Were the Croatians originally Slavic?

[Piro Ilir]

Great points. The history of the world shows very large amounts of admixture, settlement, and plain land-grabbing. Even so-called "native" groups are not always the "true" natives, but are the people who were living there just before the most recent invasion. For example, Celts are frequently seen as the "natives" of the British Isles who were displaced by Anglo-Saxons and Vikings, but there are clear indications of pre-Celtic settlement.

If I accuse someone of taking my ancestors' land, they can point right back and say that my ancestors took that land from someone else. We can go around and around and play the accuse everyone else game, or we can find a way to move ahead and get along.

What about the mysterious Picts people. They disappear around the year 1000 . What were them ? I like the Celtics, and their history.

Modern south Slavs have the same rights over the Balkans as the Albanians and the Greeks. History is just history. They belong to the Balkans

 

[Piro Ilir]

Since we know that Illyrians came from north and that Albanian language has strange correlation with Lithuanian, you probably think there is a chance that Illyrians and Albanians occupied some North-Eastern European area, before they both came down to Balkan. There is a reasonable doubt, but no evidence so far.

So, Albanians were conquered on Baltic sea by the Romans and their shores were colonized by the hellenes.!!![emoji23] . Come on. You are pulling down the conversation.

 

[Piro Ilir]

Romanians are heavily with Slav genes, but speak more ancient Latin,
Bulgarian language although Slavic has enough Latin also,

ok mr PHD?

You know that your assertion is partly false. Is coming to be an attitude for you. Albanian language has words with origin by archaic Latin and archaic north West Greek dialect. Romanian has not. Which means the Romanian language was formed later. It was formed by latinized tracians and yllirians. Probably Greeks either. The church Albanian vocabulary also shows a very earlier Christian adherence, prior Byzantine empire.

 

[Ike]

So, Albanians were conquered on Baltic sea by the Romans and their shores were colonized by the hellenes.!!![emoji23] . Come on. You are pulling down the conversation.

You find it more plausible that Lithuanians conquered Mediterranean?

 

[Милан М.]

You know that your assertion is partly false. Is coming to be an attitude for you. Albanian language has words with origin by archaic Latin and archaic north West Greek dialect. Romanian has not. Which means the Romanian language was formed later. It was formed by latinized tracians and yllirians. Probably Greeks either. The church Albanian vocabulary also shows a very earlier Christian adherence, prior Byzantine empire.

Maybe i post to you this prior,will post it again and after you tell me what is your prove to support your "Illyrian" heritage.

Austrian Scholars Leave Albania Lost for Words

Viennese researchers upset traditionally minded Albanians by pouring cold water on the theory that the Albanian language has its roots in Ancient Illyria.

Besar Likmeta
[COLOR=#666666 !important]Tirana and Vienna[/COLOR]

Joachim Matzinger and Stefan Schumacher | Photo by : Besar Likmeta

Deep in the bowels of Vienna University, two Austrian academics are poring over the ancient texts of a far-away people in the Balkans.

Like a couple of detectives searching for clues, Stefan Schumacher and Joachim Matzinger are out to reconstruct the origins of Albanian - a language whose history and development has received remarkably little attention outside the world of Albanian scholars.

“The way that languages change can be traced,” Schumacher declares, with certainty.

Although the two men are simply studying 17th and 18th-century Albanian texts in order to compile a lexicon of verbs, their innocent-sounding work has stirred hot debate among Albanian linguists.

The root of the controversy is their hypothesis that Albanian does not originate from the language of the Ancient Illyrians, the people or peoples who inhabited the Balkans in the Greek and Roman era.

According to Classical writers, the Illyrians were a collection of tribes who lived in much of today’s Western Balkans, roughly corresponding to part of former Yugoslavia and modern Albania.

Although Albanian and Illyrian have little or nothing in common, judging from the handful of Illyrian words that archeologists have retrieved, the Albanian link has long been cherished by Albanian nationalists.

The theory is still taught to all Albanians, from primary school through to university.

