Posted on 01/17/2009 7:57:23 PM PST by Ravnagora
Hopefully you understand.
Don’t forget to say a prayer to (Serbian) Sveti VLAHO (= Croatian BLAZ^). His feast day is Feb 3 (Gregorian calendar).
You're confusing Orthodoxy with Serbian nationality, a typical mistake of Serb propagandists.
Thankfully, you've the common sense to admit you were wrong about the Statuta Valachorum being a "geographical descriptor".
It looks like I'm gonna have to teach you about the Vlachs, but that'll have to wait until I return from Croatia, Serbia, and Montenegro. I'm scheduled to give a lectureon WW2 in all three places.
“Statuta serbum” is not Latin: you want “Serborum”.
Dio. Thanks for coming out to play again. If Serbs are Vlachs and Tsar Dushan prohibited the marriage of Serbs and Vlachs, that made match-making complex. Wallachia is not Rumania?
“Tito stole parts of Croatia?” Which Croatia? The Nazi “Indepent” State of Croatia” NDH, of course. Hitler had given Srijem/Srem along with Bosnia -Herezegovina to the NDH.
Seems you’re saying unwritten languages don’t exist.
NO ALPHABET? Chinese has no alphabet. Neither does Japanese. Get thee to a liberry. Look up syllabary, logographhic writing, pictography...
Croatian got codified when Ljudevit Gaj adapted Vuk Stefanovuc Karadzic’s system.
Dio, you are a linguist? Dubrovnik dialect is East Hercegovinian Serbian —
“... the literary language [of Serbs and Croats] that has been adopted [codified 1850 Vienna] is basically the particular dialect spoken in Trebinje and Gacko” [in Herzegovina, just above Dubrovnik...]
Source: Austrian linguist Friedrich S. Krauss [1859-1938]. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 23, No. 121, (Jan., 1886), pp. 87-94
URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/982914 .
GOOGLE Dubrovnik Republic. Its centuries-long independence was first lost when Napoleon’s army came in. Dubrovnik was not part of the NDH, but was German-occupied. After WW II Tito stole it for Croatia. — In 1991, Dubrovnik citizens founded a party to restore the Republic of Dubrovnik. They fled in Autumn 1991 to save their lives. Most went to Belgrade. All were senteced in absentia to life imprisonment by Comrade-General Tudjman’s government.
Teach? But you’ll have to learn something first. Start soon.
I did miss that, yes indeed. That was the rising which Tchaikovski commemorated in his Marche Slave, using — along with the Tsarist hymn — Herzegovinian Serb dances (kolo).
“Vlach Law” was a generic term applied to many nationalities, including Slavs — Moravians, Serbs, Croats — and Gypsies / Roma, too. Austrian reference to the Wallachei /Wallachia are geographic. All the landscapes there are multi-ethnic. Italian (by passport) skiers can be Italians, Germans or Ladins. — In Italian newspapers today, as opposed to scholarly publications, “Slavi” are Yugoslavian, in particular Gypsies / Roma. “Dutch” in Pennsylvania are Germans.
Erratum et corrigendum:
FOR “Christmas and Epiphany (January 6, 1991)”
READ “Christmas (1991) and Epiphany (January 6, 1992)”
Erratum & corrigendum:
FOR “Statorum Valachorum”
READ “Statuta Valachorum”. On his way to the Forums Diocletian mught drop into a library or check with someone who knows Latin.
My M.A. specialization is in Mediaeval Latin: there was no no single (codified) standard, but plenty of literature and many regional languages. —This doesn't have to be boring: get a CD of Carl Orff’s CARMINA BURANA (GOOGLE THAT). Fun music. The music is from the 1930s, the song texts (spring time, love making, satire of king and pope, drinking) are in mediaeval Latin and mediaeval German. Germans, too, had no standard (codified) language before Luther's Saxon dialect (Upper Silesian) dialect was adopted by the hundreds of German principalities as a lingua franca. — That was once Frankish, subsequently any international languge. So the plan is like “Vlachs, Valachi”, who were many diverse nationalities that were not German or Hungarian. Today's Franks are the Holland Dutch who kept the old language. In Gallia (called France today, though it isn't Frankish anymore) the Franks dropped Frankish and now use the Francien neo-Latin dialect of the region. Along this track, in Serbia there is Fruska Gora, which originally meant ‘Frankish mountain /woods’. (Which “Franks”?)
