R.Rusanov wrote:
Of course westerners inherently know more shit than anyone else, including locals, on any subject and I'm remiss to think otherwise /s
Feel free to be wrong.
You say that I have some misconceptions about Eastern Europe. You, however, have some misconceptions about me. For the past fifteen or so years I worked in hotels, bars and restaurants, both front and back of house. Not in North America, but here in southern England. An interesting thing about the industry here is how dominated it is by
immigrants from former Eastern bloc countries. I have known, drunk with and worked with these people for years, some of them I count as close friends who I see on a fairly regular basis. Tedur Covaç is, essentially, a composite character based on some of the Eastern Europeans I've known. For example, his recollection of his childhood owes a lot to conversations I've had with a close friend of mine: he's about my age, a chef, and comes from Katowice in Poland. Tedur's description of Vailana is based on how my old commis chef, a Hungarian from Villány, describes his home town (for what it's worth, the current demographics of Villány show the majority of the population being in the 18-59 age bracket: it's not just the elderly there.) So yeah, while I'm hardly a local, I'm not entirely uninformed. Also, Dravia is fictional, and a touch satirical at that; I'm well aware that Central Europe produces more than gay porn and uranium, but emphasising the latter is funnier.
I think that covers the bulk of accusations leveled at me in your first two paragraphs? Salmoneus has already discussed the issue of Sojanèsc as a surname. (Also, I happen to like it, and Sojane has historically always been a small town. The etymology is of Imperial vintage, fwiw:
Sopianae.)
As for the final paragraph, there is more to address. You think that Dravian isn't very Eastern Romance, that it is mere pseudo-French. Well, that is your opinion and you are entitled to it. On the other hand, you clearly know fuck all about Eastern Romance so I find it difficult to give your opinion the time of day. I could always explain further if you'd like? Briefly, however, Vortex is quite right in remembering that Dravian's closest relative is (Vegliot) Dalmatian. It also has a lot in common with North-Eastern Italian varieties, particularly Venetian. Varieties of Romanian occur at the opposite geographical end of this dialect continuum: expecting Dravian to sound particularly like Romanian is much like expecting Andalusian Spanish to have a strong resemblence to Walloon.
Now, how did the Dravians get to "the middle of the Pannonian plain"? Well, for a start, they didn't. They aren't in the middle of the Pannonian plain, but in the hill-country of Transdanubia. The Dravians themselves claim to be autochthonous, pointing to a glorious unbroken history going all the way back to the province of Roman Pannonia and the time of the Caesars: as the Romanians claim to be the descendants of Trajan's legionaries, so the Dravians claim they have been there all the way through: an island of pure
Romanitas in a sea of Slavonic and Magyar barbarians. On the other hand, they would: since the 19th century the varying ethnicities of central and eastern Europe have been playing out the "we were here first" game with various bloody and distasteful results. Dravia hasn't escaped that particularly unpleasant aspect of post-Habsburg nationalism. Like most Eastern and Central Europeans, the truth of their origins makes them uncomfortable.
However, their claims to have been in the general area since the fall of the Empire does contain a grain of truth. Romanised populations survived the influx of the Goths, Lombards and Slavs: at one time Dravian (or rather "Proto-Dravian") was spoken in communities much further to the west of modern Dravia: remnant populations in what is now northern Slovenia attest to this. However, as a rule they retreated from the fertile lowland areas to the hills, ceding the valleys and plains to the incoming Slavic-speaking populations. That there was a great deal of admixture is clear: Slavic loan-words penetrate even the oldest strata of the Dravian lexicon (interestingly, Dravian has separate words for maternal and paternal grandparents: the latter are loans from Slavic, while the former are native Romance). In the early Middle Ages, the area was characterised by transhumant Romance-speakers in the hills and sedentary Slavic-speakers in the valleys and plains, all ruled over by a warrior elite of Avar extraction. Following the Avar defeat by Charlemagne, the area was organised as a border principality with a Slavic-speaking elite (again, this is shown in the Dravian lexicon: vocabulary relating to law, nobility and so on is often from Slavic sources). Through a few twists of fate, this Slavic-ruled principality survived the initial Magyar invasion and only became part of the Kingdom of Hungary in the 1100s somewhen, much along the same lines as Croatia-Slavonia. Magyarisation was relatively light, with little in-migration by ethnic Hungarians: mainly nobles and landowners.
Then the Ottomans invaded and conquered what is now southern Dravia. The area was part of the military frontier for several centuries and much of the native nobility and the settled population was killed, deported or fled. When the area was reconquered, the Romance-speakers simply moved down from the hills, as it were. New settlers joined them from the German-speaking areas of the empire, and a number of Serbs were resettled. Again, not many Hungarians (there weren't really enough to go round): Hungarian linguistic influence on Dravian varieties has historically been negligible in the southern heartlands: the lands to the north of lake Balaton (
Latèsca in Dravian) which remained part of Royal Hungary had far more Magyar influence.
(Also, Tedur is not impressed at being called a bydlo. He's not even Polish, for a start. He comes from a very nice respectable family: his father was a school teacher. He suspects you're Serbian, but that's only because he's rabidly Serbophobic. That's not actually a very common prejudice in Dravia. I suspect it's rooted in women troubles, as he refuses to discuss it.)
_________________
Salmoneus wrote:
(NB Dewrad is behaving like an adult - a petty, sarcastic and uncharitable adult, admittedly, but none the less note the infinitely higher quality of flame)