It is popular because it suggests that Albanians descend from an ancient people who populated the Balkans long before the Slavs and whose territory was unfairly stolen by these later incomers.

“You’ll find the doctrine about the Illyrian origin of Albanians everywhere,” Matzinger muses, “from popular to scientific literature and schoolbooks. “There is no discussion about this, it’s a fact. They say, ‘We are Illyrians’ and that’s that,” he adds.

What’s in a name?

The names of many Albanians bear witness to the historic drive to prove the Illyrian link.

Pandeli Pani | Photo by : Idem Institute

Not Pandeli Pani. When he was born in Tirana in 1966, midway through the long dictatorship of Enver Hoxha, his father told the local registry office that he wished to name him after his grandfather.

Pani recalls his father’s hard-fought battle not to have to give his son an Illyrian name.

Staff at the civil registry office apparently said that naming the future linguistics professor after his grandfather was not a good idea, as he was dead. They suggested an approved Illyrian name instead.

“But the Illyrians aren’t alive either,” Pani recalls his father as quipping.

Many members of Pani’s generation born in the Sixties did not have such stubborn fathers. Their parents subscribed to the government policy of naming children after names drawn from ancient tombs.

In the eyes of the world, they aimed to cement the linkage between modern Albania and its supposedly ancient past.

“While I was named after my grandfather, keeping up a family tradition, other parents gave their children Illyrian names that I doubt they knew the meaning of,” says Pani, who today teaches at Jena university in Germany.

“But I doubt many parents today would want to name their children ‘Bledar’ or ‘Agron,’ when the first means ‘dead’ and the second ‘arcadian,” he adds.

Pani says that despite the Hoxha regime’s efforts to burn the doctrine of the Albanians’ Illyrian origins into the nation’s consciousness, the theory has become increasingly anachronistic.

“The political pressure in which Albania’s scientific community worked after the communist took over, made it difficult to deal with flaws with the doctrine of the Illyrian origin,” he said.

But while the Illyrian theory no longer commands universal support, it hasn’t lost all its supporters in Albanian academia.

Take Mimoza Kore, linguistics professor at the University of Tirana.

Mimoza Kore | Photo by : Photo by : Albaneological Institute

Speaking during a conference in November organised by the Hanns Seidel Foundation, where Pani presented Schumacher’s and Matzinger’s findings, she defended the linkage of Albanian and Illyrian, saying it was not based only on linguistic theory.

“Scholars base this hypothesis also on archeology,” Kore said. Renowned scholars who did not “subscribe blindly to the ideology of the [Hoxha] regime” still supported the idea, she insisted.

One of the key problems in working out the linguistic descendants of the Illyrians is a chronic shortage of sources.

The Illyrians appears to have been unlettered, so information on their language and culture is highly fragmentary and mostly derived from external sources, Greek or Roman.

Matzinger points put that when the few surviving fragments of Illyrian and Albanian are compared, they have almost nothing in common.

“The two are opposites and cannot fit together,” he says. “Albanian is not as the same as Illyrian from a linguistic point of view.”

Schumacher and Matzinger believe Albanian came into existence separately from Illyrian, orginating from the Indo-European family tree during the second millennium BC, somewhere in the northern Balkans.

The language’s broad shape resembles Greek. It appears to have developed lineally until the 15th century, when the first extant text comes to light.

“One thing we know for sure is that a language which, with some justification, we can call Albanian has been around for at least 3,000 years,” Schumacher says. “Even though it was not written down for millennia, Albanian existed as a separate entity,” he added.

Bastard tongues:

Linguists say different languages spoken in the same geographical area often reveal similarities, despite a lack of evidence of a common origin.

This phenomenon of linguistic “areas” is also evident in the Balkans, where such different languages as Albanian, Greek, Bulgarian and Romanian all share words and structures.

