Who are the Slavs? - Citations and Sources

[I of Macedon]

Originally Posted by Pelister

So, Venetic script is no where near balkans, really ? And that doesn't answer the question did the "Slavs" really come from Poland ? And how do you explain Slavic writing in present day Bulgaria and region BC ?




Sure, but how are Veneti and Sclaveni related ?

I would have to search more closely to produce the scripts I am referring too, and will get back to you with that info as soon as I can.

The scripts are related, as I pasted the link before

similarities between the Vinca and Glozel signs and those in Bulgaria. NOTE: its just a brief statement of the aforementioned.

http://www.museedeglozel.com/Documents/newinter.pdf

And with the Veneti, Sclaveni, eneti, anti etc and there relations and their obscurities, and how and when the names starting forming (Specifically "Slavs") - You have to read the PDF of the Making of the Slavs, it explains such relations and much more - as I only know so much. And because I haven't read the whole of Curta's paper yet as I've been to busy lately (but I will next week). Nonetheless from what I have read thus far its quite interesting.

Again, if you haven't had time to read it yet, read the conclusion first.

[Pelister]

Originally Posted by Pelister

Found one.

Plovdiv, Bulgaria.

http://www.unet.com.mk/ancient-macedonians/sitivo_a.htm

It's not a new discovery either.

"This written monument was published for the first time in the archaeological literature in 1950 by Z. R. Morfova and in 1971 with an inverseordinaire it was published by J. Todorovic"

But this script isn't Venetic.

[I of Macedon]

The following are excerpts and links (which at least I personally found interesting and whether it has already been discussed I don't know) to works by Johanna Nichols on Europeanisation of the slavs, O. Pritsak on Slavs and Avars and Florin Curta looks further on the 'slavic lingua franca' suggestion.


Slavic Lingua Franca – Florin Curta

Excerpts

By the mid-eighteenth century, the idea that Poles, Czechs, Croats, Russians, and others derived from an original single, very ancient people of biblical origin was widely spread. This idea seems to have been based on the assumption that there was a single Slavic language with innumerable dialects, all closely related to one another

Pavel Joseph Safarik (1795-1861) made the ‘slavic tribe’ a part of the indo-European family. To him the antiquity of the slavs went well beyond the time of their first mention in historical sources, for ‘all modern nations must have had ancestors in the ancient world.’

Tadeusz wojciechowski (1839-1919) first applied the retrogressive approach to the study of the early slavs, thus using the conditions of the present to infer about the situation in prehistory. He was also the first to propose the use of place names to write Slavic history.

A.L. Pogodin advanced the idea of using place-, particularly river-, names to find the prehistoric homeland of the slavs.

The romantic theory that made language a defining factor in the formation of a particular culture type and world view pervades.., entire scholarly discourse about Indo-European origins.

Much has changed in Slavic linguistics… few scholars would now believe that language is a direct mirror of culture, and some have pushed skepticism to the point of regarding common Slavic as a purely linguistic abstraction, a scholarly invention of Slavic linguistics.

It has become clear that languages are not necessarily correlated with ethnic identities and that ‘associated languages,’ while sensitive to the context in which ethnic groups exist, does not cause or create identity.

Indeed, it has long been noted that a uniform Slavic language community could not have been possibly maintained during the supposed migration of the slavs, a phenomenon encompassing a vast area of Europe, but for which historians have reserved only a relatively short period of time

Some by now have accepted that no major migrations are required to explain the distribution of Indo-European languages at any stage in their history.

Yet the obsessive question of where particular languages originated is still a major concern for many linguists. In fact, abandoning the idea of a homeland from which Slavic migrations originated does not imply giving up on the search.

Horace G. Lunt suggested that common Slavic was used as a lingua franca within and outside the Avar qagnate. Building upon an earlier suggestion by Omeljan Pritsak, Lunt argues that only as a lingua franca could Slavic have spread throughout most of Eastern Europe, obliterating old dialects and languages, while at the same time remaining fairly stable and remarkably uniform through the ninth century. (pg 9)

Questions curta raises.

