Sards
Well, Third Angel, I'm gonna anticipate your likely indignant demand that I repeat my arguments in full, and that I'm ignoring you, etc, etc. But I ain't got as much time these days (for that reason, I hope everyone will forgive me if I begin to ignore posts which either repeat old argumemts, misunderstand significant parts of mine or other poster's arguments, or advance spurious arguments in a rude way), and having to go over the same discussion again with fruitless results tries even my considerable patience. Anyways, Third Angel, your opinions are respected; as are those of everyone else who argues constructively and fairly. In view of this, I'll repeat my arguments here (you ought to have looked harder), and I'll post a link on the front page so that I don't have to go through this stuff again. Esp. as the mod is for the most part complete, after all my monkey work, and all the constructive contributions of all those here who are inclined to post constructively.
As far as I can tell, Sards are the only medieval Latin people to be styled
barbarus; now, all those with a get out the Sards (GOTS
) agenda, will discount this. But, to any serious historian of the middle ages, this word is the perhap the most important guide to cultural perception.
Barbarus simply means outlandish, sometimes with a bunch of negative connotations. While the core Latin West (Lombards, northern French, Occitans, Catalans, with Germans, English, etc) formed one block, Celts, Wends, Basques and Sards lay outside in this medieval "Frankish" perception. This isn't just because of language, although that is important. It's to do with culture. Europe's "internal barbarians" don't in the image wear Norman armour, they are more inclined to pastoralism than settled agrarian farming. They preserve more habits that are uncommon in the Latin west, whether in religious practice, military ritual, marriage patterns, etc, etc.
My understanding of how unique Sard culture was first came from reading Felipe Fernández-Armesto's
Before Columbus: Expolration and Colonization from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, which I suggest everyone reads, because it is a highly enlightening book for itself. But chapter 1, "Island Conquests of the House of Barcelona" talks about the Sards (esp. pp. 33-41, but see index). It describes Sardinian tribal society, Catalan/"Frankish" attitudes. Subsequent reading has only strengthened my agreement with Armesto's impression.
I didn't just spring on ethnologue and decide Sards ought to be in because of ethnologue. I used Ethnologue to illustrate the sillyness of saying Sards are simply "Italians" on linguistic grounds. Ethnologue is not a cheap-hack site like many of the pages used as authorities here. It is a prestigious lingustic database whose contributors are often specialists. It is often inclined to promote small languages (its purpose is to monitor and preserve small languages from extinction), but this neither applies to wider categorization nor a language (group) as big as Sardinian (but you'll notice it doesn't really list one Sardinian language; but 4 dialects: that's where its "bias" lies).
Sardinian is placed separately from all the Italian and French Latin dialects because structually the language has very little in common with them, and in terms of roots even to this day is little less distinctive from Romanian than from Italian or French.
For instance, I opened a thread about the Sardinian language on a lingustics communtity, and I got one response from an Italian with extensive experience of the island:
"Sardinia was so isolated that her rulers - Catalans and Spaniards up to 1714, Piedmontese Italians afterwards - rarely did anything with her. Some families do bear Spanish names, for instance the noble family from which came the great Communist leader Enrico Berlinguer. Also the most famous Sardinian woman in Italy, beauty queen and showgirl Pamela Prati (google her, she's really worth seeing) was born De Contreras. But most Sardinian names are Sardinian. There is, however, a Catalan-speaking town, Alghero."
"Sardinian, as I said, is not close to Italian today. It is quite unique among Romance languages, and, in spite of 300 years of Aragonese and Spanish rule, it has nothing in common with Catalan or Castilian either. It is, for instance, the only Romance language to draw its definite article not from ille but from ipsus (Sardinian: so, sa = the).
"Corsican is as different from Sardinian as Corsica is from Sardinia. Sardinia is in effect a slice of Africa, a high, mostly flat plateau, dry and grassy, with scrub and not much forest. I did part of my military service there and I remember it well. Corsica is hilly, deeply riven by fertile valleys, and densely forested. It is, in fact, a lot more like continental Italy, and likewise, Corsican, although treated as a minority language for the purposes of French politics, is in effect an Italian dialect with strong Tuscan affinities, easily understandable by most Italians today."
So, they certainly weren't Italian linguistically. And no one here has been dumb enough to advocate that the Sards were Italian culturally.Therefore, the argument I'm afraid is very one-sided. The only good argument against is size, and that argument applies equally to Carinthians, Albanians and even Basques. There is no-one here who speaks both modern Slovenian and modern Sardinian (which anyway, is only a rough guide to the language pre-dating Italian and Catalan influence), with a similar knowledge of Serbo-Croat and Italian; but based on ethnologue alone, Carinthians go way before Sards do (whinge and flame if you want, Finellach
). That's ignoring that Prussians and Normans are already lower down our league table. I'd even merge the Scots and Irish before erroneously incorporating Sard into Italian, Catalan, Vlach or Occitan. To put it more succinctly, there is absolutely no urgency to the matter. The only cultures waiting in the wings (excepting Lappish perhaps) are not obviously more necessary than Prussian or Norman, let alone Carinthian or Sard. In conclusion, as things stand, the GOTS agenda is a complete waste of both my own and the thread's time.
I'm sorry I haven't been able to find many authentic Sard names. It's prolly not my fault though. I suspect that the names of the ruler lists were prolly written in Latin, and "re-translated" into Italianate form. The only genuine ones I've found are the ones given in Wikipdeia, i.e. "Mikhaleis, Konstantine, and Basilis." Hopefully, when I move close to a good library in a few days, I may be able to find more.
As for Corsicans, like I said, the argument has never been that Sardinian culture spread there; just that it might be more appropriate to use the Sard tag for 1066 (and initially, 1187 too). But this is a perfectly fair and respectable debate (you might have noticed, I've been responding to you on this
).
However, lumping Sard with Italian is not respectable; it's ridiculous and absurd; and if we're gonna waste time debating that, we might as well start debating similar absurdities, such as merging Basques with Castilians. .