First written words in Albanian The first written record of Albanian is a baptismal formula written in 1462 by the Archbishop of Durres, Pal Engjelli. The first book in Albanian, a missal, was written in 1554 by Gjon Buzuku, a Catholic priest from the Shkodra region. Pjeter Budi, Archbishop of Sape, also translated and adapted several Italian texts to Albanian in the same period. Schumacher and Matzinger are concentrating their scholarship mostly on the work of Pjeter Bogdani, Archbishop of Prizren, who wrote half-a-century later. He is considered the most interesting Albanian early writer and the “father” of Albanian prose. Bogdani’s most famous work, The Story of Adam and Eve, his account of the first part of the Bible, is written in both Albanian and Italian. Matzinger says that when Bogdani published the book he was under some pressure from the Inquisition. As the Inquisition did not know Albanian, and were not sure what he wrote, they forced him to make an Italian translation, which is published in the left column of the book. “That is most useful because it means that no sentence in the book [in Albanian] is incomprehensible,” Matzinger says. Although numerous texts by Bogdani, Budi and some others survive, the variety of authors, mainly Catholic clerics, is small. “It would be interesting if we had a bigger variety of authors, though we’re grateful enough for what we do have,” Schumacher says.

According to Schumacher, from the Middle Ages onwards, languages throughout the Balkans tended to become more similar to one another, suggesting a high level of linguistic “exchange” between populations in the region.

“A lot of people used a number of languages every day, and this is one way in which languages influence each other,” Schumacher says. “The difficult thing is that this runs counter to nationalist theories,” he adds.

Drawing on genetic terminology, linguists term this process of language exchange language “bastardization”.

Following the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, the phenomenon of language bastardization has taken a new twist, moving in the opposite direction, as each newly formed state acts to shore up its own unique linguistic identity.

Before the common state collapsed, four of the six constituent republics, Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Montenegro, shared a common language known as Serbo-Croat.

But since declaring independence in 1991, Croatia has consciously highlighted the distinct character of its language, now called “Croatian”.

Bosnian Muslims have made similar efforts in Bosnia and Herzegovina, promoting official use of a codified “Bosniak” language.

Montenegro, which remained in a loose state union with Serbia until 2006, then appeared content not to have its own separate language. But after independence, a new constitution adopted on October 2007 named the official language as Montenegrin.

Similar calls to foster a separate national language have been heard in Kosovo, drawing on the northern Albanian “Gegh” dialect, though none of these initiatives has received official encouragement.

Out of language, an identity:

The study of Balkan languages came of age in the later 19th century as the Ottoman Empire began disintegrating and as intellectuals tasked with creating new nations out of its rubble turned to language to help forge national identities.

Cover of Adam and Eve, from Pjeter Bogdani | Photo by : Stefan Schumacher

According Schumacher, each country in the Balkans forged its own national myth, just as Germany or the US had done earlier, with a view to creating foundations for a shared identity.

“In the late 19th century, language was the only element that everyone could identify with,” says Schumacher.

He described the use of linguistics in national mythology as understandable, considering the context and the time when these countries gained independence.

“It’s not easy to create an identity for Albanians if you just say that they descend from mountains tribes about whom the historians of antiquity wrote nothing,” he notes.

The friction between ideological myth and reality, when it comes to forging national identity, and laying claim to territory, is not unique to Albania.

Schumacher points out that Romanian history books teach that Romanians descend from the Roman legionnaires who guarded the Roman province of Dacia – a questionable theory to which few non-Romanians lend much credence, but which shores up Romania’s claim to Transylvania, a land to which Hungarians historically also lay claim.

“The Romanian language developed somewhere south of the Danube, but Romanians don’t want to admit that because the Hungarians can claim that they have been there before,” notes Schumacher.

“None of them is older or younger,” says Schumacher. “Languages are like a bacterium that splits up in two and than splits up in two again and when you have 32 bacteria in the end, they are all the same,” he added.

The two Austrian linguists say that within European academia, Albanian is one of the most neglected languages, which provides an opportunity to conduct pioneering work.

Although the extant texts have been known for a long time, “they hardly ever been looked at properly”, Schumacher says. “They were mostly read by scholars of Albanian in order to find, whatever they wanted to find,” he adds.

