It's theorized that they were Thraco-Romans who shared little with the Slavs, even if some migrated to the Second Bulgarian Empire. I mean Hungarians got their own culture group, why not them?
Why are Vlachs Slavic?
- Thread starter Chlodio
- Start date
-
We have updated our Community Code of Conduct. Please read through the new rules for the forum that are an integral part of Paradox Interactive’s User Agreement.
Or better yet put them in the Byzantine group. This discussion has gone around a lot and some of the consensus for the status quo seems to be because of the heavy influence of the Slavs and them being their neighbors plus some meaningless Paradox policy regarding small culture groups (of course the exceptions like Hungarian you mentioned are ignored).
Long story short the culture set up for every single Paradox game up to and including Imperator is too simplistic.
Vlachs are partially slavicized, romanized Thraco-Dacians who were partially detached from the Roman Empire depending on your theory. There's no way to properly represent such a unique situation with the current two level culture mechanic.
Another argument comes from the fact that the Second Bulgarian Empire called themselves the "Empire of Vlachs and Bulgars", effectively being both a Bulgarian and Romanian state in modern terms (for reference). Putting them under the South Slavic group helps to represent this situation of two ethnicities coexisting. But then again the much more significant unity between Persians and Turks does not get this treatment. Also it doesn't make sense to say Thraco-Romans migrated into Thrace, and at this point both Bulgarians and Vlachs were effectively natives to the area along the Lower Danube basin.
Putting them along with Albanian under Byzantine is probably the best course of action imo. The Vlachs and other migrating cultures are poorly represented anyways and the current areas allude more to Thraco-Romans and Aromanians than any possible Daco-Romans.
It's also probably worth to mention that Alan, Coptic, and Assyrian make little sense as Byzantine. It's about as fair as making Armenian Iranian because they were dominated by them. Byzantium is clearly a Helleno-Orthodox group and Vlachs and Albanians go into this group whilst the others explicitly made sure they were anything but Byzantine. After all, when Khosrow II attacked Egypt, the governor just instantly submitted with little fight for a very big reason of anti-Orthodox sentiment, while the Albanians and Aromanians stayed with Byzantium when the Bulgarians revolted.
That's just my take anyways.
Long story short the culture set up for every single Paradox game up to and including Imperator is too simplistic.
Vlachs are partially slavicized, romanized Thraco-Dacians who were partially detached from the Roman Empire depending on your theory. There's no way to properly represent such a unique situation with the current two level culture mechanic.
Another argument comes from the fact that the Second Bulgarian Empire called themselves the "Empire of Vlachs and Bulgars", effectively being both a Bulgarian and Romanian state in modern terms (for reference). Putting them under the South Slavic group helps to represent this situation of two ethnicities coexisting. But then again the much more significant unity between Persians and Turks does not get this treatment. Also it doesn't make sense to say Thraco-Romans migrated into Thrace, and at this point both Bulgarians and Vlachs were effectively natives to the area along the Lower Danube basin.
Putting them along with Albanian under Byzantine is probably the best course of action imo. The Vlachs and other migrating cultures are poorly represented anyways and the current areas allude more to Thraco-Romans and Aromanians than any possible Daco-Romans.
It's also probably worth to mention that Alan, Coptic, and Assyrian make little sense as Byzantine. It's about as fair as making Armenian Iranian because they were dominated by them. Byzantium is clearly a Helleno-Orthodox group and Vlachs and Albanians go into this group whilst the others explicitly made sure they were anything but Byzantine. After all, when Khosrow II attacked Egypt, the governor just instantly submitted with little fight for a very big reason of anti-Orthodox sentiment, while the Albanians and Aromanians stayed with Byzantium when the Bulgarians revolted.
That's just my take anyways.
Last edited:
Also regarding the Slavic influence. It was very much obvious as many words and most obviously the Romanian accent is Slavic. Up until the years of nationalism Romanians used the Cyrillic script through and through.
Another thing that is not widely considered is the lifestyle of these Balkan peoples. Everyone from Croats to even Aegean Greeks share an ancient pastoralist culture. Perhaps, part of the reason the South Slavs assimilated the Illyrians so well was because of their shared way of life.
Thessalians, Epirotes, Albanians, Aromanians, Bulgars, and Sclaveni all share a commonality of being shepherds. It must be stated that most Balkan inhabitants were at least partially nomadic outside of the fertile areas. There weren't just "nomadic barbarians" that invaded the area.