- Can a lingua franca be accepted as a historical probability?
- Is it possible that the linguistic spread of Slavic is a matter of political expansion (or influence) of the Avar qagnate?
- Can the fragmentation of Common Slavic into dialects possibly be a consequence of the collapse of the Avar polity in the aftermath of Charlemagne’s expeditions of 791-795?
- Could the use of Slavic lingua franca within the qagnate contribute to an explanation of how Slavic languages came to be spoken outside the area under direct Avar control, namely in the areas so far from the center of power in the Carpathian basin as Poland or northwestern Russia.

Curta:

Pritsak’s and Lunt’s model of analysis is better equipped for understanding of what happened in both the political and linguistic terms between 600 and 800AD. This and no other, model so far proposed by linguistics or linguistically trained historians has support in the existing historical evidence. At most, this approach promises to bring current linguistic studies of Common (or Proto-) Slavic back in line with historical research, after several decades of more or less complete isolation, or misguided attempts to reconstruct not just the language, but also the culture and history of the ‘early slav.'



http://www.clas.ufl.edu/users/fcurta/lingua.pdf

(24 pages)





Excerpts from O. Pritsak, Slavs and Avars

Concurrently, a uniform material culture of «lower upper classes» was developing (as archeological finds have demonstrated) which adopted Avar metal art, primarily the Keszthely metal culture. As Helmut Preidel has shown, artifacts of this Avar metal culture became a status symbol among all non-Avar peoples of the pax .

Gradually a Slavic lingua franca developed in the military camps of the Avar pax, a language more sophisticated than the «hamlet idioms» and capable of conveying military orders, recording bureaucratic reports, and expressing ideas in the emerging, if limited, cultural life of the pax.

This wholly contemporary common Slavic language was stabilized by the end of the eighth century, and even later borrowings from one area to another would be adapted to the local dialect variants. Thus the word for 'king' among Catholic Slavs was taken from «Common Slavic» *karl-, derived from the name of the destroyer of the Avar Pax, Charlemagne (d. 814), becoming kralj in Croatian, král in Czech and Slovak, król in Polish and then korol' in East Slavic, where the word referred to western rulers, or eastern rulers crowned by the pope.

After the demise of the Avar Pax (ca. 796), several successor states emerged in which the Slavic-speaking, Avar-trained charismatic clans (of both Slavic and non-Slavic origin, especially Iranian) of Serbs and Croats were all-powerful. This process was documented in part by Constantine Porphyrogenitus in «De administrando imperio» (ca. 948)




http://www.kroraina.com/slav/op/op_slavs_avars_5.htm




Stance verbs and the linguistic Europeanization of the Slavs

Johanna Nichols

Excerpts

Europeanization was grammatical, not lexical; contacts were not intense enough to restructure the lexical semantics, hence sociolinguistically (Ross 1996, Hill 2001) Slavic must have been a dominant and/or interethnic (two or more ethnic groups) language.



http://www.indiana.edu/~sls2006/Handouts/NicholsSLS.pdf

(5 Pages)

[Delodephius]

I proposed the theory of preservation and spreading of the Proto-Slavic language by maintaining cultural and trade relations with specific groups of tribes inhabiting the banks of certain great European rivers like Danube, Sava, Morava, Prut, Dnieper, Dniester, Oder, Visla, Laba, Vardar and the coasts of the Aegean, Black, Adriatic, Ionic and Baltic seas with the centre being in the Danubian, Trypillian and Lusatian cultures.

[Risto the Great]

I think I finally understand Greeks, based on dwelling upon some of the points above.
Because various Slavic groups shared words, the Greeks want to round us up in one grouping and call us Slavs.

In a similar way, if some Arab (or possibly a Turk) strings together a couple of Hellenic remnants of words ... then they are Greek too. Notwithstanding that every other aspect of their ethnic character tells a different story.

