Re: Slovanik, my new romlang

 --- Peter Clark wrote:

> On Tuesday 30 July 2002 06:10, Thomas R. Wier wrote:
> > Quoting Jan van Steenbergen <ijzeren_jan@...>:
> > > Historical plausibility?
> > > We all know, that the Slavs have never even been near the borders of the
> > > Roman Empire;
> >
> > Not so:  the Crimea was an Imperial vassal state for centuries,
> > all the way well into the Byzantine period.  It is almost certain
> > that slavic tribes also inhabited parts of the Empire itself,
> > although not in great numbers until well after Constantine the
> > Great.
>         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.
Your Enamyn BTW seems to fit in perfectly. I would be interested to learn more
about the language and its conhistory.

>         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. As far as time permitted me, I've been looking
through some of my books yesterday, and found the following about the early
history of the Slavs:

Nobody knows exactly what the Slavic "Urheimat" looked like. Norman Davies (in
his excellent history of Poland "Heart of Europe") does not even try to
describe it, but points out that the discussion about the subject is highly
spoiled by ethnocentricity from different sides, in combination with the
question who is the most autochthonous/indigenous/native population within
contemporary borders; the truth is that it was inhabited simultaneously by a
lot of Gothic, Celtic, Germanic, Slavic, Baltic, and other tribes.
Others place the Slavic home land more or less between the Oder and the Dniepr,
cut of from the Baltic Sea by the Balts and from the Black Sea by different
subsequent nomadic tribes.

The first mentionings of the Slavs by historians date from the first century
A.D. in the writings of Plinius and Tacitus, who call them "Veneti"; in the
sixth century, these Veneti were identified by several Byzantine writers and
the Gothic history writer Iordanes as "Sclaveni". I found a lot of interesting
information on the subject at http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/14042a.htm.

What I don't know is how those Veneti relate to the Illyrian Veneti. What I do
know, is that the division of the Slavs into East-, West- and perhaps
South-Slavs started more or less at the beginning of our era. In the sixth
century they were (quite arbitrarily) identified as "Veneti", "Sclaveni" and
"Antes".

Jan

=====
"Originality is the art of concealing your source." - Franklin P. Jones

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Everything you'll ever need on one web page
from News and Sport to Email and Music Charts
http://uk.my.yahoo.com

Reply