Prolific IQ researcher Richard Lynn together with two Russian collaborators have recently published arguing that multiple aspects of socio-economic development – infant mortality, fertility, stature, and literacy-as-a-proxy for intelligence were significantly intercorrelated in late Tsarist Russia.
Literate rate of the European part of the Russian Empire in 1897.
Here is the link to the paper – Regional differences in intelligence, infant mortality, stature and fertility in European Russia in the late nineteenth century
And here is a summary by James Thompson – 50 Russian oblasts.
To the right: Here’s your map, JayMan. You’re welcome.
The main potential sticking point:
There are no data for regional intelligence in the nineteenth century and we have therefore adopted rates of literacy as a proxy for intelligence. This is justified on the grounds that a high correlation between literacy rates and intelligence have been reported in a number of studies. For example, a correlation of .861 between literacy rates for Italian regions in 1880 and early twenty-first century IQs has been reported by Lynn (2010); a correlation of .83 between literacy rates for Spanish regions in the early twenty-first century has been reported by Lynn (2010); (Lynn, 2012); and a correlation of 0.56 between literacy rates and IQs for the states and union territories of India in 2011 has been reported by Lynn and Yadav (2015). There is additional support for using literacy in the nineteenth century as a proxy for intelligence in the results of a study by Grigoriev, Lapteva and Ushakov (Григорьев, Лаптева, Ушаков, 2015) showing a correlation of .58 between literacy rates of the peasant populations of the districts (uezds) of the Moscow province in 1883 and the results of the Unified State Exam and State Certification on Russian Language in the districts of the contemporary Moscow oblast.
The methodology at first struck me as being rather problematic.
I’ve read a bit about Russian state literacy programs in the 19th century (National Literacy Campaigns and Movements) and one of their main features is that they tended to spread out from the central European Russian provinces due to cost effectiveness reasons, hence the low literacy rates of e.g. Siberia in Lynn’s data set. However, there is no particular evidence that Siberian Russians are any duller than average Russians. To the contrary, some 3% of Siberian schoolchildren become “Olympians” – high performers who qualify for highly subsidized higher education. This proportion is lower than the 15% of the central region (which hosts Moscow, Russia’s main cognitive cluster with a 107 average IQ), and the 14% of the north-west region (which hosts Russia’s second cognitive cluster with a 103 average IQ Saint-Petersburg, plus the Russians there are probably slightly brighter in general on account of Finno-Ugric admixture), but is considerably higher than in any other Russian Federal District: The Urals and Volga (both about 2%), and the Far Eastern, Southern, and Caucasus (all considerably below 1%).
In other words, would such a historical literacy – modern intelligence correlation apply to Russia as it does to Italy, Spain, and to a lesser extent, India?
Average 2009 PISA results by Russian region.
Fortunately, we don’t have to postulate, since we do actually have PISA data for many Russian provinces that I revealed back in 2012.
This allows us to test if Lynn’s assumptions apply.
There are difficulties, to be sure. Not all Russian provinces were tested in PISA, and there is, needless to say, no data for any of the Ukrainian and Polish oblasts, or for Belarus. As such, only 20 Russian provinces could be tested in this manner (26 if you also include now independent countries excluding Russia itself).
In some cases, names have changed, typically to honor some faceless Soviet bureaucrat; in more problematic cases, borders have changed significantly (e.g. the five provinces of Estonia, Livonia, Courland, Kovno, and Vilna have become the three countries of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania – I have tried to average the literacy figures between them in a common sense but back of the envelope way). The Moscow Governorate has been split into the City of Moscow (with its 107 average IQ) and Moscow oblast (with a modest 96 average IQ). Which of those should be attached to Moscow’s 1897 literacy rate of 40%? (As it happens, I went with just the City of Moscow instead of figuring out how to weigh the populations and adjust and so forth. I’m not trying to writea formal paper, after all).
There is an exponential correlation of R=0.75 between average PISA derived IQs of Russian regions and of now independent countries, and their literacy rate according to the 1897 Census. Therefore, this bears out Lynn’s assumptions.
The two downwards outliers – more relatively intelligent than literate – are Moscow, Tatarstan, Tula, Samara, and Tambov. Moscow is easily explainable – the city itself in Tsarist times would have been more literate than the Moscow Governorate, while its average IQ was artificially boosted in Soviet times since it became not just the empire’s political but also its cognitive (artistic, scientific) capital. Getting a Moscow propiska required considerable intelligence.
The three very major upwards outliers – more relatively literate than intelligent – are the Finno-Ugric Baltic states: Finland, Estonia, and Latvia. This can’t have been a non-Orthodox/Muslim thing: Both Poland (On-The-Vistula Governorate) and Lithuania (Kovno and Vilna) lie neatly on the correlation curve. Nor was it something Finno-Ugric; Karelia (then Olonets) is not an exception either. It must have been something specific just to them and the most obvious explanation is Protestantism. There is a lot of literature on the independent literacy-raising effects of Protestantism and I see no reasons why Estonia, Latvia, and Finland should have been exceptions to that.