 

[Милан М.]

You find it more plausible that Lithuanians conquered Mediterranean?

I think that contrary to all they hailed from South Italy and or Sicily,this can explain their "ancient" Latin loanwords us they say and the old Greek,since Greeks had colonies there,plus Albanian has matching with Messapian which was exactly from there,they match in genetics more there,then with the Balkan people.

Italian theory
Laonikos Chalkokondyles (c. 1423–1490), the Byzantine historian, thought that the Albanians hailed from Italy. The theory has its origin in the first mention of the Albanians, disputed whether it refers to Albanians in an ethnic sense,made by Attaliates (11th century): "... For when subsequent commanders made base and shameful plans and decisions, not only was the island lost to Byzantium, but also the greater part of the army. Unfortunately, the people who had once been our allies and who possessed the same rights as citizens and the same religion, i.e. the Albanians and the Latins, who live in the Italian regions of our Empire beyond Western Rome, quite suddenly became enemies when Michael Dokenianos insanely directed his command against their leaders..

The time they are mentioned first there was very much religious wars troughout the Balkans and competition among Byzantines,Latins and various other Slavic polities,how they ended i don't know.

 

[DuPidh]

Romanians are heavily with Slav genes, but speak more ancient Latin,
Bulgarian language although Slavic has enough Latin also,

ok mr PHD?

Romanians speak a latin language with a post Christ origin. Pre Christ origin of Latin words in Albanian are older than post Christ Romanians. Yes Romanians are heavy Slavic in their genes, but so are the Greeks of Thesalia and Southern Albanians. Northern Greeks are real slavs which were attached to Greek state with the help of European powers at the beginning of this century. The only original population of the region are Geg Albanians.
But the discussion was that Slavs in the Ballkans are original inhabitants of the area. And that is stupid. We know that there are to many ****** in this forums, but just because they are ****** it doesn't mean their stupidities should go unanswered.
When one says a stupid thing of course will get a stupid rebuttal.

 

[Ike]

I think that contrary to all they hailed from South Italy and or Sicily,this can explain their "ancient" Latin loanwords us they say and the old Greek,since Greeks had colonies there,plus Albanian has matching with Messapian which was exactly from there,they match in genetics more there,then with the Balkan people.

There is also a possibility that Albanian is a Hybrid language formed when two groups - one from Sicily and another from Carpates merged together with Dorian leftovers in the Epirus.

The only original population of the region are Geg Albanians.

Really? How did you get to this conclusion?

 

[DuPidh]

There is also a possibility that Albanian is a Hybrid language formed when two groups - one from Sicily and another from Carpates merged together with Dorian leftovers in the Epirus.





Really? How did you get to this conclusion?

Geg Albanians lack the slavic R1a and I2a haplogroups which are south Poland originated. Ev13+j2b are the early farmers. What else you want? A picture of Albanians of antiquity?

 

[Ike]

Geg Albanians lack the slavic R1a and I2a haplogroups which are south Poland originated. Ev13+j2b are the early farmers. What else you want? A picture of Albanians of antiquity?

That means everyone who have E-V13 and J2b are the original population of Balkan? Including tens of millions of Russians, Bulgarians, Europeans, Greeks and a small number of Ghegs in the end?

 

[Trojet]

Geg Albanians lack the slavic R1a and I2a haplogroups which are south Poland originated. Ev13+j2b are the early farmers. What else you want? A picture of Albanians of antiquity?

Don't bother with this guy IKE. He is a joke just like his avatar.

 

[Angela]

That means everyone who have E-V13 and J2b are the original population of Balkan? Including tens of millions of Russians, Bulgarians, Europeans, Greeks and a small number of Ghegs in the end?

What it means is that Europeans who carry those lineages, no matter where they might now be living, or what their autosomal signature, ultimately descend in the direct paternal line from farmers who arrived in Europe, probably south east Europe, thousands of years ago from the Near East via Anatolia. (That's if we don't find out that E-V13 or perhaps the precursor of E-V13 already existed in Greece or the Greek islands in the Mesolithic.) That doesn't change the fact, of course, that it seems that E-V13 probably got lucky and experienced its expansion in the Bronze Age.

