Saints Cyril and Methodius

[Soldier of Macedon]

May the memory of the brothers be preserved by their Macedonian descendants, and by the students of Slavonic letters in the world.

Вие обајцата сте солунчани, и сите солунчани зборуваат чисто словенски.

[Risto the Great]

People worthy of honour indeed.
I hope Ivanov's audience with the Vatican is fruitful.

[TrueMacedonian]

Happy Saint Cyril and Methodius Day. On this joyous occasion we should look at why they were chosen by the Emperor in the first place to go amongst the Slavic speakers.

http://www.utexas.edu/cola/centers/lrc/eieol/ocsol-3-X.html

At the time St. Cyril, then still known as Constantine, was receiving his education in Byzantium, there was a strong German effort to convert the Slavic population in Moravia to the Roman Catholic faith. Their teachings however were in Latin, and as a result, in 862 or 863, the Moravian Prince Rostislav sent to the Byzantine Emperor Michael III for a "bishop and a teacher," saying, "My people have rejected paganism and hold the Christian law, but we do not have a teacher who could preach to us in our own native tongue." The Emperor quickly chose to send Constantine, accompanied by his brother Methodius, justifying his decision with the words "You two are from Salonika, and all Thessalonians speak pure Slavonic." Constantine immediately composed an alphabet and with his brother began the process of translating the Gospels into Slavonic. It appears that, at the time, the Slavonic dialects were little enough differentiated so that a translation could be made which would be broadly intelligible.

[Sovius]

Pavel Serafimov presented an interesting paper at the 6th International Conference Origins of the Europeans in Slovenia in 2008 regarding the origins of the Glagolithic script, ultimately attributing it to the Neolithic Script of the Balkans.

The Origin of the Glagolitic Alphabet

http://www.korenine.si/zborniki/zbornik08/glagolitic.pdf

The NSB was in use between Sarmatia and the Levant, providing a plausible explanation for the similarities discovered between the Sarmatian runes and Levantian writing systems such as Phoenician and Hebrew discussed in the paper and between the runes and Glagolithic. The proximity of the Sarmatian territories to what was known as Greater Bulgaria on the eastern shores of the Black Sea could explain the similarities between the proto-Bulgarian script and Glagolithic. The paper also provides an explanation regarding the similarities between the NSB and Linear A and B.

While rarely yielding a symbolic and phonetic correlation worth positing as relevant, there is a structural similarity between Glagolithic and Sanskrit alphabets (Brahmi, Devanāgarī, etc.) that should be of great interest to researchers now that there are chronologically defined migration paths connecting the two regions. The triangular symbol which stood and stands for the “s” sound in Glagolithic and Brahmi is one of those few instances.

I personally believe the origin of Glagolithic involves the origin of linear writing, itself, as many of the symbols found among the sites that make up the Danubian region can also be found among the artifacts discovered at the Neolithic village of Banpo in China. While its easy to pass the similarities off as coincidence, populations carrying the R1a marker did make their way into the eastern parts of Eurasia and I’m sure people from the Far East made their way into Europe as well, as prehistoric trade emerged and human exploration continued. Perhaps, the Silk Road is older and longer than previously reconstructed or human prehistory is much more complex than previously envisioned?

[Delodephius]

In Europe there existed three different runic alphabets: the Norse unes, the Hungarian rovas and the Turkic Orkhon runes. All these scripts look very much alike and share a set of common looking letters. The thing is however that none of those letters have common sound values and represent something else. Similar thing is with Greek and Carian alphabets though these are of common origin they just have been using the letters differently. As for the runes there is nothing but coincidence.

[Delodephius]

P. Serafimov makes too many assumptions and speculations. What he wrote is not in a credible academic method. Let me just skip his oversimplification of things and then taking those oversimplifications and treat them as valid facts.