Another outlier, though this one is at the bottom of the IQ scale, is Moldova. To be fair I think Moldova’s PISA-derived IQ is artificially lowered by a third to half of an S.D. due to the massive brain drain it has experienced after the collapse of the Soviet Union (something like half the working age population are Gastarbeiters in the EU and Russia). We see similar drops in other countries so afflicted, such as (possibly) Puerto Rico, and (almost certainly) Ireland during most of the 20th century, when it repeatedly reported IQs in the ~90 range (and ironically one of the reasons Richard Lynn himself abandoned it to move to Northern Ireland, thus getting stuck in the most depressed region of the UK and missing out on the rise of the Celtic Tiger a few years later).
The correlation improves further to R=0.80 when we consider only those Tsarist-era provinces which are still part of the Russian Federation. This is accomplished (more than) entirely just by removing the Protestant Baltic nations (Finland, Estonia, and Latvia) and Moldova (whose current day average IQ is depressed due to massive brain drain as per above).
As usual Lynn does his north/south IQ gradient analysis, finding it to be a real thing but diminishing to nothing once the Baltic states of Estonia, Livonia, and Courland are accounted for.
Quoting from Thompson’s summary:
The Russian provinces differed significantly by geographical location. The positive correlations with latitude (r= .33, p<.05) and the negative correlation with longitude (r=−.43, p<.01) show that the rates of literacy were higher in the northand west than in the south and east. These trends were partly determined by the rates of literacy being highest in the north-western provinces of St. Petersburg and the three Baltic states of Estland, Livland and Kourland (correspondingapproximately but not precisely to contemporary Estonia and Latvia; Livland consisted of southern part of contemporary Estonia and eastern part of contemporary Latvia). Removing these four regions makes both correlations non-significant (.21 and −.23).
The Pale of Settlement in 1897.
One additional issue worth bearing in mind: The influence of the Jews. Namely, their concentration in the Pale of Settlement, which correlates to modern day Poland, Belarus, and right-bank Ukraine (west of the Dnieper). There were more than 5.2 million Jews, and their literacy rates were very high (according to the 1926 Soviet Census, Jews over the age of 50 – i.e., who had been educated under the Empire – had a literacy rate of 63% versus 28% for ethnic Russians).
This must have “artificially” raised the literacy rates in this area – as pertains to those regions’ 21st century average IQs, anyway, since the vast majority of those Jews are no longer there due to the trifecta of the Holocaust, Jackson-Vanik, and Aliyah. The effect would probably be to reduce the “indigenous” literacy rates in Lithuania and Poland closer to those of European Russia, while pushing the already low literacy rates of strongly ethnic Malorossiyan and Belorussian provinces considerably lower still. Not a single province of modern Ukraine outside historical Novorossiya (with its strong Great Russian admixture) had a literacy rate above 20% in 1897, despite highly literate Jews helping them out with the statistics.
Unfortunately, there is a severe paucity of usable psychometric data from Ukraine – for instance, it is one of the very few European countries that doesn’t participate in PISA. So its average IQ has to be estimated through generally more indirect means. It does the converted equivalent of 9 IQ points worse than Russia on the TIMSS standardized test. Ukrainians spend less than half as much time as Russians reading, and those from the western parts at least spend a lot more time participating in torchlit processions and chanting “Putin Khuylo.” Some of those activities are considerably more g loaded than others. The low literacy rates in late Tsarist Malorossiya, coupled with the finding of a close correlation between those literacy rates and modern day average IQ across both Russian provinces and today’s independent post-Soviet states, constitutes further evidence of a modest average IQ in Ukraine. Higher than in Moldova to be sure, but probably closer to the level of the Balkans than to Poland.
Data
Sources: Grigoriev, Lapteva, and Lynn 2015; Karlin 2012 (derived from PISA 2009).