What it also means is that given that we have E-V13 related lineages in the Balkans in the mid-late Neolithic very near where we now find the epicenter of E-V13 in Europe, any proposal that somehow the current bearers of it in the Balkans are not descended from these Neolithic people but were instead somehow transported or moved there in more recent times is the opposite of Occam's Razor, and is, in fact, illogical, most particularly when we have no attested movement (as shown in archaeology)into the Balkans within the last 1500 years except for the Slavs. That doesn't necessarily mean, of course, that the ancestors of the people in that epicenter region always sat on those specific square miles of territory.They might have moved from further east. However, I think a case could be made that the Slavs moved south primarily, although not totally, through the center of the Balkans.

Many groups of people in Europe have been fed an awful lot of "tripe" about their own "ethnic" origins and those of their neighbors. Modern genetics research is putting the lie to many of these ideas. I don't see the point in continuing to argue theories which have been disproved by the evidence. It's not persuading anyone; it's just an exercise in futility.

 

[Ike]

@Angela

You're going too broad on this one.

The guy clearly stated that The only original population of the region are Geg Albanians. and that it is because Geg Albanians lack the slavic R1a and I2a haplogroups which are south Poland originated.


I was wondering why doesn't then all the people of Balkan, who don't have Slavic R1a and I2a, count in as the original population of Balkan?

 

[Angela]

@Angela

You're going too broad on this one.

The guy clearly stated that The only original population of the region are Geg Albanians. and that it is because Geg Albanians lack the slavic R1a and I2a haplogroups which are south Poland originated.


I was wondering why doesn't then all the people of Balkan, who don't have Slavic R1a and I2a, count in as the original population of Balkan?

I responded only to your comment. I never said that the Gheg Albanians are the only representatives of the "original" inhabitants of the Balkans.

I think it's clear that men who carry Slavic R1a and I2a are also descended from "original" inhabitants of the Balkans. For one thing, those men may have and probably do have some male ancestors who carried E-V13 and J2b and G2a etc. (and whatever I2a lines were absorbed into Neolithic communities, lines which might have been from a different I2a branch than the ones from further north and east that moved south as Slavs). The y line a man carries represents only one of his many male ancestors.

Second of all, there are all the maternal ancestors, many of which seem to have arrived in the Neolithic

It is all those ancestors who make up one's autosomal signature and inheritance.

Now, some "ethnic" groups in the Balkans might have proportionally more ancestry from the Neolithic (and Mesolithic) and less from the Yamnaya period or the "Slavs", and the proportions might be reversed in other groups. That's another issue. However, we're talking about migrations that are all in the distant past. Yamnaya incursions date to at least 5,000 years ago. Even the Slavs date to about 1200 years ago. Everybody is now mixed to one degree or another.

Frankly, it's my opinion that on top of the barbarism that they encourage, these bitter "tribal" disputes are totally counter-productive and that you'd all be much better off if you spent your time thinking about developing your countries economically and educationally and socially rather than in some ****ing contest about which group of your ancestors arrived when...

That's about all I have to say on this particular topic.

 

[Милан М.]

I responded only to your comment. I never said that the Gheg Albanians are the only representatives of the "original" inhabitants of the Balkans.

I think it's clear that men who carry Slavic R1a and I2a are also descended from "original" inhabitants of the Balkans. For one thing, those men may have and probably do have some male ancestors who carried E-V13 and J2b and G2a etc. (and whatever I2a lines were absorbed into Neolithic communities, lines which might have been from a different I2a branch than the ones from further north and east that moved south as Slavs). The y line a man carries represents only one of his many male ancestors.

Second of all, there are all the maternal ancestors, many of which seem to have arrived in the Neolithic

It is all those ancestors who make up one's autosomal signature and inheritance.