He first compares the Glagolitic script to Greek, Hebrew, Pheonician, but then goes on to compare it to untestified and undeciphered scripts, like the "Sarmatian" runes, of which I have seen plenty of inscriptions but either without decipherment or "deciphered" using Iranian, Turkic, Hungarian, Baltic, and other languages. He then mentions the Thracian and Venetic alphabets, of former he doesn't show examples and of the latter he assumes (as much as rest of the "Venetologists") that it is a "Slavic" alphabet. There is his next problem: equating modern Slavs with various other groups in the past, the period he is speaking of. Also, the Slavs of the 6th century were bog dwellers around the marshes of the Danube, not just those for whom the term was used later, much later. But he falls into the same trap Slavists have been falling for centuries.

He makes mention of one M. Popov who allegedly "proved" Proto-Bulgars were anthropologically Slavs! He apparently sees this as a genuine fact, and something normal at that: that ethnic groups are different from each other not just in languages but also in anthropological features.

Then he goes on to compare Linear A and Linear B scripts to Glagolitic and claims that 33 letters of Linear A and 32 letters of Linear B resemble the Glagolitic alphabet. I checked it out myself: only some 7, or if I push it up a bit, some 10-11 Linear A and Linear B letters resemble the Glagolitic ones, that's pretty much as the Coptic alphabet, or Greek and Hebrew combined.

He assumes the Kurgan theory for real; also the a migration of Balkanites into the Middle East as the so called Sea People; that the Vinča inscriptions were an alphabetic script neglecting the fact that none of the letters that coincidentally resemble Phoenician, Greek, Latin, and other alphabets, have never been given proper sound value since they don't form any inscriptions and therefore be deciphered at all; he equates pottery findings not as a sign of trade but as migrations, a similar mistake done by archaeologists since the dawn of modern science; he assumes that the spread of scripts also means spread of people; he mentions a greater ethnos that existed in Europe which he equates with the Veneti or Slavs; and so on. He throughout his paper relies on his claims as facts to draw more and more conclusions. He uses elementary and high school reasoning for his explanations, this I say not as an insult but by the fact he does not delve into things beyond what you would except from a school book.

All in all, what he wrote was quite boring and uninformative, at least to me. There are other more professional works out there, like Florin Curta's works and the Palaeolithic Continuity Theory, both of which give at least some facts that can stand on firm ground on their own without making even the basic of assumptions.

Another thing. Serafimov much like many other pseudo-scientists when dealing with ancient languages, they use to compare them with modern languages they know or speak. I was always wondering why the Venetologists never compared the Venetic inscriptions with OCS, not just words, since lexical inventory of any language means little without its grammar in showing genealogical affiliation. It is ironic that most pseudo-scholars who practice palaeolinguistics actually don't know any ancient language or have studied linguistics after high school. I'm not saying you can learn all you need about linguistics in college, far from it, but you are introduced to methodology, terminology and concepts there that one needs to understand how languages work and how to analyse. The rest is up to you. But these pseudo-scholars never much bothered with reading some linguistics manual or read the voluminous researches of expert linguists, no matter if these linguists were right of wrong, that matters not, but to see how things should be done to increase one's chance of being closer to truth, and perhaps expanding the boundaries of science, introducing new methods and theories. But these pseudo-scholars try to prove scholars wrong by fighting them with sticks and stones. Sad and a waste of time.

[Delodephius]

