--- "Thomas R. Wier" wrote:
> Quoting Jan van Steenbergen <ijzeren_jan@...>:
> > As I understood about the early history of the South Slavs, they
> > overruled the whole Balkan peninsula (including Romania and Greece)
> > and assimilated part of its population. Only in Albania the native
> > Illyrian/Albanian population retained its language. On the long
> > term, Yugoslavia and Bulgaria remain Slavic, while in Romania
> > the Romance population kept silent for a long time and later
> > (mysteriously) reappeared on the map.
>
> Well, this characterization is quite simplistic*. Language
> replacement does not usually, and in this case did not,
> happen that way. Usually, when an invading population
> encroaches on the territory of another language community,
> it does not wholesale, in a generation or two, replace
> the autochthonous community's language, unless the original
> community is outright massacred (which *does* happen not
> infrequently). Usually, the two communities coexist for
> long periods of time, centuries or even millennia, before
> one or the other wins out. In the case of the Balkans,
> there were Dalmatian speakers up until the late 19th century,
> and there are still some tens of thousands of speakers of
> varieties of Romance languages (usually given the name of
> some variety of Romanian, but this may be misleading) spread
> throughout the peninsula. These varieties did not go into
> serious decline until hundreds of years after the Slavic
> invasions. These populations did not "mysteriously" reappear
> after hundreds of years; they had been there all along.
> Had any number of events gone differently -- say, the
> reconsolidation of the Byzantine Empire under Basil II
> Bulgaroctonos ("Bulgar-slayer") or under the Comneni --
> the health of these Romance varieties may well have proved
> much better. (Certainly, killing enough Bulgars and other
> Slavs would have at least removed them from replacing the
> speech of Romance varieties, but could perhaps have only
> replaced it with Greek, depending on how many colonizers
> are sent in.)
I must admit that the way I put it sounded rather simplistically. You are
right, of course. This "mysterical reappearance" of the Romanians means only,
that after many centuries of coexisting on one soil with Slavs, they finally
outnumbered them, while in for example Bulgaria the opposite was the case.
> * (I do not mean to be rude here.
No offense taken. It WAS a bit simplistic, and indeed some of the stuff I read
about the subject follows that idea.
Jan
=====
"Originality is the art of concealing your source." - Franklin P. Jones
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