Language as a bizarre legacy of forgotten antiquity

2021

Slavs in the Making takes a fresh look at archaeological evidence from parts of Slavic-speaking Europe north of the Lower Danube, including the present-day territories of the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia. Nothing is known about what the inhabitants of those remote lands called themselves during the sixth century, or whether they spoke a Slavic language. The book engages critically with the archaeological evidence from these regions, and questions its association with the "Slavs" that has often been taken for granted. It also deals with the linguistic evidence—primarily names of rivers and other bodies of water—that has been used to identify the primordial homeland of the Slavs, and from which their migration towards the Lower Danube is believed to have started. It is precisely in this area that sociolinguistics can offer a serious alternative to the language tree model currently favoured in linguistic paleontology. The question of how best to explain the spread of Slavic remains a controversial issue. This book attempts to provide an answer, and not just a critique of the method of linguistic paleontology upon which the theory of the Slavic migration and homeland relies. The book proposes a model of interpretation that builds upon the idea that (Common) Slavic cannot possibly be the result of Slavic migration. It addresses the question of migration in the archaeology of early medieval Eastern Europe, and makes a strong case for a more nuanced interpretation of the archaeological evidence of mobility. It will appeal to scholars and students interested in medieval history, migration, and the history of Eastern and Central Europe.

Linguistica Brunensia, 2024

Archaeologists can rarely contribute to any discussions among linguists. However, they are in a privileged position, when it comes to identifying and delineating migrations. The paper is an attempt to assess the archaeological evidence pertaining to the supposed migration of the Slavs in the 6 th century, from their original homeland to the Danube. Wherever that homeland was located, in order to reach the Lower Danube (where the northern frontier of the Empire was located in the 6 th century), the Slavs had to cross the territory of present-day Romania. A special emphasis is therefore placed on the archaeological evidence of that country, particularly on those classes that have been typically associated with the early Slavs. However, no class of evidence attests to the existence of any migration across the territory of Romania. Migration is therefore not the mechanism that can explain the spread of Slavic.

Uncovering the origin of SLOVĚNE, the Late Common Slavic self-designation of the Slavs, has for a long time seemed a pretty hopeless business. But so far no attempt has been made to reconstruct the prehistorical contextbefore the Slavic migrationsin which it must have been created. Such an attempt is made here. It pays attention to the details of the morphological prehistory of patrials (words for inhabitants), but especially to the semantic categories of patrials that can be observed in the oldest stages of attested Slavic, and which can be posited for earlier times. Against this background it is possible to hypothesize both the discourse context in which the word was created and the series of semantic changes it must have gone through since then.

2005

Encyclopedia of Slavic Languages and Linguistics Online, 2020

Most archaeologists associate the Roman-period Proto-Slavs with the Kiev culture in the middle and upper Dnieper basin, kindred to it sites of the type Zaozer´e in the upper Dnieper and the upper Dvina basins, and finally the groups of sites of the type Cherepyn-Teremtsy in the upper Dniester basin and of the type Ostrov in the Pripyat basin. The fate of the early Slavs was much influenced by the events on the early stage of the Great Migration, when the Huns attacked the Goths in 375 CE. In the Dnieper area, from the mid-5th century CE on, the lands of the Goths were gradually taken by the populations of early Slavic cultures, who moved there from the upper Dnieper region. For the age of Slavic migrations from the 5th to the 7th centuries CE, most archaeologists have identified the Slavs with the Prague culture, some of the sites of the Ipoteşti-Cîndeşti, the Penkovka culture, the Kolochin culture, and far to the north the Long Barrows culture, at least partially relatable to some Slavic or Balto-Slavic population. There are two specific aspects of the archaeology of Slavic migrations: the movement of the populations of the Slavic cultural model and the diffusion of this model amid non-Slavic population. Several stages and directions are associated with the Slavic migrations of the 5th-8th centuries CE:-migration into the forest-steppe zone of Eastern Europe (5th c. CE);-migrations in the lower Danube area (late 5th-early 6th cc. CE);-migration south of the Danube and into the Balkans (6th-7th cc. CE);-migration in the middle and upper Danube areas (mid-6th-7th cc. CE);-migration into the Vistula, Oder, and Elbe basins (6th-7th cc. CE); and-migration in the forest area of Eastern Europe (7th-9th cc. CE). From an archaeological point of view, these migrations are manifested in the spread of Slavic cultural traits (related to handcrafted ceramics, types of buildings, cremation tombs, and female costume), and, for the southern part of the area, they are confirmed by the testimony of written sources. In archaeological research on Slavic antiquities, the following schema comprising three chronological stages has been increasingly accepted (see e.g., Stanciu 2015: 165):-Proto-Slavs, corresponding to the Wends (Venedi, Venethi, Veneti, Ouenedai) of ancient sources (Roman period, 1st-4th cc. CE);-Early Slavs, i.e., the Antes (Antae, Antai, Anti) and the Sclaveni (Sklavenoi, Sklavinoi) of the writers from the Late Antiquity and Early Middle Ages (mid-5th to the middle or the second half of the 7th c. CE);