And once again the simplistic culture mechanic here shows its many many weaknesses.
Another thing that is not widely considered is the lifestyle of these Balkan peoples. Everyone from Croats to even Aegean Greeks share an ancient pastoralist culture. Perhaps, part of the reason the South Slavs assimilated the Illyrians so well was because of their shared way of life.
Thessalians, Epirotes, Albanians, Aromanians, Bulgars, and Sclaveni all share a commonality of being shepherds. It must be stated that most Balkan inhabitants were at least partially nomadic outside of the fertile areas. There weren't just "nomadic barbarians" that invaded the area.
And once again the simplistic culture mechanic here shows its many many weaknesses.
Same reason the Scottish culture is a mess. I think sometimes Paradox gets so much conflicting information they just leave things status quo. I mean, consider if they were in the Latin culture group, for instance: Yes they might speak a romance language but would medieval Romanians really have much in common culturally with Italians or the French? Their perspective is obviously not the same as their ancestors 1000 years ago but we have modern Romanians here now. Do you modern Romanians feel you have more in common culturally with other Romance-language speakers than you do with Bulgarians, Russians, Serbs, et cetera?
Culture groups aren't just about language; hence why Greeks, Alans, Armenians, Georgians, Assyrians, Copts and Goths are all in the same group even though they all speak largely unrelated languages. Basques are in the same group as the Latin Iberians even though their language is unrelated as well.
Culture groups aren't just about language; hence why Greeks, Alans, Armenians, Georgians, Assyrians, Copts and Goths are all in the same group even though they all speak largely unrelated languages. Basques are in the same group as the Latin Iberians even though their language is unrelated as well.
Last edited:
Personally, I think the root cause for recurring threads about Vlachs being in South Slavic culture group has to do with semantics and how culture groups are assigned.
Most of the culture groups are based around language groups, presumably due to the inherent assumption that people who spoke similar language also had very similar cultures. Some culture groups, however, are not based on linguistic families, usually due to the fact that the cultures don't have any linguistically and/or geographically close "sister cultures": instead, these groups are instead based more on geography (as is the case with Mesoamerican, East-, Central- and West African culture groups), shared religion, history and lifestyle (as is the case with Israelite culture group), or a combination of both (as is the case with Altaic, Iberian and Byzantine culture groups).
Threads like this tend to arise when a culture group named after a language family has a culture not belonging to said language family, even if there are other justifiable reasons why the culture group is as it is: for example, if "Iberian" culture group would be called Ibero-Romance, there'd be threads criticizing the presence of Basque and Catalan cultures in it.
Apart from Vlachs in South Slavic culture group, other examples I can think of would be Dutch in West Germanic culture group (a group which otherwise contains only North Sea Germanic languages), Berber and to a lesser extent Andalusian in Arabic culture group (while both Berbers and Andalusians spoke Arabic, Berber languages and Mozarabic were present among them as well), Hungarian outside of Finno-Ugric culture group (admittedly, lumping all Finno-Ugric cultures in one culture group is pretty unrealistic to begin with), and Tocharian in Iranian culture group (given that Tocharians were a seperate branch of Indo-European languages from Iranian).
While there are reasons for keeping Vlach in the South Slavic group (such as similar lifestyle to other people of the Balkans, Slavic influence in the Romanian culture, or the historical coexistence of Bulgarians and Vlachs in the Second Bulgarian Empire), the fact that this topic is brought up time and time again does show that some players are not satisfied with the status quo, presumably due to the name of the culture group implying that Vlachs are Slavs, which is, to put it mildly, not particularly accurate. And while it might be possible to overhaul the game's culture mechanic to make the entire system more satisfying and at the same time fix these sort of border cases, the developers have said in the past that they're not planning to do any major changes to how culture in CK2 functions, so large-scale overhauls as a solution to this problem are probably out of question. So, what smaller changes could be made to alleviate the issue at hand?
If one still wishes to emphasize the Vlachs' similarities to the Slavs in their culture, an option could be to rename South Slavic culture group to Balkan culture group. Of course, such renaming might raise other questions, such as why Arberian and Greek cultures aren't part of this areal culture group, or why East and West Slavic culture groups exist while South Slavic culture group has been removed, or if Vlachs are in South Slavic group due to their historical co-operation with Bulgarians, why aren't other cultures which historically were unrelated but in good terms with one another like Polish and Hungarian in the same culture group.
