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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.
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.
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