When is Dio going to explain “Vlach” to us? I'll keep my calendar open.
Good read and many excellent comments. I have many Serb and Croatian friends and though they tolerate each other its hard to get a non biased opinion.
Geographically Dubrovnik is to 1991 Croatia what Florida and Alaska are to the USA, at the fringes. As for Serbian ethnos and Orthodoxy, let the following letter speak for itself:
THE REPUBLIC OF DUBROVNIK
Letter to the Editor, Belgrade newspaper Borba. Thursday.
3 October 1991, from Stijevo Brandzulica, Molfetta (Italy).
Just a few days ago I read in your esteemed newspaper Borba of 24 August 1991 an article about the founding of the Dubrovnik Republic. As an old Dubrovniker who has been living and working in Italy, I would like you to publish my reflections, tardy though they may be.
Dubrovnik has for ages been a special city, a city of peace and freedom, a special symbiosis of Romano-Slavic life. The Slavic element stems from the surrounding countryside, whose inhabitants for thirteen centuries have been primarily Serbs.
Dubrovnik was under Byzantium when medieval Italian culture came into flower. The majority of families were Serbs, who remained in the Orthodox faith but were under the constant pressure of the Catholic Church to convert.. This is the story of my own lineage. My family have over the years all become Catholics. Because of this mixture we now feel ourselves to be neither Serb nor Croat, but distinctly the people of Dubrovnik.
The language of Dubrovnik is based on the Serb dialect of East Herzegovina, which still has a Serb Orthodox population. Catholic Serbs make up a goodly part of the population of Dubrovnik. And regardless of the present-day situation, truth to tell, all through the nineteenth century Dubrovnik was linked especially to Serbia, because alone of the South Slav peoples she then enjoyed statehood; she protected us and finally liberated us from Austrian captivity.
The most distinguished of the Serb Catholics was Matija Ban, who held that the Serbs and Croats were a single people with the same language, but with two different names. Dubrovnik was the proper place of that symbiosis and of the successful communal coexistence of the two.
It must be said also that the Catholic Church has done much to destroy the unity of these two traditions. Another truth is that today Dubrovnik is dominated by Croats, unfortunately of an extremist Croatianism, whose bearers are not from the old Ragusan lineage, but uncultivated, half-civilized West Herzegovinian rednecks.
Dubrovnik used to be a separate republic. Dubrovnik can be that again, to the advantage of all its inhabitants. Until 1800 Dubrovnik had a multi-ethnic character and was recognized as a separate state, until this condition was destroyed by Napoleon. He turned Dubrovnik over to the Austrians, the first occupiers in her history.
The younger generation should know that it was only in 1939 that Dubrovnik entered into the Croatian world. And it was only in 1941 that Dubrovnik for the first time in its history was incorporated into the fabric of a Croat state, the ill-famed Nazi “Independent State of Croatia”. And in 1945 Dubrovnik was attached to Tito’s Socialist Republic of Croatia.
If we know the history of Dubrovnik we cannot tolerate modern falsifiers of history and the historical untruths they manufacture. I see Dubrovnik as a Yugoslav and multi-ethnic city with open borders. If anything of Dubrovnik’s traditional intelligence and diplomacy had remained, Dubrovnik today would today be a city state just like San Marino and Liechtenstein. I am convinced that Dubrovnik can find her salvation only in her individuality and that she must once again become the Republic of Dubrovnik. Those who favor this concept and desire a Republic of Dubrovnik, as I have found out, have been put under arrest in Croatia. Since this is so, democracy has not triumphed, but an occupation has taken place more perilous than war, and more tragic.
I implore my fellow citizens to sit down at the table and cool-headedly work things out. For Dubrovnik the most profitable thing would be for Dubrovnik to belong to no one else but to Dubrovnik alone.
Could Dubrovnik ever suffer more tragic days than to have its streets mined and barricaded? Who are Croatia’s forces “protecting” Dubrovnik from? The answer is clear, from the people who actually built Dubrovnik, the Serbs of Eastern and Southern Herzegovina and Monte Negro. These have been Dubrovnik’s builders, never her destroyers. — The Serbo-Croatian saying goes “If the goat lies, the horn doesn’t”. Herzegovinian Serbs were never, to use the Serbophobes’ own buzzword, a “disruptive factor” for Dubrovnik.
