Re: Slovanik, Enamyn, and Slavic slaves

Quoting Peter Clark <peter-clark@...>:

> 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.
>         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.

And what was happening during all that time?  Lots and lots of
interaction with Slavs, though the Slavs were often only
nominally vassal states. But even when the Slavs were not under
the political sway of the Eastern Emperors, they were most certainly
under the cultural sway, for even when they tried to secede from the
church hierarchy and create an autocephalous Slavic church, they
modelled this on Constantinopolitan customs, traditions and
guidelines.  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]

>         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!

 =========================================================================
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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