Going through the Korenine website and reading the latest Proceedings I see not much has changed in the recent years. What I see is they still like to claim that Slavic languages could be equated or are synonymous with Proto-Indo-European. Although I would agree with them in the past, before I started to actually study Slavic languages, comparing them with each other and other IE languages, I came across quite quickly across something that these "experts" seem not have even noticed: that Slavic languages, or if we go back into the past the Old Church Slavonic which would be the closest to some Proto-Slavic or Common Slavic language, if one ever existed, are in terms of their grammar much evolved than other IE languages of the past. And I don't mean evolved in a very positive way. I mean, that in Slavic languages grammar has been so mutated that it is quite different than grammars of let say Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, Gothic and Hittite, the five oldest attested IE languages. What I'm talking about is the verbal system. Slavic languages have lost most of their paradigms! One third of them is non-existent at all already in OCS, the medium voice, and another third, the passive voice, is built by using the active voice and the reflexive pronoun in Accusative, and in the active voice the imperative mood is based on the conjugation endings of the former optative mood. All the older IE languages use simple endings for many verbal forms Slavic needs to use a descriptive form. But this is simply because modern Slavic languages are being considered to be very archaic and old, when in fact they can't hold a candle to the older IE languages. Neither can any other modern IE language, but we don't hear English or German being declared "oldest IE language out there" simply because there exist something called language evolution and that Slavic languages today have evolved less in some areas or more slowly then other IE languages compared to their predecessors, which does not mean that Slavic didn't evolve faster in the past, before written records.
The only thing Slavic languages still preserved is their somewhat complex declination system which is as much as complex as the Baltic ones. But Slavic languages as I said cannot compete in the system of verbs to such languages like Celtic or even English.

There is also the thing with the vocabulary and deciphering ancient unknown inscriptions using modern(!) Slavic languages and claiming that they cannot be deciphered with any other language, based simply of similarity of words and not much of anything else. Words don't make a language alone.

[Sovius]

In Europe there existed three different runic alphabets: the Norse unes, the Hungarian rovas and the Turkic Orkhon runes. All these scripts look very much alike and share a set of common looking letters. The thing is however that none of those letters have common sound values and represent something else. Similar thing is with Greek and Carian alphabets though these are of common origin they just have been using the letters differently. As for the runes there is nothing but coincidence.

You present a very sound set of objections in relation to the intellectual platform you are basing your views on. Your argument is based on the concept of convergence, the view that, while these systems of written communication contain similarities, they developed independently of one another, as the individual meanings for each symbol, however similar in form, have been shown to be different among the three systems you have listed. This is the same observation that the argument favoring divergence is based on, the view that similar qualities stem from a common source and that abstract differences are secondary due to the intrinsic similarities observed in their form and function. The specific sound a similar or different character communicates is treated as an attribute of the same function (communication). I believe the fact that each system is similar in form and has characters that do the same thing (communicate information) supports the view that there is a common origin for each system, which are now more unique in terms of what each character came to communicate for each culture.

The NSB contains forms from a prior age of existence that have been observed as having been in use among many other surrounding cultures during later eras which used these forms for the same function. I believe the fact that many of the characters have the same or similar functional attributes (sound correlations), even if there are only just a few correlations between sets of characters from different alphabets, supports the view that linear writing developed on the Illyrian Peninsula and diverged over time as the function of the NSB and its variants came to take on more advanced applications in everyday life. Meanings, forms and uses change over time for various reasons such as innovation and adoption, but, by virtue of the fact that prior states of existence can be observed for contemporary alphabets and ancient alphabets, they are forever bound to their original forms, even if function and form have evolved. Whoever drew a single line in the sand and said this represents one thing, not two, developed abstract written communication. The people who developed the characters that would come to be used for the abstract and partially abstracted symbols that would come to be used in ancient and modern alphabets developed linear writing.


Populations largely defined by the P37.2 genetic marker were inscribing objects to communicate something during the early Neolithic Period, while their descendents, who were also largely defined by the P37.2 genetic marker were inscribing things using similar, albeit differentiated, symbols, to communicate things during the Bronze Age and Ancient Period. People who write in either Cyrillic or the Latin variation of the Venetic (Rasennian) script, who are also largely defined by the P37.2 genetic marker are doing the same thing, using symbols that can be regarded as simply representing the latest stage in the evolution of the NSB. Population continuity is a central, but understated theme of Serafimov’s paper, a pool of evidence which has cemented itself as the new academic cornerstone regarding Southeastern European Archeology and, therefore, Anthropology. I believe Serafimov has presented a very complex puzzle that needs to be solved, not sullied.

The “p” in the old Turkic script can be viewed as a simplification of the old Hungarian “p” and is identical to the Venetic “p”. The “p” symbol is found among the Vinča ruins. That the Glagolithic “p” (pokoji) hooks back into itself in a cursive manner does not make it a convergent symbol in my opinion. This favors symbolic divergence, no matter how many paths this divergence took to arrive back where it started, if, in fact, it took such a route.