| IQ | Literacy in 1897 | |
| Astrakhan | 94.8 | 15.5% |
| Bashkortostan | 93.4 | 16.7% |
| ESTONIA | 102.1 | 77.9% |
| FINLAND | 106.6 | 75.6% |
| Kaluga | 91.7 | 19.4% |
| Karelia | 98.1 | 25.3% |
| Kursk | 94.6 | 16.3% |
| LATVIA | 98.0 | 74.3% |
| LITHUANIA | 99.0 | 35.4% |
| MOLDOVA | 84.9 | 15.6% |
| Moscow | 106.6 | 40.2% |
| N. Novgorod | 93.1 | 22.0% |
| Orenburg | 92.7 | 20.4% |
| Perm | 93.3 | 19.2% |
| POLAND | 100.2 | 30.5% |
| RUSSIA | 96.0 | 21.1% |
| Ryazan | 94.7 | 20.3% |
| Saint-Petersburg | 102.6 | 51.5% |
| Samara | 99.2 | 22.1% |
| Saratov | 96.0 | 23.8% |
| Tambov | 95.9 | 16.6% |
| Tatarstan | 98.1 | 17.9% |
| Tula | 98.6 | 20.7% |
| Ulyanovsk | 91.5 | 15.6% |
| Vladimir | 98.9 | 27.0% |
| Vologda | 95.3 | 19.1% |
| Voronezh | 92.7 | 16.3% |
Literacy and Social Development in 1890s Russia (from Grigoriev et al. 2015)
Incidentally, I am not surprised to see Yaroslavl being the top non-Baltic/non-capital Russian region by literacy rate in 1897. It struck me as by far the cleanest and most civilized provincial Russian town on the Golden Ring when I visited it in 2002 (a time when Russia was still shaking off the hangover of the Soviet collapse). Curiously enough, it also hosted one of the most vigorous insurrections against the Bolshevik regime in central Russia. Although it was not one of the regions covered by PISA, I would not be surprised if Yaroslavl oblast was to get a 100-102 score on it should it be carried out there (and as would be implied by the correlation curve).
Much like the Jews left what is Ukraine through Jackson-Vanik and Aliyah, smart people had their own exodus over the years, especially starting 1990’s, but perhaps earlier than that. I am therefore skeptical about the human potential of Ukrainians that in fact will only go down under third world conditions and lack of cultivation.
And the jewish oblast**
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_Autonomous_Oblast
Could it be that tsarist aggressive russification policies drove down literacy rates for non-russian orthodox (and Greek-Catholics forced to orthodoxy), like moldavians, ukrainians and belorussians?
Protestants, catholics and jews had their own school systems, but non-russians orthodox didn’t.
The church in russian Moldova was moved from obedience to Yassy metropolitan and the Constantinople patriarch to the russian church. That also turned parochial schools from romanian to russian.
In Russian Moldova the government opened in the 1860’s russian village schools where romanian was forbidden. The same thing happened, on a smaller scale, in the baltic countries creating a decrease in literacy in the second half of the 19th century.
As you can see in this map in 1930 the part of Moldova that had the misfortune to be part of Russia for a century had a much lower literacy rate than the other half, despite having a majority population with the same ethnic origins.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_Romania#/media/File:Romania_1930_literacy_EN.svg
I doubt that IQ has anything to do with this.
With regards to Ukraine, keep in mind the local social situation. The low literacy Ukrainian governates such as Podoliya were populated by Ukrainian peasants and Polish nobles, who were less inclined than Russian nobles to promote literacy among the surrounding peasants. Thus, literacy rates in these areas might have been due to factors other than genetic ones.
In Galicia, under a totally different administration, literacy was 44% by 1900 – lower than in the Baltics and St. Petersburg, but higher than in Moscow (42%). It was lower among ethnic Ukrainians than among Poles or Jews but looking in mostly-Ukrainian counties it was still around 30% – higher than that of every ethnic Russian region other than Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Yaroslavl.
I think this does reflect IQ, but it seems clear that it does not reflect genetics. There is no great genetic difference between Galicians, and Ukrainians in the Right Bank, yet Galician literacy was double that of the Right Bank in 1900. As a result of factors that can be explained by having been part of the Russian Empire, literacy and IQ were lower in eastern Moldova and central Ukraine than in Romania and Galicia.
The north-south IQ gradient among farmers and their descendants is a very real and very important thing. It would be interesting to rank populations by their average-historical farming latitude and to compare that with IQ.
For example, the southern Han are to some extent descended from migrants from northern China. One could look up the northern Han portion of their ancestry and then estimate what portion of their ancestors spent how many centuries farming at what latitude. With a little bit of arythmetic one could arrive at a comprehensive latitude-of-farming-history score of lots of populations.
Another example: the people of the former Yugoslavia are partly Slavic and partly ancient Illyrian. The proportion of Slavic ancestry among them is known, the average latitude of the proto-Slavic ur-Heimat is known, the amount of time each of these two elements spent farming is known. One could arrive at a score that derives from all of these variables.
The reality is more complex than that of course. Both the Illyrian and the Slavic portions were mixtures of various elements with their own histories. The more of this historical complexity one takes into account, the more meaningful the score would be.
One result of this would be the amount of IQ pull per degree of latitude per generation spent farming.
In Galicia, under a totally different administration, literacy was 44% by 1900
Do you have a reference for that? A quick search revealed this map of literacy in the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1880. At that time Galicia had one of the lowest literacy rates in the Habsburg state.
On that map Galicia’s literacy rate seems to be below Croatia’s. What’s modern Croatia’s mean IQ? 90? A little higher? And since 1880 Galicia lost a lot of Poles and Jews, so the native population would be below that. Croatia probably lost some Germans and Italians, but they would have comstituted a much smaller percentage of the population.
