Re: Slovanik, Enamyn, and Slavic slaves

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

>  --- "Thomas R. Wier" wrote:
> > Quoting Peter Clark <peter-clark@...>:
> > > It just got off on the wrong foot by my incorrect association
> > > of the Roman Empire with Latin-speaking Rome proper. Yes,
> > > the Slavs were close to Roman territory, as you effectively
> > > pointed out. No, they were not close to *Latin*-speaking
> > > Roman territory, as I pointed out. We are violently agreeing. :)
>
> > No, we're really not.  My assertion has been that the Byzantines were
> > merely a continuation of Roman rule, which is how most modern historians
> > take it.  In the East, there were significant populations of Romance
> > speakers, especially in the trans-Danube region but also all throughout
> > Dalmatia.  Indeed, one might even say that Romanian, Dalmatian,
> > Aromanian, and Megleno-Romanian are all to varying degrees
> > Romance languages with significant Slavic sub- and super-strates.
> > (It's often impossible to tell the difference between them, and
> > the terms "substrate" and "superstrate" probably serve only to
> > conceal the complexity of the social relationships.)
>
> 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 do not mean to be rude here. This conception of history
and archaeology has been very prevalent in the 20th century,
especially by the likes of Marija Gimbutas, and so I would
not be at all surprised if you've actually read something
along these lines. But much of the modern archaeological
establishment, especially the likes of Colin Renfrew, would
label this very naive.  Constanze Witt, an Celtic archaeologist
at the University of Texas, addressed some of the questions
in her presentation: "Who was who in antiquity? Current
approaches to ethnic identityof the Greeks and Celts", which
can be found here:

<http://ccwf.cc.utexas.edu/~cmw/CMW/ethnicity.html>)

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