The old Hungarian “a” is identical to the Venetic “a”, which is also identical to the Coptic “a”. This symbol is regarded as a NSB symbol, as well.

A form of the Glagolithic “Jat” can be found among the symbols that make up the NSB.


Before there was a letter “v” there was the “bird in flight”. The “v” and “ts” (Glagolithic) sounds both have fricative and guttural qualities that make them similar (divergent) sounds. They don’t sound quite the same, but they are pronounced in a similar manner. I believe the mechanics of pronunciation are as equally important as grammar when approaching such decisively deceptive areas of study as what Serafimov has entered into. As I believe grammar to be important, as well, I value Bor’s decipherment of the Este tablets for this very reason, not because he was right or wrong, but because everyone I know who is familiar with the language that he used to unravel its conjugations understands the decipherment in the same way and have come to understand many of the words that he came across in the same way, independently of ever having reviewed his original decipherments.

Could it be that you’re confusing a study that utilizes comparative analysis, interdisciplinary scholarship and the statistical method, with pseudo-science? How is the hypothetical Kentum/Satem division not an absurd assumption, an entire language family that was primitively divided in half using one arbitrary word, an abstract word at that? A “Cold War” coincidence? (Geographically speaking, of course) If you ever find the mythical proto-Indo-Europeans or Indo-Europeans following these outdated, albeit, somewhat useful methodologies, let me know. OK, Ferdinand De Saussure was a very gifted researcher, but genetics no longer supports a lot of this archaic crap that continues to be passed along from generation to generation as doctrine. Just as there are no rules for history, historical linguistics is far more complex than the oversimplifications inherent in Aryan Model Linguistics. Scholarship is about blazing new trails, not walking on a sidewalk.

There are other symbolic correlations of interest that should be discussed, but I have to log out. Perhaps, you can elaborate on some of the implied assumptions that you mentioned in your 2nd to last post. I see I have some catching up to do. Thank you for providing these counter arguments, they've been very helpful.

[Soldier of Macedon]

Thank you both for providing these informative observations, this is brewing as an interesting discussion.

[Delodephius]

Could it be that you’re confusing a study that utilizes comparative analysis, interdisciplinary scholarship and the statistical method, with pseudo-science?

I'm far from an expert but I know for example which kinds of methodology can be considered pseudo-science, even if I cannot explain it with adequate terminology and wording. I hope to improve on that as I study more.

How is the hypothetical Kentum/Satem division not an absurd assumption, an entire language family that was primitively divided in half using one arbitrary word, an abstract word at that? A “Cold War” coincidence? (Geographically speaking, of course) If you ever find the mythical proto-Indo-Europeans or Indo-Europeans following these outdated, albeit, somewhat useful methodologies, let me know. OK, Ferdinand De Saussure was a very gifted researcher, but genetics no longer supports a lot of this archaic crap that continues to be passed along from generation to generation as doctrine. Just as there are no rules for history, historical linguistics is far more complex than the oversimplifications inherent in Aryan Model Linguistics.

The Kentum/Satem division is quite absurd, I agree. Languages are not biological organisms, they don't behave according to the laws of nature. There are certain rules when it comes to languages, but these are conditioned and are no universal. I do not believe in a common Proto-Indo-European language, but I myself don't yet have enough knowledge to refute the idea of one, though I know of scholars who can.

There are other symbolic correlations of interest that should be discussed, but I have to log out. Perhaps, you can elaborate on some of the implied assumptions that you mentioned in your 2nd to last post.

In my next post, I'm in a hurry at the moment.