Another option would be to create an Eastern Latin culture group for Vlach culture would be the most linguistically accurate solution, but it would make playing as a Vlach character more challenging due to the aforementioned lack of reduced foreigner penalty, not to mention that the devs haven't really expressed interest in creating isolated culture groups for linguistically isolated people groups. Moving Vlach to Latin culture group could also be an option deemed accurate on linguistic grounds, though this has been criticized on the forums due to the Vlachs' being historically isolated from other Romance languages, and the gameplay implications that a French ruler would treat a Vlach with the same level of familiarity as they would treat Normans, Italians or Occitans, or that a Romance-speaking culture would have easier time ruling over Vlachs than the cultures neighbouring them; or vice versa, that Vlachs would find it easier to rule over Frenchmen than Bulgarians or Hungarians.
Finally, Vlach culture could potentially be moved to Byzantine culture group, as was proposed before: while doing such a change probably would get rid of any representation of historical co-operation between Vlachs and Bulgarians due to higher "foreigner" penalty, doubled risk of Vlach revolts when ruled by Bulgarians and higher tendency for AI to pursue culture-conversion, it would be the best option available if renaming the South Slavic culture group is not a feasible course of action, given that Byzantine culture group covers historically non-Catholic Christian cultures around Byzantine sphere of influence without any nearby sister cultures, a description which fits to Vlachs rather well. The critics of this proposal have pointed out that Byzantine culture group is formed by cultures either heavily influenced by Greek culture or former minority Christian groups of the Byzantine Empire, neither of which Vlachs historically were, making the placement of Vlach culture in Byzantine culture as accurate as placing Serbian and Bulgarian there, as well.
Most of the culture groups are based around language groups, presumably due to the inherent assumption that people who spoke similar language also had very similar cultures. Some culture groups, however, are not based on linguistic families, usually due to the fact that the cultures don't have any linguistically and/or geographically close "sister cultures": instead, these groups are instead based more on geography (as is the case with Mesoamerican, East-, Central- and West African culture groups), shared religion, history and lifestyle (as is the case with Israelite culture group), or a combination of both (as is the case with Altaic, Iberian and Byzantine culture groups).
Threads like this tend to arise when a culture group named after a language family has a culture not belonging to said language family, even if there are other justifiable reasons why the culture group is as it is: for example, if "Iberian" culture group would be called Ibero-Romance, there'd be threads criticizing the presence of Basque and Catalan cultures in it.
Apart from Vlachs in South Slavic culture group, other examples I can think of would be Dutch in West Germanic culture group (a group which otherwise contains only North Sea Germanic languages), Berber and to a lesser extent Andalusian in Arabic culture group (while both Berbers and Andalusians spoke Arabic, Berber languages and Mozarabic were present among them as well), Hungarian outside of Finno-Ugric culture group (admittedly, lumping all Finno-Ugric cultures in one culture group is pretty unrealistic to begin with), and Tocharian in Iranian culture group (given that Tocharians were a seperate branch of Indo-European languages from Iranian).
While there are reasons for keeping Vlach in the South Slavic group (such as similar lifestyle to other people of the Balkans, Slavic influence in the Romanian culture, or the historical coexistence of Bulgarians and Vlachs in the Second Bulgarian Empire), the fact that this topic is brought up time and time again does show that some players are not satisfied with the status quo, presumably due to the name of the culture group implying that Vlachs are Slavs, which is, to put it mildly, not particularly accurate. And while it might be possible to overhaul the game's culture mechanic to make the entire system more satisfying and at the same time fix these sort of border cases, the developers have said in the past that they're not planning to do any major changes to how culture in CK2 functions, so large-scale overhauls as a solution to this problem are probably out of question. So, what smaller changes could be made to alleviate the issue at hand?
If one still wishes to emphasize the Vlachs' similarities to the Slavs in their culture, an option could be to rename South Slavic culture group to Balkan culture group. Of course, such renaming might raise other questions, such as why Arberian and Greek cultures aren't part of this areal culture group, or why East and West Slavic culture groups exist while South Slavic culture group has been removed, or if Vlachs are in South Slavic group due to their historical co-operation with Bulgarians, why aren't other cultures which historically were unrelated but in good terms with one another like Polish and Hungarian in the same culture group.
