Paleo-Balkan & Balto-Slavic - Common Proto Language

[Onur]

In fact, in terms of military tecnology and organization skills (most important things in that era), the so-called barbarians was far more advanced from the Romans. Thats why Romans immediately adopted eastern military tactics and eastern composite bows as soon as they saw Hunnic armies. Also thats why eastern Roman emperor Leo wrote a book to analyse Turkic military system. I think the emperor Leo`s "Tactica" was one of worlds first strategy book. The current military system and it`s hierarchical organization of 10s divisions is still quite same as 1500 years ago, like head of 10 men is corporal and a luitenant is responsable from 10x corporals, 100 men and 10x luitenants obeys to the squadron leader etc. All these systems comes from the so-called barbarians of medieval age. It was quite same for other barbarians. For example Vandals and also Gauls naval technology was more advanced than Romans, so they defeated them many times.


As for the langugage adoptions; b4 the start of widespread education in 19th century, probably the most important factor was the population. I mean, in the medieval age, the minorities was probably adopting the language of majority due to intermingling between them. For example, why Bitish people (Anglo-Saxons) speaks the language of Angles today, instead of Saxons? It`s because, probably Angles was more populous than Saxons at that time but that doesnt mean that Saxons german like language didnt effect Angles language, cuz it surely did.

2nd most important factor was the religion. In medieval Europe, when a group of people adopts a new religion, sometimes they were also adopting the langage and customs of their religious forefathers because their former language and customs was being demonized and regarded as a sin. Like the peaceful druids of Celts and the runic alphabet of Germans becoming/transforming to the root of witchery and demonism after christianty. Or for example Bulgars in danube. As soon as the Bulgar monarchy became christians, they abandoned their own language, customs and titles like Khan in favor of the Macedonian system created by Cyril&Methodious at that time but that doesnt mean that Bulgars Turkic language didnt effect current slavic language of Bulgarians. It surely did and i know that there are ~150-200 Turkic words in today`s Bulgarian which comes from early medieval era.

Originally Posted by Delodephius

There are many linguistic and customary similarities between Swedes and Slavs that no one can explain, for example.

It`s not that difficult to explain. Swedes were also a part of the barbarian peoples from the east. They migrated from the current Russian plains. Before they became christians, they had shamanistic beliefs, like tree of life called igdrasil, the myths like Odin, Thor and ofc they were using runic alphabet.

[Delodephius]

It`s not that difficult to explain. Swedes were also a part of the barbarian peoples from the east. They migrated from the current Russian plains. Before they became christians, they had shamanistic beliefs, like tree of life called igdrasil, the myths like Odin, Thor and ofc they were using runic alphabet.

There was no migration from the Russian planes. Get that out of your head. Not of Slavs, not of Germanic peoples, nada! And the Germanic Runic alphabet is derived from Latin, not Turkic runes. I should know, I can write in both and I compared them with Latin, Greek, Sogdian, Pahlavi, Kharosthi, etc. I'm an alphabet nerd, there's no writing system I didn't try to learn. 懂吗？
And runic is a writing style, not an alphabet. It is equal to terms like an engraving, a painting, a drawing. Germanic runes and Turkic runes means that these scripts share common features, but you can write any script in a runic style, Cyrillic, Arabic, Chinese, etc. Besides aesthetic appearance there is no other similarity between Germanic and Turkic runes, no letters that look the same in either of those scripts has the same sound value, which basically means these two scripts are not related at all. However, Germanic runes show clear evolution from the Latin script, much like the Turkic runes show evolution from the Kharosthi script.

Just one thing "acedonians spread their language beyond central Balkans." so what did cyril & methodius do didn't they spread the cyrillic alphabet wasn't that derived from the ancient macedonia alphabet??They spread orthodox christianity all over europe,moldavia ,russia etc.So that all these countries learned the cyrillic alphabet which is really macedonian.(maybe the missing language could well be macedonian)
Anyway leave you guys to sort it all out.

Cyril invented the Glagolitic alphabet, not Cyrillic. And Cyrillic alphabet is actually just the Greek alphabet with a few additional letters taken from the Hebrew script. And Cyril and Methodius spread Christianity only to Moravia and what is now Slovakia, and it didn't hold there. Only afterwards was Christianity spread to Bulgaria and Russia, not to the Western Slavs nor the Croats or Slovenians who adopted Catholicism and never used Old Church Slavonic i.e. Old Macedonian. And even when OCS did spread to those lands like Russia, it was used as the language of the Church, not the language of the people who used their own Slavic languages. So there was no spread of Macedonian in the way you are implying.