Literacy improved dramatically starting form the 1880s. By 1914 almost all Galician kids were in school.
There is a reference here:
https://keithdarden.files.wordpress.com/2009/11/darden-natural-experiment.pdf
Page 20.
” In Galicia as a whole in 1880, only 17.3% of men and 10.3% of women could read and write.27 By 1900, literacy rates for the population as a whole were up to 44% (Sirka 1980, 79). By 1910, 59% of people over the age of nine were fully literate (Himka 1980, 60).
Ukrainian-language newspapers grew in number, circulation, and frequency throughout the period leading up to WWI, and private reading societies expanded their membership.28 In this process the spread of literacy and the formation of a (regionally limited) national culture went hand in hand, and it was the educated priests, teachers, and cantors who provided the leadership in both spheres, and local cadres in the national movement were expanded by the literate peasantry as education was extended to the countryside (Himka 1980, 113).
On that map eastern (Ukrainian) Galicia’s literacy is about the same as that of Polish western Galicia. What is Poland’s modern IQ? 99? A bit higher than Russia’s 97?
Generally specially in the past literacy was demanded where it was needed, read: Urban areas.
I don’t know Poland. Western Galicia could be its hick part. Or Western Galicia’s current population could be completely different from its 1880 population. One would have to know Poland and be unbiased about it to know these things.
I love maps. So I was staring at that 1880 map and I noticed a little town north-west of Lvov called Rawa Ruska, i.e. Russian Rawa. So I thought “what did the Banderites rename it into?” Looked it up. It’s still called Rawa Ruska! I don’t like using non-English words in English-language writing, but I guess that would be a zrada.
Are you an expert on Croatia?
It’s telling that you ignore the fact that the Eastern (Ukrainian) Galicia in 1880 was about as literate as western (Polish) Galicia that year, which is right next to and part of the same province, but you ignored this and skipped all the way down to Croatia to make your comparison. Probably because in Lynn’s study Croatia’s IQ is 90 while Poland’s is 99 (higher than Russia’s 97).
Also, hopefully you realize that Galicia 1880 to Russia 1897 is a less parallel comparison than Galicia 1900 to Russia 1897?
Other than Warsaw (for obvious reasons) the most backward part of Poland is generally considered to be the former Russian part.
The town is called Рава-Руська in Ukrainian. Rus isn’t Russia. There is still a Rus’ka Street in the center of Lviv, btw.
You continue to demonstrate your ignorance of all things western Ukrainian.
Some time ago I quoted to you a German diplomat of the 16th century who defined Russia (exact Latin spelling) as the area from around Krakow to the Volga, and south of the Arctic Ocean. I know enough history to be able to tell you that this was the common pre-20th-century understanding of the extent of core Russia.
In addition to brain drain, Moldovan IQ is also affected by a significant population of Gagauz and Gypsies. Given all this, and even if it is likely that they have the lowest IQs of any European people, I still have a hard time believing it’s near sub-Saharan levels.
I’m imagining teachers handing out the PISA and a lot of Moldovan kids just saying ‘fuck it’, more so than in other places.
Von Herberstein was the Holy Roman Empire’s ambassador to Russia. Not a marginal scribbler of some sort, but the exact opposite. He officially represented Charles V, Europe’s most important ruler (by a huge margin) in Moscow.
AP, do you claim that von Herberstein’s definition of “Russia” was incorrect for its time? That it was at odds with the general 16th-century understanding of what Russia was? If so, can you provide a different definition of Russia from that period?
Alternatively, do you think that von Herberstein’s definition was correct for its time, but that the common understanding of what Russia was changed after him? If so, at what date? What is the earliest definition of Russia (or Rus) that you can find that agrees with your view and disagrees with von Herberstein’s?
I found the quotes again:
“Russia extends near to the Sarmatian mountains [Glossy: Carpathians], up to a short distance from Cracow.”
Next page:
“Of the princes who now rule over Russia the first is the Grand Duke of Moscow, who holds the greater part of it; the second is the Grand Duke of Lithuania; the third is the King of Poland, who now is sovereign both of Poland and Lithuania.”
Just a note to both Glossy and AP that the modern IQ figures for both Russian provinces and now independent countries are based on PISA data (so as to maintain consistency since of course Lynn doesn’t have subnational figures for Russia).
Croatia’s 2009PISA-derived IQ is 96, i.e. virtually the same as Russia’s.
Around 1900, the literacy rates in Bessarabia and Romania were virtually identical: 15.6% in Bessarabia (per Anatoly’s link above) vs. 13% in Romania.
The fact that the literacy in Bessarabia has not improved much since then can only be blamed on Romanian government’s educational policies. Bessarabia’s development was simply never a priority to them, and not just with the respect to education.