Uncovering the origin of SLOVĚNE, the Late Common Slavic self-designation of the Slavs, has for a long time seemed a pretty hopeless business. But so far no attempt has been made to reconstruct the prehistorical contextbefore the Slavic migrationsin which it must have been created. Such an attempt is made here. It pays attention to the details of the morphological prehistory of patrials (words for inhabitants), but especially to the semantic categories of patrials that can be observed in the oldest stages of attested Slavic, and which can be posited for earlier times. Against this background it is possible to hypothesize both the discourse context in which the word was created and the series of semantic changes it must have gone through since then. Section 1 reviews some recent, innovative proposals for the etymology of SLOVĚNE. Section 2 examines the morphology and semantics of patrials in Old Church Slavonic and several others of the earliest attested Slavic languages. Section 3 reconstructs the semantic categories of Common Slavic patrials. Section 4 applies the relevant findings in an etymological explication of SLOVĚNE. Section 5 discusses phonological and morphophonemic changes relevant to the patrial suffix. Section 6 is a brief summary.

On the issue of continuity between the Veneti and the Slovenes, 2023

The classical Venetic theory that appeared in the eighties advocated the presence of the Slovenes (in German traditionally referred to by the signifier Windisch) in areas South of the Danube long before the sixth century, when, according to the dominant scenarios of academic thought, these areas were first settled by the proto-Slavs. The classical Venetic theory was rejected by the linguistic, historiographic and archaeological sciences and since then it has been considered a pseudo-scientific thought. The aim of this paper is to present to the international professional and general public the latest development in the Venetic theory; it is therefore an updated, critique considering, version of the Venetic theory on the origins of the Slovenes and other ethnic Slavs. With it, by the application of a set of formal-analytic and discursive-analytic methods of reading of sources in the ethno-symbolic approach to the understanding of nationality, and within the concept of hegemony the role of political sciences in the science of the ethnogenesis of the Slavs has been determined. In this paper the power of the (counterhegemonic) argument prevails over the argument of (hegemonic) power, as the attribution of the Venetic ethnonym to the corpus of inscriptions of the Atestine archaeological culture has been legitimately dismissed, and consequently the theory of the sixth century settlement of the Slovenes / the Slavs, i.e. the Veneti, in the areas between the Adriatic and the Danube has been rejected. The paper serves as an act of counter-hegemony in the Slovene historiography and memory studies.

