Eh... So what did the Gauls and the Iberians do in Roman times? Or many of the Native Americans?
That's called displacement. In both cases these groups were conquered by outsiders who formed an administrative elite and as well colonized. In the case of the Gauls, some recent scholars have argued that they were rarely more than a loose collection of semi-related tribes whose Celto-Gaullic identity was solidified
after the Roman and later Germanic onslaughts, as a reaction against outside invasion. The American (Plains) indians were forcibly Americanized and had their children taken from them and raised in American-style schools. Ancient peoples, who did not have the notions of ethno-nationalism that we have, did not do things like this.
But in both cases, the various Indian tribes and the various Gaullic tribes, they still managed to retain some aspects of their former cultures to our own day. I lived in New York state for some years and experienced first-hand local Seneca and Tuscarora (Iroquois) Indians still speaking their native language - though they also knew English. The Uighurs show no traits of a Ugric/Uralic -speaking people.
Your comment on the Bulgars was very informative and interesting, the Roberts book was, I must admit, very short (aprox 700 pages) so it did not contain specific enough info. Its main downside was its unilaterally western approach where eastern history (perhaps with the exception of Russia) was largely inadequate.
It has been my long experience that Western histories are far too often short on Eastern European history.
About Prussia, the “Prussians” where conquered by the Teutonic knights during the thirteenth century, later to become a Polish fiefdom. The source of Prussian power came from Brandenburg which later came to incorporate German Prussia into itself in 1701. The centre of Prussia did however continue to be Brandenburg with Berlin as its capital.
Nothing new for me here. My wife is from Torun/Thorn of old Prussia, so I've spent a lot of time in the north (though my family is from points east in the old
Kresy). An important point to note however is that the Teutonic Knights, recently having been booted out of Jerusalem and the Crusades (and Hungary), were merely acting in conjunction with their initial sponsor - Konrad Mazowiecki (of Mazovia). Poland's central "government" (if you can call a medieval administration a government) had imploded in 1138 with the death of the last of the powerful Piasts, Boleslaw III ("Krzywousty") and would not revive until the early 14th century. Konrad, duke of Mazovia, was trying to seize real estate from the Baltic Prussians on his own initiative and equally on his own initiative had invited the
Deutsches Ritteren in 1225 when the Prussians began launching devastating retaliatory raids into Chelmno and Mazovia. The convenient fact that they were non-Christians sealed the Mazovian-Teutonic Knights deal, and it was called a crusade by both sides. In the 1950s Hermann Schreiber wrote an excellent book called, when translated into English,
Teuton and Slav, the Struggle for Central Europe. It is a fairly balanced book that goes into excellent detail on, among other issues, the destruction of the Baltic Prussians. It is in some regards gruesome reading but by no account unusual for its age. A good recommendation. Schreiber mentions for instance that there were reports of isolated villages still speaking the old Baltic Prussian as late as the early 18th century.
So it was the lands of the Teutonic knights that where known as Prussia which later came to be called merely “East Prussia” as a part of the greater Prussia of the seventeenth century.
Not really true; the Prussian state came to control many more lands far beyond its original medieval mandate, even before the Brandenburg unification. The Teutonic Knights came into frequent conflict for instance with two other German knightly organizations independently formed in the northern Baltic lands (modern Estonia and Latvia) as a result of earlier German migrations, and as well the Hansa city League resisted the Teutonic Knights. The eventual Prussian capital, Königsberg, was hated by those connected to the old Order as it represented the land-owning junker and middle classes who had derived from waves of German migrations and not from the ranks of the Teutonic Order. It was these two groups in fact who rioted in 1793 when Danzig/Gdansk was formally incorporated into the Prussian state; they preferred the autonomy of old Polish rule and distrusted the Hohenzollerns who romanticized the old Teutonic Order.
The name "Prussia" is simply older Slavic for "Po-rusy", the lands by/near the Rus. ("Rus" here may mean the Eastern Slavic civilization or the 10th-13th centuries, or either the Vikings of Scandinavia or possibly one of many early proto-Finnic tribes who wandered much of the modern Russian northwest, all of whom used the expression 'Rus' or 'Ruotsi' in some context.) In fact, modern Hungarian has preserved a remarkable amount of early Slavic place and people names inherited from the Moravian Slavs inhabiting the Carpathian Basin when the Magyars stormed it in the late 9th century) - for instance, Hungarians refer to Italians as "Olasz", derived from the old Slavic "ulah" or "vlah" for the Latin peoples - and the modern Hungarian term for Prussia is again the old Slavic version: "Poroszorgszág". (The "-ország" simply means "land" or "country". "Porosz" is derived from the Slavic "po-rusy", slurred even in modern Polish as "Prusy". The gist here is that you really can't take much from the Prussians' name as applying to a Baltic people who may not have even used it themselves and a later German people who picked up the name as a geographic moniker, rather like how von Bismark once remarked that for him, "Italy" would always be nothing more than a regional term.