I wonder what the birthrates in the high IQ areas were.There is a book Architects of Annihilation which says that the Nazi (and Soviet) mass killing, were influenced by an economic analysis of rural overpopulation. Overpopulation had become evident in parts of Russia by the nineteenth century.
If you think that “core Russia” as it is understood in the modern sense extended to near Krakow I can’t help you.
I suspect he used “Russia” to refer to Rus. Perhaps in Latin, unlike in the East Slavic languages, there were no separate words for these two entities.
You are conveniently quoting from an 1850s English translation.
Here is a Russian translation:
The translator notes: ” Г. употребляет термин “Руссия” в двух смыслах — как восточно-славянская территория в пределах Древнерусского государства и как Русское государство конца XV — начала XVI”
“Herberstein uses the term “Russiya” in two understandings of the term – as an East Slavic territory within the limits of the Old Rus state and as the Russian State at the end of the 15th and beginning of the 16th century”
http://www.vostlit.info/Texts/rus8/Gerberstein/frametext1.htm
“Руссия граничит с Сарматскими горами (montes Sarmatici, Sarmatisch gebuerg) 44, расположенными неподалеку от Кракова…”
From the note for this passage:
“В данном случае термин “Руссия” Г. употребляет в широком смысле ”
In this case the term “Russiya” is used in the broad sense” [see above].
As a Russian speaker you surely know better, so I suspect your purpose here is to present a false picture.
The Russian translator of Herberstein’s work adequately explained the meaning of “Russiya” as he used it. See above. You have chosen to twist that meaning in order to support your ridiculous claim that “core Russia” extended almost to Krakow.
In Herberstein’s work, “Russia” as understood in the modern sense probably corresponds to Muscovy, the part of Russiya ruled by the Grand Duke of Moscow.
Thanks for the clarification.
The (relatively) high Galician literacy rates of 1900 compared to the rest of Ukraine and to much of the Russian Empire might correspond to modern Lviv oblast having almost the highest percentage of the population with post-secondary education in Ukraine (it lags behind only Kiev City and Kharkiv oblast):
https://www.google.com/search?q=%D0%9F%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%BD%D0%B0+%D0%B2%D0%B8%D1%89%D0%B0+%D0%BE%D1%81%D0%B2%D1%96%D1%82%D0%B0+%D1%81%D0%B5%D1%80%D0%B5%D0%B4+%D0%B7%D0%B0%D0%B9%D0%BD%D1%8F%D1%82%D0%BE%D0%B3%D0%BE+%D0%BD%D0%B0%D1%81%D0%B5%D0%BB%D0%B5%D0%BD%D0%BD%D1%8F&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwi7ntLR_eTKAhWIVT4KHWl3AiwQ_AUICCgC&biw=1920&bih=955#imgrc=mzI-rx6ftoMMgM%3A
The areas with the lowest literacy in 1897/1900 have the smallest percentage of people with post-secondary education in 2001. I suspect that PISA data would follow a similar pattern.
The Russian translator, whoever he was, pulled all of that out of his back side. I’ve read the Latin original of that passage. And I quoted it to you in the past. There’s nothing there about a broad and a narrow sense. There’s only one sense. The idea that Rus’ and Russia are different things is a very modern one. I’ve only ever seen it pushed by Polish and Ukrainian nationalists. I’ve never seen it expressed in any document prior to the 20th century.
Russia began as a bookish form of Rus’. It became the standard form by the 17th century, with Rus’ gradually becoming the folksy, archaic form. But until 20th-century historical revisionists showed up, they always referred to the same territory.
AP, of you can find any document from before the 20th century that implies that Rus’ and Russia are two different territiories, you will score some points for your view. If you can find any such document from before the 19th century, you will prove me wrong outright. Not 20th-century editorializing by a biased translator, but text written before the 19th century. Something that says that a patch of territory, no matter where, is in Rus’, but not in Russia.
The original: http://www.hs-augsburg.de/~harsch/Chronologia/Lspost16/Sigismundus/sig_co01.html
“Caeterum Russia montes Sarmaticos haud longea Cracovia attingit.”
I’m much worse at Latin than at the modern Romance languages, but I would translate it like this:
“Besides, Russia reaches the Sarmatian mountains not far from Krakow.” Why does he start the sentence with “besides”? That I don’t know.
“Principum qui nunc Russiae imperant, primus est, Magnus dux Moscovuiae, qui maiorem eius partem obtinet: secundus, magnus dux Lithvuaniae: tertius est rex Poloniae, qui nunc & Poloniae & Lithvuaniae praeest.”
This is very easy to understand:
“Of the princes who now rule Russia, the first is the grand duke of Moscow, who holds its greater part. The second is the grand duke of Lithuania. The third is the king of Poland, who now possesses both Poland and Lithuania.”