Discourse, Vol. 7, No 1, pp. 103-124, 2021

Introduction. This article is written in the development of the theme of the application of linguistic methods to historical research, more specifically, to the research of the circumstances of the origin of the Slavic ethnic group. These circumstances have not yet been clarified to the extent excluding clashes of opinions, down to opinions opposite to each other. In particular, the range of supposed dates for the appearance of the Common Slavic language varies from the 3rd millennium BC to the middle of the 1st millennium AD. The article describes an attempt of restricting this range. Methodology and sources. The main ethno-defining trait is a common language: the Old Russian lexeme ɪазыкъ meant both “ethnos” and “language”. Usually a common language is, according to O. N. Trubachev, the result of convergence of many originally different dialects. The search for the probable time of the Common Slavic language origin has been accomplished under the following assumption: the factor consolidating dialects into the Common Slavic language (“Slavic Koine”) were kinds of economic activities that spanned a number of tribal groups, including the group of speakers of the actual Proto-Slavic dialect that initiated these activities. The type of this production can be tried to determine by the ancient original Slavic industrial terms. Then, assuming the possibility of migrations of Proto-Slavs from the territory where the Common Slavic language was formed, to the territory inhabited by foreign-speaking tribes, we have searched for the names of local flora and fauna borrowed in Slavic languages, as well as foreign-speaking place names; in the languages of ethnic groups currently living in the territory of the formation of the Common Slavic language, we must, accordingly, find traces of Slavic names of local flora and fauna, as well as toponyms, Slavic by origin. Results and discussion. Examining Slavic vocabulary, we have found there: a) Common Slavic names of copper, lead and silver, i. e. metals that have been simultaneously found in Old Europe exclusively in the Balkan-Carpathian metallurgical province of the 4th millennium BC; b) the original Slavic terms related to mining and metallurgy; c) the original Slavic names of crops and a number of other plants native to the Eastern Mediterranean and neighboring areas, as well as the names of the agricultural inventory; d) Finno-Ugric borrowings of the names of Northern European fish and Finno-Ugric place names in the absence of German borrowings. In the languages of peoples living in the Eastern Mediterranean one can find zoonyms, phytonyms and place names with unclear etymology, which, upon closer examination, can be explained as borrowings from dialects of the Proto-Slavic language. Conlcusion. The totality of the observed lexical data leads to the conclusion that the ancestral home of Slavs was localized in the Eastern Mediterranean. This data does not correspond to any of other Indo-European (IE) languages other than the Baltic languages, which suggests, in particular, that only Proto-Slavs and Proto-Balts were directly related to the Balkan-Carpathian Metallurgical Province of the 4th millennium BC and that the languages of the respective groups were being formed in the Balkans and the Eastern Mediterranean at that very time.

Language Typology and Universals, 2003

This analysis of Slovene in three relevant morphosyntactic areas shows that the language has developed remarkably consistently in its hierarchies and markedness-conditioned elimination of Opposition. This typological consistency in morphology and syntax contrasts sharply with what appears to be a lack of consistency in its prosodic type. Slovene prosody can be shown to have undergone a typological restructuring during the progressive accent shift that took place sometime during the 9"" or 10"" Century AD, although it preserved many archaic features that are crucial for the reconstruction of Slavic prosodic history. A closer inspection establishes a set of Slovene phenomena that can all be claimed to have originated from language contacts with Celtic. This reconstruction is supported by archaeological and onomastic evidence. Inherentni razvoji in razvoji v stiku, ziasti s keltscino Predstavljena obravnava treh zanimivih oblikoskladenjskih podroCij slovenSöine kai:e, da je slednja presenetljivo dosledno urejela svoje hierarhije in odpravljanje opozicij (usmerjano od zaznamovanosti). Ta tipoloäka doslednost v oblikoslovju in skladnji je v ostrem nasprotju do vsaj navidezne nedoslednosti pri prozodiCnem tipu. Da se pokazati, da je slovenska prozodija doiivela tipoloäko prestrukturiranje med pomikom naglasa, ki se je dogajal v nekem obdobju med 9. in 10. st., vendar je ohranila Stevilne starinske poteze, ki so kljuCnega pomena za rekonstrukcijo zgodovine slovanske prozodije. NatanCnejäi pregled opozori na vrsto slovenskih pojavov, o katerih se da trditi, da izhajajo iz jezikovnih stikov s Kelti. Täko rekonstrukcijo podpirajo arheoloäki in imenoslovni dokazi. ' In a number of phonological and morphological phenomena, immediate prehistorical connections with Slovak can be demonstrated (for a survey of the relevant literature, cf. GREENBERG 2000:41 ff.)

Slovene Studies Journal, 1983