If we "filthy slavs" (according to Greeks) used this approach, then it would have to be said unequivocally that the "filthy slavs" left far more of an impact on Europe and civilisation than the Greeks could ever dream of. Would any Greek care to disagree?

[I of Macedon]

More from O. Pritsak, Slavs and Avars, also mentioned by Florin Curta

The non-historical pastoralists or peasants beyond the limes of the existing historical empires (Rome, Iran, China), who had no experience with the larger world, and whose parochial interests therefore did not in any way predispose them to larger political bodies, were more often than not forced into undergoing a period of training that absorbed them into one larger body. This process, which usually lasted over successive generations for at least one century, created an upper class among the trainees that was cognizant of larger political bodies. That class became ready to take part in strengthening a pax and in forging the parochial dialects into a standard medium of communication for the entire pax. Linguae francae developed that embraced diverse linguistic entities into a «common language», whether based on Turkic or Slavic (or other) materials. Upon the demise of the pax, it was possible for several full-fledged «daughter languages» to emerge. This involves a concept of language development often ignored by those who take too literally the model of the genealogical tree of language as it was elaborated during the age of Romanticism. Rather than seeing only branches that continually sprout new branches, we are saying that a lingua franca which has evolved in order to serve large areas itself becomes a new and fairly uniform «tree» that then slowly puts forth new branches.

I spent four decades studying all twenty-two living Turkic languages, along with all the extinct forms that are known, with the aim of uncovering a Proto-Turkic stage (or perhaps more than one). I could not escape the conclusion that the oldest reconstructable common Turkic is the stage which directly preceded the oldest Turkic written texts, about 550-650, that is to say the time when the Turkic pax with its lingua franca, essentially free of dialectal diversities, was created.

My friend and colleague, Horace G. Lunt, has recently told me that he has had essentially the same experience with Slavic material. The oldest reconstructable Slavic differs so little from attested Old Church Slavonic, whose normalized form can be put in the ninth century, that OCS itself must be considered a dialect form of Common Slavic, and a dialect-free stage could be envisaged for as late as 750-800.

Historians have generally used linguistic abstractions, such as the notion of Common Slavic, for their own purposes, without trying to discover what objective reality was behind them. We need to try rather to study concrete peoples in concrete situations, insofar as this is possible. It is my conviction that only a method of historical sociolinguistics, such as we are suggesting here, can produce valid answers to our valid questions.

Further

…This analysis shows clearly that §§ 35-36 do not contain precious information about the topography of the putative three branches of the Slavs, contrary to the belief of many scholars. Rather, apart from the current location of the Sclaveni in Jordanes's former homeland, Pannonian Moesia (a civitate Novietunense et laco qui appellatur Mursiano, § 35) and the information on the non-Slavic Vistula Vinidarii, all the data are only various insertions the compiler took from different sources, whether classical writings or oral traditions, of the Goths themselves. Jordanes put the Vinid-, Sclaveni and Antes together not on the basis of ethnic or linguistic criteria, but because all three terms refer to institutions of military colonists on frontier territories. Although this findings may dismay Slavists, it will help historians understand the process of nation-building in medieval Europe and Asia

The anonymous Miracula S. Demetrii (= Mir II; compiled ca. 675-685) gives a list of five bands (ἔϑνος) of the Sklavins who attacked Thessalonica in 614 . Many scholars have labored in vain to establish Slavic etymologies of these putative «Slavic tribal names» . If the Sklavin troops were created by the Proto-Bulgars sometime during the last decades of the fifth century, as I assume, the self-designations of these bands should reflect the Ponto-Caspian milieu of the time, which was Hunno-(Eastern) Iranian.

Let us therefore check to see whether the hypothesis holds. Here are the names :

Βαϊουνητ-
Βελεγεζητ-
Βερζητ-
Δρουγουβιτ-
Σαγουδατ-

Four seem to have a suffix /it/, spelled -ητ- or -ιτ-, while the fifth may be seen as without suffix.