[vojnik]

As far as I know there is no such thing as an "ancient macedonian alphabet" I have been to various archaelogical digs around Macedonia and prior the the Glagolic alphabet the Koine alphabet was used adopted first by the Anceint Macedonian court as the official language used for billateral dealings this alphabet was adopted by most ancient civilisations. What is known is that the Ancient Macedonians had no alphabet of there own which was unique to others but it did have a unique language. It was not until Kiril i Metodij do we see a unique Macedonian Alphabet which was only invented in order to create a new standardized alphabet for Christian military work. What the disciples Naum and Kliment found was the local populations and others found it difficult to learn this alphabet so for the first time they used mostly Greek with a few Hebrew letters to create an Alphabet which could be used to write down the Macedonian language

[Onur]

Originally Posted by Delodephius

There was no migration from the Russian planes. Get that out of your head. Not of Slavs, not of Germanic peoples, nada! And the Germanic Runic alphabet is derived from Latin, not Turkic runes.

We better not derail the thread with this argument but if you are not aware of this already, i gotta tell you that what you claim is totally contradicts the numerious records (Roman, Arabic, Germanic records) and real world events of great migration period. You also contradict with the early Germanic epics and Nordic myths where they relate themselves as migrants from the east, e.g. Odin and his people`s migration from the east


I didnt say that Germanic Runic derived from Turkic, what i said was, both alphabets have some connection, most likely related with a common ancestor script. I dont think Latin was the source. When Germanic people was writing in Runic at 2-3rd BC, Latin was so young itself. Latin script is already nearly same as Etruscan script. If we consider that Etruscans were also migrants from the east, so it`s quite possible to say that all runic and Etruscan scripts might had common ancestor.

And runic is a writing style, not an alphabet. It is equal to terms like an engraving, a painting, a drawing.

And if you draw same symbol for a particular sound and if you do that for about 25-30 different sounds, then it becomes an alphabet. Surely pre-christianity Germans and pre-islam Turkic people had their own alphabets.

Do not play with the words, you know what i mean when i say "German runic", i mean "futhark" of Goths, Nordics etc.

[Delodephius]

Etruscan, Latin and other Old Italic alphabets evolved from a variant of the Western Greek alphabet (modern Greek alphabet is based on an Eastern Greek variant) and Greek evolved from Phoenician (if you want I can make you a table of that as well). Now, Futhark evolved from a northern variant of the Old Italic script, but also a bit from Greek. Here is a table of comparison. Note, the Runic letters in blue have a slightly different pronunciation than the pronunciation of the Old Italic and Greek letters, the origin of the letters in red is uncertain but quite possible, while the origin of the letters in green is unknown. One rule of the runic alphabets is that there are no round strokes or horizontal ones since they were written on wood so as to prevent splinting, though they were written on metal and stone this rule was still followed. Later on this changed once they were written on other materials like paper.



Now, you dare again question my knowledge of scripts and their origin and I'll smack you on the mouth through cyberspace, 懂吗？

[Delodephius]

Furthermore, I'll soon be posting those comparison tables of different Indo-European declensions and conjugations, as I promised SoM. The tables are only limited to those that include Slavic, since there are conjugations that were lost in Proto-Slavic times. I won't make those as there is nothing to compare there, however if one sees that there was a great deal of similarity between Latin, Greek and Sanskrit conjugations it kinda gives an adequate picture of which Indo-European languages are and which are not. I believe it was Onur who asked the stupid question "how could it be that Slavic languages are Indo-European" relating it to the fact that Slavic languages have case and verb endings like Turkic languages, while ignoring that so do or did all the other Indo-European languages since the very beginning. Only Slavic, Baltic, Icelandic, Greek, Romani (Gypsy) and I think Armenian languages preserved the noun and verb inflections today (last 500 years), so if you know only Germanic, Romance, Iranian and Indic languages you won't get much taste of the older Indo-European grammar, however (1000+ years) older forms of these languages (Old English, Latin, Gothic, Old Norse, Sanskrit, Avestan) had pretty much the same grammar as do the former and there is a clear documentation of how their grammar changed over time.

[George S.]

