Class 4: Before Europe (2)
It doesn't all fall down,
the barbarians don't all come rushing in one day
and have a barbarian party.
That never happens.
Part of the Roman Empire
slowly falls under the influence of others.
The capital of Rome moves to the city
which is today known as Istanbul,
but which for a long time was known as Constantinople.
And the Roman Empire continues as Byzantium, as Byzantium.
It continues for another thousand years,
which let's face it, even if we're cynical,
is a pretty long time.
And that thing which is called the Renaissance,
where the clever Europeans like rediscover all the things,
the Renaissance is possible, you know, in large measure,
because Rome never fell in the first place,
because there was, there's no,
I'm not gonna say the Byzantium preserved everything
of ancient Greece and ancient Rome, it didn't,
but it preserved a lot of things,
like for example the Iliad.
So if you've had like any kind of like,
if you've done, you know, DS here,
have had any kind of that sort of education,
the Iliad only exists,
that's the story of the Trojan War with Achilles
and all these figures, the Iliad only exists
because people for a thousand years in Byzantium
hand copied the thing over, and over, and over, and over,
and over, and over, and over, and over, and over,
and over, and over, and over again, right?
Until late in the day copies were transferred to Italy
right before Byzantium was overcome, let's say.
And then they were printed in Italy and translated
and then it becomes a classic text.
And so therefore, because of Byzantium,
we have Achilles, we have the Iliad, we have Homer, right?
And we can say, oh, we rediscovered it,
isn't that wonderful?
And we can do that kind of time travel magic
where we leap back to ancient Greece.
But it's less time travel magic
if you remember that Byzantium was actually around
for another thousand years.
And for our story, for our East European story,
you just can't do without Byzantium in the middle.
If you're telling this story from a Western point of view
it's kind of awkward that Byzantium is still there, right?
It's kind of awkward.
It's like you're trying to like date a new person
but you're still going out with the other person
but it's like, I'm not really, you know, not really,
like you know, she's not, not, you know?
And that's what Byzantium is like in the Western story.
Like okay, there's this huge thing over there,
and it calls itself Rome, and they're speaking Greek,
but it's not really Europe.
It's not really there.
Let's just look the other way, right?
That's what Byzantium is
if you're doing the West European thing.
But if you're not, if you're trying to figure out Ukraine,
or for that matter Russia or Belarus,
but the fact that Byzantium
is there the whole time is important.
It's not marginal, it's not some kind of unwanted appendage,
it's not this confusing thing.
It's part of this unbroken tradition, right?
So I was just in central Kyiv
and I was looking at the cathedral,
which is spectacularly beautiful, St. Sophia,
and it was built, you know, that was built in 1037, right?
It was built, you know,
it was built while Byzantium was still around.
It was built three centuries before Notre Dame, right?
Three centuries before Notre Dame.
The daughter of the guy who had it built, by the way,
was Queen of France.
And she went to France and she said
this place is backward and dirty,
and I really wanna go home, right?
So that gives you, and that's not just the kind of thing
that makes Ukrainians proud,
but it also just gives you a sense that,
for quite a while, this Byzantine story
was a heartier and more interesting story
than the West European story.
Okay, so there's a different story
starting with ancient Greece,
which is, in a way, more robust and continuous.
I'm not saying it had to be that way.
I'm not saying that Ukraine
had to be part of the Byzantine tradition.
Other things could have happened,
but that is in fact how it turned out.
Okay, so language here then becomes important.
In the West European version, or the Western version,
there's Greek, right, then there's Latin,
and then from Latin you get the Romance languages,
Portuguese, Romanian, French, Spanish, Italian.
So the Romance languages they're called, Rome.
And then you have the Germanic languages.
So the Germanic peoples were some of the ones
who overwhelmed Rome, replaced Rome actually kind of slowly.
So, you know, Danish, and Dutch, and Swedish, German, right?
So in Western Europe, the Western Europe is dominated,
oh English is a Germanic language, forgot.
So Western Europe is dominated by these Germanic
and these Romance languages.
In Eastern Europe we have a different trajectory,
which is Greek, more Greek,
a language called Old Church Slavonic,
which we'll explain more about
at the end of this lecture and next week,
and then Slavic languages.
Now Slavic languages, which we're gonna move into,
they are par excellence something which comes before Europe.
It has always been and is still frankly
a little mysterious
why so many people speak Slavic languages, right?
The Slavic languages are actually
the dominant language group of Europe
if you count the people, right?
If you count the people,
or especially if you count the territory
where more people speak it than any other, right?
Slavic languages cover a lot more territory
than Germanic ones do or than Romance ones do.
And the Slavic languages that were spoken
a thousand years ago are not,
are clearly related to the Slavic languages
that are spoken now.
Okay.
Okay, what am I doing with my hand?
- [Student] Punching. - Punching, okay.