There is a suffix /it/ that is very familiar to Altaists. Indeed, it occurs in the name of the Hunnic Avars: Varxun- it (see fh. 30, above).

Compare Ἐϕϑαλῖτ-αι, «Hephthalites», derived from the name of their leader Efthal . This seems to be a parallel to a later stage in the linguistic history of this territory, namely the self-designations of groups of Ukrainian Cossacks that were based on the names of their leaders. There were two patterns. The first took the stem of the leader's name, sometimes removing a final suffix, and added a suffix denoting «adherent of» : e.g. Mazepa : Mazep-yn-ci, Lisowski : Lisov-čyk-y (Lat. Lissov-ian-i) . The second was simply the name of the leader, e.g. Barabaš «Left-bank Cossacks (after 1667)», from the name of Colonel Barabaš (fl. 1647-1648) .

Detaching the it-suffix, let us look at the four bases Baioun-, Belegez-, Berz- and Drougoub-.

Baioun. Here we can read u or ū < *-aġu- , plus the nominative singular suffix /n/. This is then the equivalent of a well-known Old Turkic word, which occurs with the majestic plural suffix /t/ (because of the meaning): bayagu-t «rich-merchant» (the standard translation of Sanskrit śreṣṭ̣hī). Therefore we posit *bayūn < *baya-ġun .

Belegez is a reasonable transcription of Hunnic bel-egeč, where *bēl means «five », and *egeč is comparable to Old Turkic äkäč «(elder) sister of the clan» and Old Mongolian egeči «elder sister» . The surname bel-egeč reminds
one of Beševliev, the surname of the leading Bulgarian specialist in the field of Proto-Bulgarian inscriptions: beš-evli is Ottoman Turkish and means «(having) five wives».

Berz- is doubtless the front variant of the name of a Khazaro-Bulgarian charismatic clan Barč- ; it can be taken as an incorrectly reconstructed form from Βερζιλ- Barč il > Bärčil, and finally Bärč. The band leader was apparently a member of the Barč clan.

Drougouw-. This word has three distinct Hunnic (Hunno-Bulgarian) features: first, initial d-, as against Old Turkic t- ; second, metathesis of the vowel, producing a consonant-cluster in initial position, *dur- > dru- ; and third, the development of the final g into -w . The root is the verb *dur- (OTurkic tur-, but Ottoman dur-) «stand», both in the sense of «stand upright» and «stand still» */ġuġ/ is the suffix of nomen usus. This then is a surname *Druġuw (equivalent to Turkic turġuġ, turquġ), signifying «he who usually stands still». Kāšġarī, the eleventh-century Turkic philologist explains the name (in Arabic) thus: «shyness (shame, diffidence) about something; one says ol mändän turquġ = (Arabic) ṣāra minnī ḥayīyan li-fi̒l badā minhū «he is ashamed before me over a matter that arose concerning him» . The surname *Druguw was probably used jocularly, as an antonym, for a very forceful person (in the manner common among the Zaporogian Cossaks later).

The fifth name, Sagudat-, with no suffix, is of Eastern Iranian origin: *sāka-dāt «gift of the stag» - the stag was the totem of the Scythians . The etymon *śāka, in Ossetian sag, is rendered in the Bactrian inscriptions as CΑΓΓΟ, CΑΓΟ; in the middle of the fourth century there was a Scythian people on the Danube called Saga-dares *sāga-dār «stag [totem] possessor» . Old Persian dāta is Middle Persian, e.g. Pahlavi, d’t .

Conclusion: the five names preserved in Mir II are not «Slavic tribal names», but self-designations of Proto-Bulgarian Sklavin bands; accordingly they have clear Hunnic or Iranian etymologies.

