. If anyone has been to Crimea and can recommend an
> especially remote and (preferably) pleasant spot, I'm all ears. There are
> some karsts in the mountains (a karst is an irregular limestone region with
> sinks, underground streams, and caverns) which would be perfect for storing
> documents for long periods of time...
>         ...Alexandr Ressovsky, a linguist from St. Petersburg, was
> vacationing in the Crimea in the summer of 1912 when he heard a report that
> some ancient parchments, written in an unknown script, had been discovered
> in a cave nearby. Interested, he managed to get a hold of several
> manuscripts, one of which included some Greek text. He immediately
> recognized the Greek text as an extended trade agreement and hypothesized
> that the other half of the text, written in the unknown script, was a
> translation. Working on this assumption, he was soon able to produce a
> rough translation and a small grammar of the unknown language.
>         Upon returning to St. Petersburg, he successfully acquired support
> for an archaeological expedition to the area in which the manuscripts were
> found, and spent the next five years working to discover more about the
> language and its speakers.
>         Unfortunately, the 1917 Revolution, Ukraine's secession, and the
> civil war interupted his work for several years. It was not until 1926 that
> he was able to return to his work in the Crimea. In the meantime, however,
> he had managed to produce a more complete grammar of the language, which he
> had learned was called Enamyn. In 1932, he had the opportunity to travel to
> London, where he met up with Robert Atkins, a fellow linguist and amateur
> archaeologist. Atkins was excited by Ressovsky's work and begged him for as
> much information as possible. Ressovsky agreed, and thus began a period of
> intense
> correspondance between them that lasted two years, before Ressovsky
> mysteriously broke off communication. Atkins would try several times to
> resume correspondance, but never heard from Ressovsky again. It was not
> until 1992 that Ressovsky's fate was discovered by Atkins' son, James; he
> had been executed on Oct. 28th, 1936, for "treason to the Motherland" under
> Article 58/1A. Robert Atkins himself died in 1976 in a car accident near
> his home in Cardiff, Wales.
>         Thanks to James Atkins, however, the work done by Ressovsky and
> compiled and translated by Robert Atkins was not lost. In the past several
> years, interest in Enamyn has re-emerged as several key documents,
> including fragments of the Bible and folklore, have been rediscovered in
> the archives of the former KGB, which presumably confiscated the documents
> when Ressovsky was arrested. Unfortunately, some of these documents are in
> poor condition and quickly deteriorating.
>         Some of the key points of interest to the Enamyn people include
> their relationship both with the Byzantine Empire and the Khazars, a Turkic
> people who converted to Judaism in the ninth century. Ressovsky mentioned
> in his correspondance with Atkins that he had discovered a chronicle that
> dated from the mid-tenth century that recorded many historical events in
> the Crimea from the fourth century on. This work has been lost, but it is
> hoped that it will be discovered in a KGB archive or warehouse someday.
>         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.
Fascinating.  Guess who'll be on the bookshop's case day-in-day-out once the
Enamyn scholars have put together the Enamyn Language Manual!

Well done!

>
> > >         Incidentally, our word "slave" comes from medieval Latin for
> > > "slavic," "sclavus," (which, alas, does not prove an Imperial
> > > connection). It comes from the fact that there was a booming slave
> > > trade that passed through Crimea from the 11th century until the Mongol
> > > invasion in the 13th.
> >
> > That is not entirely true.
>
>         <snip interesting discussion of Slavic history>
>         What part isn't true? Merriam-Webster gave the etymology of "slave"
> and for two centuries the Crimea had the busiest slave ports in all of the
> Western world. (Can't speak for other parts at the time.) I am not saying
> that the Slavs were unknown prior to that time, but rather, the word
> "slave" is directly related to the word "Slav."
>         Ok, I've rambled on too long. Time to work on other things...
>
>         :Peter
--
Mau e ki, "He aha te mea nui?"
You ask, "What is the most important thing?"
Maku e ki, "He tangata, he tangata, he tangata."
I reply, "It is people, it is people, it is people."