[Sovius]

All the characters that form the Venetic (Rasennian/Etruscan) script, whether unchanged or variated, have been found amongst the ruins of Europe’s earliest known permanent settlements and were used by the ancestors of many of the people who continue to live in this area and the surrounding regions. It is the human genome which forms the basis for this statement, not some ethnocentrically deluded assumption. Would it not be wise to try and find meanings in these symbols and strings of characters using a linguistic system that people in the region continue to speak, no matter how much or little this system has changed? The Baltic and Slovenian (Macedonic) languages are the most conservative living languages of all the verbal communication systems classified as Indo-European by Victorian theorists and exhibit very few signs of differentiating amalgamation when compared to Nordic, Latin or Sanskrit. If you’re familiar with Alinei than you are familiar with the relationship between populations carrying the P37.2 and M17 markers and the various forms of empirical evidence that would be preserved during such a period of massive linguistic exchange over half of Europe. It’s all about the regions of origination for these markers and the significance of such a region versus a settled region in terms of archeological and linguistic evidence.

Here’s a paper authored by Marco Merlini that also supports the work of Radivoje Pešić:

http://eprints.jiia.it:8080/118/1/Acta_VI-2007_Merlini.pdf

Pešić was ridiculed for putting forth the idea that Serbian culture represented the natural evolution of the indigenous cultures of the region, as with other contemporary Balkan cultures that remained basically unphased by later period migrations that carried additional linguistic and cultural change into the area, such as those indigenous civilizations along the region’s southern coastal areas and Dacia. Geneticists have demonstrated that he was a very capable researcher, well ahead of his time. As Serafimov is simply continuing down a path that Pešić and others have forged, I would like to ask, where is Serafimov assuming anything that could reasonably be qualified as pseudo-scientific? Could it be ambiguous terminology or the synoptic form of his address? It is a fact that our ancestors wrote on wood, as demonstrated by the Novgorod planks. The Bishop of Mecklenberg recorded that the people the Holy Romans were slaughtering in what would become Germany used written communication (Obrodites). The urns that were “scribbled on” and buried by the ancestors of many modern Germans, Polonians and other ethnic groups in the region during the Bronze Age demonstrate something very obvious for interdisciplinarians.

The Bulgarians (Altaic language speakers) expanded through the Sarmatian cultural belt that geneticists have discovered between Central Europe and India. Before there was a Greater Bulgaria, there was a Greater Sarmatia in this region (Madja (Persian), Medes (corrupted), meaning ‘plains dwellers’). The conditions required for cultural exchange existed. Should Serafimov have included more peripheral evidence in this paper which was authored for a specific and not a general audience, yes, but I believe it would be more beneficial to fill in the missing pieces than to disregard the paper as a product of pseudo-science. The Sarmatian Runes were made by a people carrying genetic traits that ultimately originated on the Illyrian Peninsula, why shouldn’t the language that they also brought with them across the Steppes be considered?

The following study forms the basis for my argument concerning the admixture of Sarmatian and Bulgarian populations. Under this scenario “Bulgarian” characters that resemble NSB and Glagolithic characters would have ultimately originated out of contacts with populations to the East of the Black Sea.

DNA Genealogy, Mutation Rates, and Some Historical Evidences Written in Y-Chromosome

http://precedings.nature.com/documents/2733/version/1

[Delodephius]

The Baltic and Slovenian (Macedonic) languages are the most conservative living languages of all the verbal communication systems classified as Indo-European

Although this is not wholly incorrect, Slavic and Baltic languages have changed to the extent that their predecessors from just a thousand years ago would find their language unintelligible, not unlike other IE or any other languages.

I do not believe in mass migration and exchanges of population, I do believe in continuity, but I do believe in change (and this goes for everything) and in my opinion we today maybe descendants of people who lived here before us thousands of years ago and we may speak a language that originated from theirs, but I do not think that their language was like ours and that we could understand each other.
When they were deciphering Egyptian first they deciphered Demotic because it was the phase of Egyptian before Coptic, a language still used today in the Coptic Egyptian Church. When they deciphered Demotic, they deciphered Late Egyptian, and then Middle Egyptian until finally they could decipher Old Egyptian from 2500 BC. If they tried to decipher Old Egyptian with Coptic their decipherments would be wrong because the two languages are unintelligible. Hittite was deciphered because it was na IE language and had considerable literature and many bilingual texts. This made it easier. What we have of Venetic or any other Old European inscription are short inscriptions that are attempted to be deciphered by non-experts using modern Slavic languages. There can be no correct decipherment. I read Anthony Ambrozic's work, I read Matej Bor's work. It is almost absurd what they did and how they tried to decipher the inscriptions. And then people wonder why scholars ridicule them. Because they deserved it that's why. Because they used methods that would ashame any professional scholar.

