Re: Slovanik, Enamyn, and Slavic slaves

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

> On Thursday 01 August 2002 16:11, Thomas R. Wier wrote:
> > Quoting Peter Clark <peter-clark@...>:
> > >         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.
>         All true...but the common language was Greek, not Latin, despite
> the continued "official" use of Latin.
This is true. It was also true for the entire period of Roman rule
in the east, where it was used by the Romans from the very beginning
of their rule there.  If that is the case, if Greek was just as much
an instrument of Roman rule (it was), then how can you claim that
Byzantines were less Roman on that ground alone?

> My fault, however; I should have made it clear that I was refering to
> the possibility of a Slavic-Romance language developing, as Jan initially
> imagined. Now a Slavic-Hellenic language is most certainly not out of
> the question, in fact much more likely. (But probably much harder to do,
> since there are far fewer languages stemming from Greek; in fact, other
> than modern Greek, I do not know of any--comments?)
Actually, there are a number of other Greek languages around, but they are
are all very small.  Doric speakers today number around 300, are all
shepherds and their language, unintelligible with Demotic, is called
Tsakonian.  Outside of Greece proper, there's Pontic, which has about
200 thousand speakers, and there are still speakers of Greek dialects
in Italy and Corsica, which are both unintelligible with each other
and with Demotic.

>         Of course, if we want to reduce things to the absurd, we could call
> Russia "Roman" since Moscow is the Third Rome.
No, not really.  For Russia and the Holy Roman Empire, the claim
to be the rightful successor to the Roman Empire was always *far*
more of a tool of propaganda than it was a matter of fact. Neither
Russia nor Charlemagne's Empire were ruled with Roman law, and
neither maintained anything even approaching the interest in
ancient science and learning that Byzantium did down to its
last days. (Indeed, both were intellectual backwaters of the world,
even if one takes into account the "Carolingian Renaissance". It
has often been claimed that scholars fleeing the conquest of
Constantinople were responsible for lighting the spark of the
Italian Renaissance, and this is partly true, although it ignores
the economic growth in Italy that would support such an endeavor,
among other reasons.). No one would deny that when Constantine was
emperor, he was an Emperor of Rome; and yet, he was the emperor
instrumental in making the city of that name only the second city
of the Empire. So, did the Empire cease to be "Roman" and yet
it had a Roman Emperor, then?  The claim that Byzantium was not
"Rome", somehow, is the product of centuries of prejudice and
bigotry against Byzantine studies; these are the same kind of
people at Oxford or Cambridge who disdained the study of American
history as less than a waste of time (this was Paul Johnson's
experience).

To put it simply, there is an unbroken line of rule from Augustus
all the way to the Palaeologi, unlike either the Holy Roman Empire
or Russia, and despite the changes that were bound to occur and
did occur, over a thousand years, there was still far more that
connected the life of Constantinopolitans even late in the empire's
existence to Rome than there was in Paris or that other backwater
of the time, Berlin.

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