Von Herberstein’s understanding of what Russia was (a country, a people, but not a state) was far from unique at his time or at any time. People have been continuously talking about Italy and Italians since before the start of the Christian era, yet there was no state called Italy until the late 19th century. The same situation now applies to the Kurds and Kurdistan. People have been talking about Spain and Spaniards since before the Roman period, but the Spanish state was only really born in the late 15th century.
I think it was Ivan III who started calling himself the Grand Prince of All Rus’. This was a claim to territories that he did not possess. He was basically saying that Kiev, Chernigov, Smolensk, etc. were his by right and that their current owners were thieves and imposters. Von Herberstein diplomatically ignored that claim in the above quote, calling Ivan’s heirs the Grand Princes of Moscow instead.
I want to make my meaning as clear and precise as possible:
Before Polish and Ukrainian historical revisionists showed up in the latter part of the 19th century everyone (Moscow officialdom, Polish officialdom and outside observers like von Herberstein) agreed on what core Russia (same thing as core Rus’) was. The disagreement was about who it should belong to. The reason I use the word “core” here is to distinguish the territory of the medieval Rus’ (aka Russian) state from later acquisitions like the Kazan’ and Astrakhan’ Khanates, Siberia, the Baltic area (which Ivan IV was already trying to annex), etc.
This complication is not unusual. Pre-WWI Germany did not include the Hapsburg Empire’s historically German lands, but acquired overseas colonies. Vienna, Linz, Salzburg, etc. were and are parts of core Germany, but they weren’t in the German state of 1913. Namibia was never a part of core Germany, but was in the German state of 1913.
Lvov isn’t in core Russia anymore, but that’s a product of a relatively recent change in public mood. From what I understand it’s something that happened around the time of WWI.
I suspect he used “Russia” to refer to Rus. Perhaps in Latin, unlike in the East Slavic languages, there were no separate words for these two entities.
You’re taking a concept (two entities) invented by modern historical revisionists and applying it to the 16th century. And when you don’t see it in the 16th century, you say that Latin just didn’t make that distinction. Of course. No language did. It’s a phony modern distinction. It’s a product of modern Polish and Ukranian nationalisms, not of the Middle Ages or of the early modern period.
As I showed to you before, the -ia form is attested in the mid-10th century. Constantine Parphyrogenitos, the Byzantine Emperor (another anachronistic term, since he would have called himself the Roman Emperor), called Igor (Ingor to him) and Svyatoslav (Sphendosthlavos) the rulers of Rosia.
The -ia ending simply added a Greco-Latin gloss, a degree of formality to the word. It didn’t make that word acquire a new territorial meaning.
If you find a pre-modern explanation of the difference between these two terms that says that they referred to different territories, you will prove me wrong.
OK, I found another pre-modern definition of “Russia”. It was written by a Pole named Maciej Miechowita who lived from 1457 to 1523.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maciej_Miechowita
It’s contained in a work of his called “Tractatus de duabus Sarmatiis, Asiana et Europiana,
et de contentis in eis.” (Treatise of two Sarmatias, the Asian and European, and of their contents).
https://www.hs-augsburg.de/~harsch/Chronologia/Lspost16/Miechow/mie_tra0.html
The first chapter of the second book is called “De Russia, de districtibus eius, de abundantia et contentis in ea.” (On Russia, its districts, its abundance and contents).
https://www.hs-augsburg.de/~harsch/Chronologia/Lspost16/Miechow/mie_tr21.html
The passages that define “Russia”:
“Postquam diximus de Sarmatia Asiae, quae Scythia vocitatur, restat dicere de Sarmatia Europiana, et in ea primum occurrit Russia, olim Roxolania dicta. Latus eius orientalis adiacet flumini Tanai et Paludibus Meotidis, secernentibus Asiam ab Europa.”
My translation;
After having talked of Asian Sarmathia, which is called Scythia, it remains [for us] to talk of European Sarmathia, and in it Russia, which was once called Roxolinia, occurs first. Its eastern side is bordered by the river Tanais [Glossy: the Don] and the Meotian marshes [the area around the Sea of Azov], which divides Asia from Europe.
A little later:
“Clauditur autem Russia a meridie Sarmaticis montibus et flumine Tiras, quem incolae Niestr appellant. Ab Oriente finitur Tanai et Meotidibus Tauricaque insula, a septemtrione Lithuania, ab occasu vero Polonia.”
My translation:
Now, Russia is limited in the south by the Sarmatian mountains [Glossy: the Carpathians] and the river Tiras, which inhabitants [he obviously means locals] call Niestr [this is the Dnestr]. In the east it’s bordered by Tanais [Glossy: the Don river], the Meotide [the Maeotian Swamps, a classical name for the area around the Sea of Azov] and the Tauric island [apparently he thought that the Crimea was an island], in the north by Lithiania, in the west by Poland.”
You can look for an English or Russian translation yourself, but the Latin meaning is clear to me. “Russia” (exact spelling) is bordered by the Carpathians and the Dnestr in the south, the Don, the Azov area and the Crimea in the east, Lithuania in the north and Poland in the west.
