Slavs are indigenous in the Balkans
Author: Mario Alinei
Filed: 03/10/2003, 14:15:52
Source: Origini delle lingue d�Europa, Vol. I: La teoria d
Here are some excerpts of Dr. Mario Alinei’s study concerning the Slavic populations in the Balkans. It is congruent with Dr.Florin Curta’s conclusions about the invention of the “arrival of the Slavs in the Balkans”.
“I have to commence by clearing away one of the most absurd consequences of the traditional chronology, namely, that of the ‘arrival’ of the Slavs into the immense area in which they now live. The only logical conclusion can be that the southern branch of the Slavs is the oldest and that from it developed the Slavic western and eastern branches in a differing manner and perhaps at different times.”
“Today only a minority of experts support the theory of a late migration for the Slavs… because none of the variant versions of such late settlement answers the question of what crucial factor could possibly have enabled the Slavs to have left their Bronze-Age firesides to become the dominant peoples of Europe. The southwestern portion of the Slavs had always bordered on the Italic people in Dalmatia, as well as in the areas of the eastern Alps and in the Po lowlands.”
“The surmised ‘Slavic migration’ is full of inconsistencies. There is no ‘northern Slavic language’, it is rather only a variant of the southern Slavic… The first metallurgic cultures in the Balkans are Slavic… and connected with Anatolia… Slavic presence in the territory, nearly identical to the one occupied by them today, exists ever since the Stone Age… The Slavs have (together with the Greeks and other Balkan peoples developed agriculture… agriculturally mixed economy, typically European, which later enabled the birth of the Greek, Etruscan, and Latin urbanism. Germanic peoples adopted agriculture from the Slavs… The Balkans is one of the rare regions in which a real and true settlement of human groups coming from Anatolia is proven…].
REFERENCES
Mario Alinei, Origini delle lingue d�Europa, Vol. I: La teoria della continuit�, Il Mulino, Bologna, 1996;
Vol. II: La continuit� delle principali aree etnolinguistiche dal Mesolitico all�et� del Ferro, Il Mulino, Bologna, 2000.
BIOGRAPHY
Mario Alinei is Professor Emeritus at the University of Utrecht, where he taught from 1959 to 1987.
Founder and editor of “Quaderni di semantica” review.
He is president of “Atlas Linguarum Europae”.
Illyrer, Thraker, alles Slawen nur andere Bezeichnungen.