Another option would be to create an Eastern Latin culture group for Vlach culture would be the most linguistically accurate solution, but it would make playing as a Vlach character more challenging due to the aforementioned lack of reduced foreigner penalty, not to mention that the devs haven't really expressed interest in creating isolated culture groups for linguistically isolated people groups. Moving Vlach to Latin culture group could also be an option deemed accurate on linguistic grounds, though this has been criticized on the forums due to the Vlachs' being historically isolated from other Romance languages, and the gameplay implications that a French ruler would treat a Vlach with the same level of familiarity as they would treat Normans, Italians or Occitans, or that a Romance-speaking culture would have easier time ruling over Vlachs than the cultures neighbouring them; or vice versa, that Vlachs would find it easier to rule over Frenchmen than Bulgarians or Hungarians.
Finally, Vlach culture could potentially be moved to Byzantine culture group, as was proposed before: while doing such a change probably would get rid of any representation of historical co-operation between Vlachs and Bulgarians due to higher "foreigner" penalty, doubled risk of Vlach revolts when ruled by Bulgarians and higher tendency for AI to pursue culture-conversion, it would be the best option available if renaming the South Slavic culture group is not a feasible course of action, given that Byzantine culture group covers historically non-Catholic Christian cultures around Byzantine sphere of influence without any nearby sister cultures, a description which fits to Vlachs rather well. The critics of this proposal have pointed out that Byzantine culture group is formed by cultures either heavily influenced by Greek culture or former minority Christian groups of the Byzantine Empire, neither of which Vlachs historically were, making the placement of Vlach culture in Byzantine culture as accurate as placing Serbian and Bulgarian there, as well.
Because they are still south slavs, no matter how much they love to larp as "We are romans".
The Huns killed most of the original inhabitants of the region and the slavs came in with them.
The Huns killed most of the original inhabitants of the region and the slavs came in with them.
That is mostly what I learned at history. And until different countries do not agree to teach the same things all around the world, there will be no "historicaly accurate" view on things. So no one could make an "accurate" representation.
I mean look all around the Balkan. If you accept at face value, the claims of all people around there(about what they had and when) , that region alone should be bigger than Europe.
Thats wrong on many levels:
1. Romanians dont like to "larp" as romans, most of us when we talk about our ancestors we talk about dacians not romans, the romans are just like a bonus thing
2. It would be physically impossible for the huns to kill all dacians since they inhabited a vast area ( they lived in : Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Ukraine, Serbia )
3. I have never heard of the theory that romanians came in with the slavs, also we came in with the slavs from where, Kiev?
4. It is illogical that a people that are slavic in origin would adopt a latin language long after the Roman empire was past its height. Also the argument that we used the cyrillic alphabet is nonsense, the mongols use it too and nobody would make the argument that they are slavs.
Nobody in Romania would argue that we were influenced by slavs, but being influenced by slavs and being slavs are 2 different things.
Both of you are getting a little aggressive. But as to your points: The origins of the Romanians are murky no matter which theory you ascribe to.
1. OKay
2. That is a factually incorrect statement, not only was Ukraine at the period of the Huns was more or less Scythian so Dacian/Romans would not be there in any real numbers but its frankly not that hard to kill and disperse even large scattered ethnic groups.
3. The poster is referring to the late Antiquity slavic migrations into the Balkans, and claiming that the Romanians are a subset of this group (which is probably incorrect for a number of reasons)
4. Not really, Hebrew was a religious language for 2000 years before its resurrection as a native spoken language, furthermore we know of Sumerian because it was a Babylonian religious language for millennia after the ancient Sumerians stopped speaking it. The dispersion of latin language into native subsets through loan words etc. fundamentally changed the structure of South slavic languages as compared to East Slavic and most South slavic groups show up after Latin stopped being spoken in the Roman empire. Its not really hard to imagine a migratory group integrating local language rather than supplanting it (see: English) especially if they small in number relative to local speakers initially.
I meant parts of Ukraine, not like all of Ukraine, the western part is what i meant and obviously not all of Serbia nor all of Bulgaria too, I was just making a point. Also for the last part, people in the Balkans spoke greek rather than latin as a common language also you said "Its not really hard to imagine a migratory group integrating local language rather than supplanting it", I find that hard to believe, as I dont see the turks speaking greek or hungarians speaking a slavic or germanic language.
