Originally posted by Risto the Great
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Let's start giving a better shape to that confusion:
The article is more or less correct. The most frequent objection to it is the usage of the term Slav and Slavic ethnic group. Sooner or later some of you shall be offended by the term "Old church Slavonic" as well, but - alas! This is what the original sources mention. Czar Samuel was never mentioned in any of the contemporary sources as Macedonian. His opponent Basil was a member of the Macedonian dynasty of the East Roman Empire (Byzantium).
But then, even if you had any doubts, why don't you ask Misirkov to tell you what happened?
"If the formation of the South Slav peoples was a mechanical and political process it would not be impossible that it might recur in present times. Within the South Slav language complex there are several branches outside the Serbian and Bulgarian political units; these are the Macedonian dialects. These branches, since they are closely allied, naturally have some connection linking them more closely with Bulgarian in the east and Serbian in the north. These branches have been given various names at various times but it was not until the last quarter of the nineteenth century that these names overlapped so much as to displace one another. These various names did not properly catch on, and gradually they began to give way until finally they were replaced by the natural description Slav" with a "Macedonian" reflection from the geographical area in which they were distributed. The people who spoke these dialects had once been called "Slavs" and later either "Serbs" or "Bulgarians" until the rivalry between these two names made them both alien to the Macedonian Slavs, who started calling themselves after the old geographical name of their country. The name Macedonian was first used by the Macedonian Slavs as a geographical term to indicate their origin. This name is well known to the Macedonian Slavs and all of them use it to describe themselves. Since the formation of nationalities is a political and mechanical process, all the necessary conditions exist for Macedonia to break off as an independent ethnographic region. The Macedonians have a common country which is gradually, with the reforms, breaking off into an independent political whole in which there are "several branches of the South Slav chain of languages": these branches can easily be united through a general recognition of the central one as the means of expression of the literary language of all intelligent people in Macedonia and as the language of books and schools. Thus all the conditions for the national revival of the Macedonians are clearly visible, and, even from the point of view of the other historical theory (concerning the formation of small ethnographic units from a larger unit on the Balkan Peninsula), this is completely logical.
Here is what one might say to those who claim that Macedonian as a nationality has never existed: it may not have existed in the past, but it exists today and will exist in the future."
So, ladies and gentlemen, don't fool yourselves. The references "Slavs", Slavic ethnos" and "Old Church Slavonic" are perfectly normal, Misirkov acknowledges them, and they reflected the truth until the beginning of the era of nationalism, after the French revolution. Then the South Slavs begun splitting into pieces, some of them based upon countries of the past with the same names - or rather all of them!
So, is there anything else that you find to be unusual or wrong? I'd be happy to discuss it with you...
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