How cultures get assimilated/absorbed

[Masada]

I don't know. I think if we have enough exceptions to the general rule - Anatolia and the post-Roman world - then we either can disregard that rule to come up with a better rule or alternatively that we can come up with a complementary rule that explains the exceptions. South-east Asia is also instructive in this regard - 'Viets', 'Thai', 'Burmese' etc. are all very recent identities that have ballooned outwards to encompass areas that that they had only the most tenuous links to.

 

[Lord Baal]

Well, those are your specialties, not mine, being as I am a post-Wesphalian kinda guy. If you can come up with enough exceptions innonimatu's rule, then I'll accept that it's not a good rule, at least not on its own.

 

[Dachs]

It's interesting that innonimatu's historian attempted to test his hypothesis on the Roman Empire, where the case for assimilation beggars description unlike anything in the history of the world except possibly the United States.

Another problem is the huge volume of cases of supposed assimilation or absorption where we really don't know enough about the case to even apply or extrapolate a rule. Take, for instance, the Curious Incident of the Slovaks in the Night-Time: the Slovaks did nothing in the long millennium between the ninth and nineteenth centuries, and that was the curious incident. Or the issue of who the hell exactly the Romanians are - relevant if we accept the prevailing Romanian explanation of their language as deriving from the Latin that the Romans in Dacia spoke for less than two centuries, and who mysteriously disappear from history for another...thousand years.

 

[innonimatu]

It's interesting that innonimatu's historian attempted to test his hypothesis on the Roman Empire, where the case for assimilation beggars description unlike anything in the history of the world except possibly the United States.

You mean that assimilation was common? But the roman empire lacked a unified culture and even, in the modern sense, a unified political system! The political system was a confusion of previous institutional arrangements stitched together (city-states, leagues, monarchical rule, republics, etc). The really amazing thing is how long it lasted as a political unity.

Actually, in that book this historian mentioned quite a few other examples beyond the Roman Empire. I jut dug up the book. He addressed 14 different regions of the Roman Empire, and 14 other, more recent examples of imperial occupation which he considered somewhat similar in outcome to the occupation of each of these 14 regions.
I had forgotten the intriguing point of this book: in the end the author admits that the is one parameter entirely missing from the available data abut the Roman empire, for his formula to be applicable: the average number of "romans" or latins in each province. There are estimates for the total populations for each province, but not really for the number of "romans" in each. So he proposes to instead make a subjective judgment about the cultural influence of Rome on each province, placing each within an interval on the numeric scale of "cultural influence" given by his formula, and then turn the formula around to obtain from it a (very rough) estimate for the average number of "romans" on each province.
Obviously this is obtained after approximation upon approximation, but haven't many other demographic estimates been approximations? It may be a method worth considering. The book ("A herança de Roma", António Teixeira) is only available in portuguese, unfortunately .

Or the issue of who the hell exactly the Romanians are - relevant if we accept the prevailing Romanian explanation of their language as deriving from the Latin that the Romans in Dacia spoke for less than two centuries, and who mysteriously disappear from history for another...thousand years.

Dacia was one of the regions he considered. His thesis (which, he stressed, is speculative) was that the conquest may have taken a significant toll among the population. The partial void would then have been filled with migrants coming not just from within the empire, but also from the north and east, creating a situation where a common communication language, in the form of simplified latin, became a necessity. That romanian derives from latin is credible enough, considering the presence of other populations with similarly derived languages in the Balkans (Aromanians?). Latin did not just disappear in the Balkans following the collapse of the western empire.
He then compared the situation of Dacia with that of Haiti. Lack of social cohesion during a period of imperial occupation, during which population from several different backgrounds occupied the territory, basically caused the language of the conqueror to be used as a lingua franca which takes over a primary role in just a few generations. But language is only one aspect of a culture, and its adoption does not imply that the culture, the way of thinking, of the conqueror (Rome/Dacia, France/Haiti) prevailed in the region.