So if you had a drink, if you had a drink,
I'm not saying that you did,
but if you had a drink on Saturday night,
and it was in a big bowl, had some alcohol in it,
some other stuff, what was that called?
- [Student] Punch.
- Okay, why, has it ever occurred to you,
like why is this and the, why is that the same word?
That's never occurred to you, okay.
But you know the answer.
- [Student] No, I don't, I just,
if you drink a lot of the punch, maybe you're more likely-
(Timothy laughing)
- All right.
That is what is known as a folk etymology.
(students laughing)
Like, and the thing is like,
now that's gonna be on the internet,
and next week it's gonna be true.
(students chuckling) It's gonna cover the,
you're gonna have taken over the cognitive space
to that explanation.
So the reason why, okay, is that a punch
is a drink that has five ingredients.
And a punch like this, count 'em, five fingers, okay.
How do you, anyone know how to say five in Russian?
- [Student] Pyat.
- How do you say five in Polish?
- [Student] Piec.
- Five in Ukrainian?
- [Student] Pyat. - Okay.
That's why, all right?
It's a rare example of a base Slavic word
coming into our language, right?
So the reason why punch and punch,
we have that word, is from Slavic languages' five,
the word for five, that's where it comes from.
And so, interestingly, so that raises the question
like are you speaking the language, or is it speaking you?
Because you didn't have to know why it's a punch,
like you would've gone through your,
if you hadn't taken this class, amazingly,
you would've gone through your whole lives
without knowing, right, why it's a punch,
and why I'm throwing a punch, or why I'm drinking punch.
So are you speaking the language,
or does the language speak you, right?
Language is interesting because, I mean,
how many of us actually invent a word and have it stick?
Relatively few.
Even in the age of the internet, relatively few of us.
The language is there for us, we speak it,
or does it speak us?
And it outlasts us.
I mean when we're gone,
the language that we speak is still going to be there.
So it's important to kind of, it's important,
what I'm starting to say is,
to disaggregate the language from the people.
So I'm gonna be talking about the Slavs,
and the Slavic language,
but it's important to remember that
it's not that there's a language
biologically connected to people.
The language is there when people are born.
And whether they end up speaking that language
or other languages are gonna depend upon
what happens to them over the course of their lives, right?
So just to take a very easy example,
more people are speaking Ukrainian in public now
than when I was there the last time a year ago, noticeably.
That's not, that's because of something that's changed
in the world, right?
It's because something that's changed in the world.
Language is not, so it's not the same thing,
like when languages move,
it's not necessarily because people have moved.
It's not as simple as that.
So the way that historians tell the story
in terms of the movements of people
is not the same way that the historical philologists
tell the story with the movements of languages.
And historical philologists are probably,
I think, are probably right.
So language does change,
but it changes more slowly than we do, right?
So, I mean, we can still,
we can all read Shakespeare, right?
If you're Polish, you can easily read the Polish
of 400 years ago.
And if you're Russian or Ukrainian
or Belorussian or whatever,
you can read texts from several hundred years ago
with just a little bit of effort.
And although it's weird to think about vice versa, right?
Like if you could time travel people
from like 500 years ago to now,
they would understand our conversations,
at least with a little bit of work.
So the language is there before you get there.
An example that's relevant for our class is the Vikings.
The Vikings are speaking, obviously, you know,
proto-Swedish, Scandinavian languages, a Germanic language.
They arrive in Kyiv.
Don't worry, there's a whole lecture about this,
it's the next one.
They arrive in Kyiv and the dominant language around them
is a Slavic language.
And what do they do?
They learn it, right?
They learn it, and they take it on,
they change their own names
so that their name sounds Slavic, right?
So what could sound more Slavic than Yaroslav, right?
Yaroslav.
But if I say Jarisleif, you might think for a second,
say, oh, Jarisleif,
that sounds like somebody in an Icelandic saga,
and you would be right, and it's the same person.
Or if I say Volodymyr, you'll think, well,
that's the President of Ukraine, Volodymyr,
that sounds very Slavic.
But what if I say Valdamar, right?
Then we're somewhere completely different.
And the guy who is remembered by the Ukrainians
as Volodymyr, or by the Russians as Vladimir,
was actually called Valdamar, right?
And certainly like when he, you know,
talked to his Scandinavian relatives,
that's what he was called.
So they learn the language,
they adapt their own names to this language,
and then this language also speaks us, right?
Then this language speaks us.
Like I was on American television last night,
with an American, you know, asking me questions.
And he's talking about Vladimir Putin
and Volodymyr Zelenskyy and I'm thinking, you know,
more than a thousand years ago,
a Scandinavian called Valdamar, you know,
got himself baptized and now we are saying Volodymyr.
Like it hasn't, my point is that
it hasn't changed that much,
and we can even kind of explain why it changed.
Like the guy who was called Valdamar,
he took on the name, in this language at that time
was probably something like Voldemar, right?
But he took on a name, and now a thousand years later