A good map of the Don River:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b0/Don_basin.png?uselang=ru
A comparison with the map of Kievan Rus’ (which of course just called itslef Rus’ and Russia):
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4e/Kievan-rus-1015-1113-%28en%29.png.
He’s describing all of what’s now the Ukraine and a large chunk of European Russia.
He mentions Galicia and Lvov:
“Postea ad montes Sarmaticos habitat genus Rutenorum, quibus praesident nobiles Polonorum in Kolomya, in Zydaczuow, in Sniatin, in Roatin, in Busko etc. Sub eisdem montibus sunt districtus Haliciensis, olim Gallicia dictus, et Premysliensis, et inter montes Sarmaticos districtus Sanocensis. In medium Russiae tenendo est Leopoliensis terra et urbs in ea bene munita, eodem nomine nuncupata, habens duo castra, superum et inferum, et est metropolis Russiae.”
There should be translations online, but the highlights are that the Leopolian land and city are in “Russia”, Leopolis is a “metropolis of Russia” and that a “Rutenian” people lives by the Sarmatian mountains. As clear from the above, his “Russia” extends to the Don.
As I said above, Miechowita called those who lived by the Carpathian mountains “the Rutenian people”. What did that adjective mean to him? Here’s the answer:
The chapter “De Moscouia” starts with these words:
“Moskouia est regio longissima latissimaque. Nam a Smolensko usque ad Mockwam civitatem sunt centum miliaria, a Moskwa ad Volochda centum miliaria, et Volochda est pro[p. 189]vincia, et fluvius per ipsam labens eodem nomine vocatur; a Volochda ad Vsczuga centum miliaria, ab Vsczuga ad Viatka 1 centum miliaria, et ista quadringenta miliaria sunt de regione Moskouiae, et sermo per totum est Rutenicus seu Slauonicus.”
The language throughout Moscouia is Rutenian, or Slauonian. The distnction between the U and the V is very recent, so you can read those as “Moscovian” and “Slavonian”.
What’s absent in the bits of this treatise that I have now read is a distinction between Rus’ and Russia. The same word (Rutenian) is used for the people of the Carpathians and the language spoken throughout Moscovia.
Glossy is totally right.
In medieval time present day Ukraine and Belarus were called Russia.
Unfortunately UgroMongol hordes from Moscow took over the name and called themselves Russian to appear more civilized.
The same case as with Gypsies / Roma / Romanians.
As anybody could expect renaming did not change the Nature / Nurture of UgroMongols aka Russians.
The term Russia became so negatively loaded that Ukrainians felt obliged to rename themselves into Ukrainians.
I think Romanians should do just like Ukrainians before.
Maybe Dacians ?
“Flumina in Moskouia sunt plurima, aliqua autem maiora scitu digna enumerabo. Tanais, nominatissimus fluvius, a Thartaris et Moskouitis Don nuncupatus, fontes et originem habet in Moskouia”
The Tanais, which the Tatars and Muscovites call the Don, originates in Moscovia. Why is that important? He says elsewhere that “Russia” extends to the Tanais on the east.
“Accipiat quarto in Moskouia unam linguam et unum sermonem fore, scilicet Rutenicum seu Slauonicum in omnibus satrapiis et principatibus, sicque etiam Ohulci et qui in Viatka degunt Ruteni sunt et Rutenicum loquuntur…”
Fourthly, understand that that in Moscovia there is one language and one speech, called Rutenian or Slavonian, in all the satrapies and principalities. Also Ohulci [I don’t know who they were] and in Viatka [people] speak Rutenian.
So the same language, Rutenian, is spoken by the Carpathians and in Viatka.
“Magnus ducatus Lithuaniae est regio latissima. In ea sunt plures duces Lithuaniae et Russiae…”
“The Grand Duchy of Lithuanian is a very wide realm. In it there are many dukes of Lithuania and Russia.”
In general he regards Moscovia and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania as states, but Russia as an area.
“Pskow, urbs notabilis murata et magna, minor tamen, quam Nowygrod, adiacet Moskouiae et Lithuaniae; hanc Latini Pleskouiam appellant. Inhabitatores ipsius omnes sunt lingua et ritu Ruteni”
Pskow, an important walled and large city, but smaller than Nowygorod [I’m retaining the original spellings] borders Moscovia and Lithuania. The Latins call it Pleskov. All of its inhabitants are Rutenians by language and rite.
QED. The people lilving next to the Carpathian mountains, the people of Pskov and the people of Viatka are all Rutenians.
If you don’t know anything about Russian history and you look up the Ruthenian language in the Wikipedia, you will “learn” that “Ruthenian can be seen as a predecessor of modern Belarusian, Rusyn and Ukrainian.”