I'm not doubting you slovak just that i find it hard to accept that we were slavs when we belewive we are just macedonian.If you can come up with the evidence for that other language then perhaps i could accept it at the moment i'm confused.
quote//""Now, you dare again question my knowledge of scripts and their origin and I'll smack you on the mouth through cyberspace, 懂吗？"Also i'm not doubting for one minute yor credentials as you graph clearly attests.
Just if you find out the other language & with some support how we are just slavs & not macedonian i would gladly accept.You got to admit i't's not easy to accept that we are just slavs.

[Delodephius]

I didn't say you were just Slavs. The word Slavs means Slavic speakers, i.e. people who speak one or another Slavic language. If you want an example of a Slavic language that never had any contact with Old Church Slavonic/Old Macedonian then look at Old Novgorodian, Slovenian, Lusatian, Polish or Czech. Even when Old Macedonian was brought to Russia there are books from that time written in Old Russian, like the famous Tale of Igor's Campaign, a Pagan book at that, from pre-Christian times, and modern Russian evolved from Old Russian, not Old Macedonian, because there were Slavic speakers all over Europe way before OCS/Old Macedonian became a liturgical language, and only for some of them. The Common Slavic language originated in Central Europe, not Macedonia, nor Asia with the Indo-Iranian speaking Serbs and Croats. That is a fact and we are trying to uncover how it spread to other parts of Europe including Macedonia.

[Delodephius]

SoM, I made this map to help a bit with the mental picture. It is not 100% accurate, but it gives a rough idea of the location of Indo-European language groups around 1000 BC I'd say, or maybe it is a bit diachronical. Anyway:

1. the green colour is the location of Proto-Balto-Slavic-Palaeo-Balkan languages. The dark green is the location of Proto-Baltic, while the slightly brighter green in the east is the where hypothetically the Common Slavic dialect began to emerge. The lightest green is the location of other PBSPB dialects into which area Common Slavic later spread;
2. the brown are the Germanic languages (I hold on to the theory that a Germanic language was spoken in Britain way before the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons). Germanic languages emerged from a Lingua Franca that was spoken on the shores of the North Sea. The appearance of Gothic in Eastern Europe was not due to migration west but due to conquest;
3. light blue are Celtic languages;
4. dark blue are Italo-Celtic languages;
5. orange is Greek;
6. gold are the Anatolian languages which went extinct and were replaced by Greek and Armenian;
7. dark grey is Armenian, though I do not know where the exact border between it and the Anatolian languages was located.
8. yellow are the Iranian and possibly Indo-Aryan languages, so Indo-Iranian basically, which means Scythian, Sarmatian, Cimmerian, Alanian, Roxalanian, Ossetian, in the south Persian and Kurdish.

[Soldier of Macedon]

Originally Posted by Delodephius

So in my opinion both galva and golva could have been used in Common Slavic, keeping in mind that such language was never recorded and is only reconstructed and thus only hypothetical.

Is it possible that some dialects retained this Proto Slavic feature as Common Slavic began to spread out, hence the reason why they retained the "a" instead of adopting the "o"?

The entire area from both sides of the Carpathian mountains is a possible homeland of that particular dialect, although I think that Common Slavic evolved as a mixture of dialects from the entire area that was under Gothic, Hunnic and Avar rule where it served as a Lingua Franca.

I agree, and this is why I would suggest that Common Slavic may have been more close to West Slavic languages than any others - hence the reason why I also referred to the similarity between Common Slavic and Polish "o" for golva/glova.

There are many linguistic and customary similarities between Swedes and Slavs that no one can explain, for example.

Interesting that you say this, because I was recently talking a Dutch fellow about how similar his language is to other Germanic languages, and he indicated that (to him at least) the Scandinavian languages appeared to have some 'Russian' sounds and features which made it most difficult for him to understand when comparing to other Germanic languages.

Only afterwards was Christianity spread to Bulgaria and Russia, not to the Western Slavs nor the Croats or Slovenians who adopted Catholicism and never used Old Church Slavonic i.e. Old Macedonian.

Wouldn't there have been at least some Old Macedonian influence in Croatia given their use of the Glagolitic script? Or did they receive it through another means?

Furthermore, I'll soon be posting those comparison tables of different Indo-European declensions and conjugations, as I promised SoM.

No problem mate, when you're ready. By the way, I like the map, very much in line with my views, this will no doubt assist in further discussions. Will respond in more detail later this afternoon.