Since all attempts to find an etymology of the term Sklavin- / Slav-, on native ground have failed, one is tempted to look elsewhere . Proto-Bulgarian seems the most promising spot. There we find a common Hunno-Turkic word saqla-, 'to watch over, guard, protect' . The noun derived from it by the suffix */GU/ is attested in Kazan-Tatar (Muslim progeny of the Volga Bulgars) and in Karaim (modern Qipčaq-Polovcian), where the suffix became /-w/. In these languages the noun saqla-w means 'guard, watch; guarding' in the senses of actor, profession, place, or action As early as Proto-Bulgarian, the suffix */GU/ had become /w/ : e.g., κολο-β-ρ (< *qola-ġu-r) 'leader' . Further, in Proto-Bulgarian stress moved from the root syllable to the suffix, and the root vowel then reduced, e.g., *dawl-an > dwan 'hare', *tovirəm > tvirəm «the ninth» . Therefore one can assume that in Proto-Bulgarian the old *saqla-ġu would develop as *saqla-w and later as sqlaw-. Proto-Bulgarian also had a collective suffix /-in/, used especially to designate peoples: e.g., Volga Bulgarian Bulgar-in, «the Bulgars», Sowar-in «the Sowars» .

Thus our conclusion is that there was a Proto-Bulgarian word saqlaw > sqlaw with the plural form *sqlaw-in and two meanings: 1) «guard, watch, guarding»; 2) «trained slave». The Arabs, who were engaged in the slave trade, (see below), adopted the singular form as ṣ(a)qlab, meaning «trained slave», while the Byzantines, who were interested in contacts with the collective of the sqlawin on their limes, adopted it as sklavin, adding a plural desinence: Σκλαβην-οί. In Slavic, the suffix was modified to the collective plural -ěn-e, denoting a social group, correlated with the singulative suffix -in-, while the impermissible initial cluster *skl was reduced to sl.

The term sklavin of the Byzantine cultural sphere between the sixth and ninth centuries was very tightly connected with the Avar Pax. In contemporary testimonies, whenever the Sklavins appear, the Avars are almost invariably also referred to, though sometimes indirectly, usually as their masters.

The term Sklavin, then, I contend, did not have an ethnic or linguistic entity as its referent, but was classificatory, designating in the first instance barbaric professional frontier warriors. No single common Slavic nation existed, nor can we assume a feeling of one Slavic ethnic commonality. Instead, the sources show that the term ἡ Σκλαβηνία / Σκλαυηνία (sing.) or αἱ Σκλαβηνίαι / Σκλαβινίαι / Σκλαυινίαι (pl.) had the meaning «any regions occupied by the Sklavin», that is, a stronghold, whether small or large in area, of the frontier military colony type. The first author to use the term Σκλαυηνία was Theophylact Simocattes (fl. 610-641) referring to barbarians' strongholds on the left bank of the Danube. The institution was known throughout the entire province of Lower Pannonia. Several scholars (e.g. G. Ostrogorsky,
Leszek Moszyński's paper, gives the gratifying assurance that even in Poland, the bastion of Slavic scholarly patriotism, a sober perspective is possible. He states clearly that the term Slověne was never used as a self-designation by any «Proto-Slavic» tribe.

[Risto the Great]

Hmmm, this is quite consistent with many Macedonian views that suggest the attackers of Solun were not Slavs. And gives greater credence to the fact that the natives of Solun must have been slavic speaking already. Very interesting and thought provoking post.

[Delodephius]

And the Svevi?

[I of Macedon]

Originally Posted by Slovak/Anomaly/Tomas

And the Svevi?

I can't help you with that, all I'm providing here is what I have read from the authors above. If you want more clarification or some additional information you're going to have to somehow get in contact with O. Pritsak and/or Florin Curta among others.

[Soldier of Macedon]

That is a very interesting perspective I of Macedon, thanks for sharing. Slovak, is there any way to interlink this to the Suevi?

Originally Posted by Slovak/Anomaly/Tomas

And the Svevi?

Simocatta at times refers to the Slavs as either with the Avars or Avars themselves, I think this needs to be looked at much closer as there is some pontential information here that could help put some missing pieces together.