The Sarmatian Runes were made by a people carrying genetic traits that ultimately originated on the Illyrian Peninsula, why shouldn’t the language that they also brought with them across the Steppes be considered?

Because the language they spoke will never be known. We can only speculate and speculations are as good as not knowing anything. Genetics in my opinion have little to do with languages. Languages are not living organisms as Alinei said. Unless we find books or something longer written in the Sarmatian language then we can simply abandon any attempt of trying to classify them according to it.

where is Serafimov assuming anything that could reasonably be qualified as pseudo-scientific?

He assumes that in continuity both ends of the path are same enough. I say they look nothing alike at all.

[Sovius]

Alinei is also confident that language follows genes. There are now limiters that can be used to refine our understanding of European linguistic evolution and non-familial amalgamation. There is the belief that languages change too quickly to accurately reconstruct lexical and grammatical elements and patterns beyond a certain point in time. There is also the belief that languages are resistant to change and do not change unless forced to change, a physical law governing the existence of languages, if you will, all things being physical, the inertia of familiarity and function.

Let’s examine a lexical correlation. The Croatian word for frog is zabo. The Basque word for frog is zapo. One culture exists on the Iberian Peninsula in Western Europe up into Southwestern France. The other exists on the western coast of the Illyrian Peninsula. Basque is considered a non-Indo-European language, while Croatian is considered a language that did not come into use until the 6th Century AD by Aryan Model theorists. Empirical evidence offers a number of possibilities, but I would like to find out which scenario you find most plausible in terms of the scientific method.

[Delodephius]

Lexical commonality of just a small number of words is not a an argument for language commonality. We do not know enough about the language picture of Europe before Roman and Greek times, we cannot know in what places Proto-Basque and Proto-Slavic languages were spoken, but stemming from the fact that both of these languages, beside few words that are common only amongst them, they have absolutely no similarity. There could be many scenarios of how an exchange of words could occur, trade is the first thing that comes to my mind or a language contact before the modern geographic displacement (in all cases: diffusion). It could even be a common ancestry, but this would be far fetched as the two language groups are not even remotely related and share almost no feature. The few common words are a mere anecdote.

[Sovius]

“Lexical commonality of just a small number of words is not an argument for language commonality.”

This is not an argument for linguistic commonality, although typological and grammatical similarities have been observed between these languages that require an explanation. European languages are hybrid languages and therefore the result of differing linguistic systems co-existing and blending into one another over time in different ways.

“We do not know enough about the language picture of Europe before Roman and Greek times, we cannot know in what places Proto-Basque and Proto-Slavic languages were spoken”

This would be an excellent opportunity to demonstrate that this statement is not simply an assumption based on the traditionalist platform that’s been carried over as dogma into the classroom through some textbook. These were not simply their times, but our times, as well. In many ways, they were us.

“trade is the first thing that comes to my mind”

Bronze Age cultural diffusion, perhaps? It would make sense that early Slavs, being swamp dwelling heathens, would deal in reptiles, I suppose.

“It could even be a common ancestry, but this would be far fetched as the two language groups are not even remotely related and share almost no feature.”


What is the relationship between the M26 genetic marker and the P37.2 marker and what is the potential significance of its relative dating in relation to the M343 marker that has also been observed in Northwest Iberia? What is the percentage of copulating couples who can speak the same language versus those copulating couples who cannot speak the same language? (It would be interesting to find out what the divorce rate is for the latter) Is the ability to communicate necessary for survival and if so, what qualifies as evidence of having survived?