This whole issue could be dismissed if we weren't stuck with that "culture group" feature.
Culture groups could be dropped and instead cultures would be more or less close to one another with maluses being set for each case. For instance Breton could be very close to French (low malus), a bit close to Irish (middle malus), less close to scottish (high malus) and unrelated to Mongol (max malus), while Irish would have middle malus both for Breton and Scottish and high malus for French (same with French towards Irish).
Cultural, linguistical, historical and geographical parameters are then taken into account.
Centuries of rule of a culture over another could also diminish the malus for the rest of a campaign.
This way is more modular, more interesting to play and solves the Vlach problem.
Culture groups could be dropped and instead cultures would be more or less close to one another with maluses being set for each case. For instance Breton could be very close to French (low malus), a bit close to Irish (middle malus), less close to scottish (high malus) and unrelated to Mongol (max malus), while Irish would have middle malus both for Breton and Scottish and high malus for French (same with French towards Irish).
Cultural, linguistical, historical and geographical parameters are then taken into account.
Centuries of rule of a culture over another could also diminish the malus for the rest of a campaign.
This way is more modular, more interesting to play and solves the Vlach problem.
This could technically be done without needing to break the culture groups. There is this culture called parent used by Norwegian, Swedish and Danish with Norse. It's the only function is to remove the "foreigner" penalty. I believe one culture can have multiple parents, therefore I reckon one could achieve your desire by writing:
Code:
parent = frankishIs that really a teaching in Romania? I don't want to be aggressive in any way or what so ever but in Hungary we learn that avars were there before us.
How can be both true?
Have someone established a history void of politics at least once in the past for that region?
Claim : I am as far as one can be from a historian so I don't know what was back then. But it seems strange that teachings are contradictory in a fact based world in the age of sience and easy data processing.
Contradict what? The avars were in Pannonia, what buisness do romanians have with Pannonian? I mean this whole discussion was whether romanians are slavs or latin so I dont see what the avar have to do with anything? Also its not a just a teaching in Romanian its what the Dacian kingdom had at its peak.
Also the province of Dacia withing the roman empire
Talking about migration, it's hardly accurate to say most migrations ever fully displaced a significant local population. They practically always bled into local populations, even if the migrating tribe dominated the previously settled group to the point of making them culturally extinct. Trickles of those genes are still there, and in many places, the dominant genes are from people who lived there in prehistoric times (which is apparently true of Romania). To blame cultural change on genocide by murder is far-fetched, especially in pre-industrial society.
There's very little evidence today of "mass slaughters", even by the Huns.
With the Romanians you have to look at the cultural and linguistic evidence. First off, we have a very obviously Latinate culture isolated up on the more Grecian end of the Empire, which even today remains quite linguistically conservative. Linguistically conservative groups are usually isolated, they tend to hold onto their traditional language harder as a marker of identity. Then you have the medieval Ethnonym (ethnic names for the group) - Wallachian. That's a German name for a Romanised Celt, such as the Welsh or Walloons - Dacians are often considered a celtic subset. So linguistic evidence suggests that by the medieval period the people we now call Romanians were considered to be Romanised Celts or Dacians.
Geographically, Romania is in Dacia, it has been invaded by Goth, Huns, Gepids and then Slavs. The people are doubtless quite mixed but will still be partially Dacian. A big problem is the lack of information until the later medieval period because the Mongols destroyed so much.
With the Romanians you have to look at the cultural and linguistic evidence. First off, we have a very obviously Latinate culture isolated up on the more Grecian end of the Empire, which even today remains quite linguistically conservative. Linguistically conservative groups are usually isolated, they tend to hold onto their traditional language harder as a marker of identity. Then you have the medieval Ethnonym (ethnic names for the group) - Wallachian. That's a German name for a Romanised Celt, such as the Welsh or Walloons - Dacians are often considered a celtic subset. So linguistic evidence suggests that by the medieval period the people we now call Romanians were considered to be Romanised Celts or Dacians.
Geographically, Romania is in Dacia, it has been invaded by Goth, Huns, Gepids and then Slavs. The people are doubtless quite mixed but will still be partially Dacian. A big problem is the lack of information until the later medieval period because the Mongols destroyed so much.
What does that mean? How can a state be Bulgarian/romanian ? As far as i know states cant carry a trait similiar to "culture" or "nationality"