Now, some "ethnic" groups in the Balkans might have proportionally more ancestry from the Neolithic (and Mesolithic) and less from the Yamnaya period or the "Slavs", and the proportions might be reversed in other groups. That's another issue. However, we're talking about migrations that are all in the distant past. Yamnaya incursions date to at least 5,000 years ago. Even the Slavs date to about 1200 years ago. Everybody is now mixed to one degree or another.

Frankly, it's my opinion that on top of the barbarism that they encourage, these bitter "tribal" disputes are totally counter-productive and that you'd all be much better off if you spent your time thinking about developing your countries economically and educationally and socially rather than in some ****ing contest about which group of your ancestors arrived when...

That's about all I have to say on this particular topic.

I agree with you with most of your comment,only regarding ethnogenesis of the Slavs their supposed migration was never proven archeologicaly as you point out in your comment prior,good to notice there is yet researches on Slavic ethnogenesis,Slavic language and entire IE language family,so it will be good from your side not to take theories or inceptions from 19th century as axioms,otherwise i think that as always particularly toward Balkan Slavs to labeled no connection to that land or the "autochotonous" population or underlying their role in the same ethnogenesis,regardless peoples memories their oral and written sources wrote very much different history,not to mention entire Balkan peninsula is pretty much similar in genetics.

 

[gyms]

Geg Albanians lack the slavic R1a and I2a haplogroups which are south Poland originated. Ev13+j2b are the early farmers. What else you want? A picture of Albanians of antiquity?

DearSDuPidh,two questions:can you prove,that I2a is slavic?Can you prov that R1a and I2a "are South Poland originated"?Thanks!

 

[gyms]

The larger part of I2,which is on Slavic population came in Balkans during the big Slavic migration.

There's really not enough evidence for that assumption.It's pure speculation.

 

[Ike]

DearSDuPidh,two questions:can you prove,that I2a is slavic?Can you prov that R1a and I2a "are South Poland originated"?Thanks!

We could prove by testing some old skeletons. If they don't find any I2a-Din in ~Christ-time corpses it would then be safe to assume that it got there with Slavs. Still not an evidence, but much more plausible.

 

[gyms]

We could prove by testing some old skeletons. If they don't find any I2a-Din in ~Christ-time corpses it would then be safe to assume that it got there with Slavs. Still not an evidence, but much more plausible.

It's exactly what I meant.There are no tested skeletons just speculations.

 

[Angela]

I agree with you with most of your comment,only regarding ethnogenesis of the Slavs their supposed migration was never proven archeologicaly as you point out in your comment prior,good to notice there is yet researches on Slavic ethnogenesis,Slavic language and entire IE language family,so it will be good from your side not to take theories or inceptions from 19th century as axioms,otherwise i think that as always particularly toward Balkan Slavs to labeled no connection to that land or the "autochotonous" population or underlying their role in the same ethnogenesis,regardless peoples memories their oral and written sources wrote very much different history,not to mention entire Balkan peninsula is pretty much similar in genetics.

I neither said nor implied that there was any lack of proof for a migration of Slavic speaking peoples into the Balkans in the early Middle Ages. I would never do such a thing because it would be contrary to all archaeological, linguistic, historical, and now genetic evidence. To argue that it never happened is another exercise in futility. (Of course, these migrating Slavic speakers were not the same genetically as the modern people who identify as Balkan Slavs.)

Specifically how much of a genetic change this caused autosomally is another issue. There are also some differences by group, although most Balkanites are pretty darn similar genetically.

As to I2a Din, other than lots of ancient dna showing it didn't exist in the Balkans before the Roman era, another clue would lie in improved resolution of the phylogeny for I2a. Does I2a Din derive from the I2a branches that were present in the Balkans in the Neolithic, or does it derive from branches from far northern areas or from the steppe lands? As to R1a, the current evidence does seem to indicate that most of the R1a in the Balkans dates to the period of the Slavic migrations, although if some of it is from older, more ancestral clades, those could have come with the steppe related migrations. Absolute precision may be impossible in this specific instance, because older clades may have survived in the Slavic speakers and been swept along during the migrations.