Interestingly where Brandenburg now lays was once the lands of a Slavic people (the “Wieleci”
that the germans incorporated into themselves as an effect of their migration eastwards not hindered until 1410 at Grunwald/Tannenberg. There was always someone there first. Weren’t the Saxons there before that?
Europe is a peninsula, at the western-most end of a big landmass. There've been lots of peoples who have wandered the northern plains that stretch from the Urals to the Bay of Biscay. We only know the names of a few of the more (relatively) recent peoples.
In English these Slavs are referred to either as "Sorbs" or the German "Wends". In Polish we call the Slavs living below Potsdam in modern Germany the Luzycy (or sometimes "Serboluzycy"), meaning respectively the Lausatians and Serbo-Lusatians. They're what's left over after Charlesmagne's efforts in the late 8th century to push the Slavs back across the Elbe. The Lausatians' languagem considered today a Western Slavic language, is surprisingly close to Polish.
Where the Avars the same people as the Magyar, I know they where some sort of Turkic tribe situated in the area of western Romania of today since 567 ad and later those lands where Magyar by ca 1000 ad. When did the Hungarians get there?
No, the Avars were a largely Turkic tribal confederation while Hungarians are/were a Finno-Ugric people. The Avars entered Europe in the 6th century, destroying the Gepidic empire and taking up residence in the Carpathian Basin (i.e., modern Hungary and northwestern Romania). They were a Steppe culture and played an important role in European history for the next two and a half centuries until the Franks took advantage of an Avar civil war and trashed them in the early 9th century. When the Magyars (early Hungarians) moved into this same region decades later, they found the shards and remnants of Avar culture, mostly through several tribal groups who had piggy-backed with the Avars and followed them into Europe - among them, the Slavs.
If you're interested in some rough aspects of Hungarian and late Steppe culture, I once got into a ridiculous debate over Hungarian origins but which churned up a lot of source info in this thread here:
http://forums.civfanatics.com/archive/index.php/t-65862.html
Unfortunately it has only been preserved in archive form so it's a bit difficult to follow, but you'll get the idea.
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NOW, on to the main point of this discussion: Whether modern Uighur, a Turkic language spoken in what is today northwestern China, was ever in fact a Ugric language (and therefore related to Hungarian, as well as other similar languages in northeastern Siberia). My contention is that no, the idea is absurd that a people would ever give up their language entirely and just start speaking an entirely different language, with no trace of their earlier linguistic affiliation. I used a common website operated by professional linguists to ask whether this was indeed the case, and so far all responses agree that it is not possible. Here is a quote from the most succinct response:
Reply:
Uyghur is an Eastern Turkic language related to Uzbec, and, more distantly, to Azerbaijani and Turkish. It belongs to the Turkic branch of Altaic, a group made up of the Mongolian, Tungus, and Turkic languages. While a broader Atlaic including, perhaps, Korean and Japanese, is pretty much rejected among comparative linguists, this narrower Altaic is probably valid but still controversial. There has been a claim that Uralic and Altaic made up a Ural-Altaic family, but this claim has been almost universally rejected. Since the Turkic peoples spread into Turkey from the east, it's likely that the Turkic peoples originated in Central or East Central Asia. Uralic, which includes Finnish, Estonian, Samoyed, and other languages of NW Russia and the NE Baltic, has its homeland well to the NW of Turkic, and the likelihood of enough contact to lead to language adoption is remote. Uyghur, together with other Turkic languages, can be reconstructed back to Proto-Turkic with some clarity. Thus the possibility that the Uyghur peoples of western China were originally Uralic is truly remote.
Herb Stahlke
Ball State University
Reply From: Herbert Frederic Stahlke Date: Dec-12-2005
Available here: http://cf.linguistlist.org/cfdocs/new-website/LL-WorkingDirs/ask-ling/message-details1.cfm?asklingid=200355406
An important point about Uighur is that it is not just another Turkic language; it was the language and script adopted by Genghis Khan (and therefore used widely for centuries) for the literary needs of his empire, and therefore has a wide-spread history in written form, which demonstrates quite clearly that this is a native Turkic language and not a Ugric-Turkic hybrid.
Sorry folks, but there simply is no connection between Uighur and the Ugric languages.