The shoe is on the other foot: the “disruptive factor” are really the people who have figuratively and literally sandbagged Dubrovnik into her present isolation.
Dubrovnik must, in the words of her great 17th century poet Ivan Gundulic, reclaim her “golden freedom”. This can be only when Dubrovnik is again a free and independent republic.
Translator J. P. Maher, Chicago, February 1992.
PS: 14 April 1992. Wall posters were put up overnight in the Old City demanding the withdrawal of all military formations and a plebiscite on Independence for Dubrovnik.
This echos what a friend of mine's father, who was raised there pre-WWII, said. When I asked him if he would return to Dubrovnik for a visit, he said, "No. The place I was raised doesn't exist anymore. I was raised Catholic but I am not a Croat, I am & always will be a Dubrovcanin."
Professor Maher is the king of the anecdote. He’s always able to back up his facts with a story, whether it’s his own personal experience or the experiences of others whom he considers credible sources. The anecdotes make the facts come alive, and he has no reason to lie or to make things up. He’s not a “paid propagandist”. His motives are to discover and share the truth. It’s called integrity.
It’s almost impossible to imagine that Croats and Serbs ever lived together “peacefully” and that they shared common experiences. As to your point about “bias”, I feel that once the essence of an “opinion” is shown to be “fact”, it’s no longer “biased”. There are, believe it or not, Serbs and Croats who are able to look at the history of their people honestly and to provide a truthful description of their history. There are Croats who have testified to the crimes their own bretheren have committed who actually lived to tell about it. And with Serbs, you have to always keep in mind where they are coming from “politically” and “ideologically” when they are giving you their analysis of things. For example, a pro-Tito Serb will often paint a whole different picture than a chetnik Serb will.
Serbs, for a long time, believed that the “truth” would prevail as events unfolded in the Balkans at the beginning of the 1990s. One day it will.
Good point. No one people in the World such as Croats have just one opinion, Tito’s partizans and Ustasha have the samepicures of the Serbs, they (Serbs) must be destroyed,Croats don’t care, Communist Tudjman or Fascist Pavelic, killing Serbs is duty for all Croats.
From Croatia: a competent view of “Vlach”.
from
http://croatiancrescent.blogspot.com/
“A little street runs along the base of the low hill on which the cathedral stands, called Vlaška ulica. The adjective “vlaška” comes from the noun “Vlah”, the name used for descendants of Roman colonists in the Balkans. As Romanians are the only Balkan people that speak a Roman language, the word Vlach became associated with Romanians, and especially with Romanians living outside of Romania.
In Croatian, however, the them Vlah was used for foreigners in general, and Italians in particular. Foreigners in Zagreb lived mostly at the foot of the Bishop’s palace, just outside of the walls. That is how Vlaška ulica got it’s name. It is a street for strangers.”
On standard language and “codification”, a German opinion is reported in Croatia:
http://croatiancrescent.blogspot.com/
“Croatia was the guest country of last year’s Leipziger Buchmesse, the biggest German book fair after the Frankfurter Buchmesse. A great opportunity to present Croatian literature to the (German speaking) world, one would say. The weekly [magazine] ‘Stern’ remarked that Croatia is a literary terra incognita for Germans: “No wonder,” explained Stern, “as Croatian is a very young national language.”
Croatia, however, blew it. Right before the fair a split occurred in the Croatian Writers Society.
A Croatian author who has successfully entered the German market is Edo Popovic.”
This surname is of some interest for Croatian ethnogenesis. — POP in Slavic languages means ‘priest’. POPOV in Russia, Bulgaria and Serbia’s Vojvoda is ‘priest’s son’. Although the Irish Bishop Eamonn Casey sired a son, the boy doesn’t bear his father’s name. Orthodox priests are not celibate.
Two illustrious sons of Orthodox priests are Nikola Tesla and the polymath Rudjer Boskovic, of Dubrovnik. (Google him for his magnificent accomplishments.)
PS. jpm: in 1990 German-hatched Croatia ethnically cleansed thw “Society of Writers of Croatia” to “Society of Croatian Writers”.
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