Yet here there is a Pole saying in 1517 that only one language is spoken in Moscovia, and that’s Rutenian, aka Slavonian. He describes both Galicians and the people of Viatka as Rutenians. These are the extreme SW and NE points of historical Rus’/Russia, its bookends.
Life lesson: don’t believe everything you read in encyclopedias. Always try to find out who the authors are and what their biases might be. Go for the primary sources if you have the time and the curiosity.
I’ll give you another example:
You can read in many places that until the 19th century the French language was strictly the thing spoken around Paris and that it was not intelligeable to most of the subjects of the French king.
I recently read Rousseau’s autobiography called Confessions. He was born in Geneva and walked the entire length and breadth of France in his youth, in the 1720s and 1730s, sometimes sleeping outdoors. He recorded numerous conversations with people of every station in life all along his journeys. Never once do I remember him mentioning having trouble understanding anyone. The book was written in standard-seeming French. He never mentioned having to learn it. The only thing he wrote on this subject was that at the beginning of his writing career he had to correct one specific grammatical mistake that Genevans like him made.
He did describe his attempts to learn a foreign language, and that was Latin. Those attempts failed.
It makes you think. There are political reasons for modern historians to claim that the French language and culture were invented in the 19th century. It could be wishful thinking.
I remember a discussion on the languagehat blog about the origin of Quebeqois French. Most of the ancestors of modern Quebeckers left France in the 17th century. And most of them weren’t from Paris. Yet the language of modern Quebec is mutually intelligible with modern standard French. It’s just an accent of it. How did that come about? People started coming up with explanations, and none of them seemed plausible.
So this claim of lack of mutual intelligibility in France before the 19th century might be BS. The whole Ruthenian thing is definitely BS. The word was used historically, but not in the sense that these BS artists ascribe to it now.
[Ohulci [I don’t know who they were]]
Voguls, whom we now know and love as the Mansi in Khanty-Mansiisk?
You are right on all counts. The forms Ruteni and Roxolani are just a pseudo-etymological show of classical erudition (the first was the name of a tribe in Gaul, the second belonged to one of Germanic or Sarmatian invaders).
In the parts I’ve read I don’t remember him ever forming a demonym directly from the word Russia. When he uses a demonym for the locals, it’s Ruteni instead. In the section on Galicia it’s clear that Galicia in in Russia and that its people are Ruteni. So it seems that he used Ruteni as the demonym and Russia as the corresponding toponym.
Why didn’t he write Russii or Russi instead of Ruteni? You may have found the reason. There probably weren’t any people called Russii in Greco-Roman literature. But there was a people called Ruteni in it. They were in Gall, and so completely unrelated to Russia, but it was a classical word.
He had a tendency for classicism. I refuse to believe that anyone on the ground was calling the Don Tanais in 1517. He got that out of Greek or Latin books. Same thing with the Meotian marshes.
Just for completeness, I think I should add the following:
After saying that that there is only one language in Moscovia and that it is called Rutenian, aka Slavonian, Matthew of Miechow (there are many ways to spell his name) lists two exceptions:
Praeter Thartaros Kosanenses, qui ducem Moskorum recognoscentes Machometum una cum Sarracenis venerantur et linguagium Thartaricum loquuntur. Etiam praeter alienigenas ad septemtrionem in Scythia commorantes, qui sermone et linguis propriis loquuntur et idola colunt, prout in sequenti capitulo dicetur.
Excepting the Kazan Tatars, who recognize the duke of Moscow and together with the Saracenes venerate Mohammed and speak the Tatar language. Also excepting other peoples, living in the north of Scythia who speak their own languages and worship idols, about which I’ll speak in the next chapter.
This establishes beyond doubt that the lingua Rutenica is the Russian language.
“History of Rus, or Little Russia”:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Rus
It was written either in the last decade of the 18th century or the first decade of the 19th century, and widely circulated among the nobles of the Ukrainian Left Bank for decades before being published in Moscow in 1846.
Here is a transcript:
https://books.google.com/books?id=MrIcAAAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=%D0%98%D1%81%D1%82%D0%BE%D1%80%D0%B8%D1%8F+%D0%A0%D1%83%D1%81%D0%BE%D0%B2&hl=ru&cd=2#v=onepage&q&f=false
It’s also online here:
http://izbornyk.org.ua/istrus/istrus02.htm
“Восточныхъ Славянъ называли Скиθами или Скиттами по кочевой жизни и по частому переселенію съ мЂста на мЂсто; Полуденныхъ Сарматами по острымъ ящуринымъ глазамъ съ прижмуркою; и Русами или Русняками по волосамъ; СЂверныхъ приморскихъ Варягами называли по хищничеству и по засадамъ, ожидающимъ прохожихъ; а въ срединЂ отъ тЂхъ живущихъ по родоначальникамъ ихъ, потомкамъ Афетовымъ, называли: по Князю Русу, Роксоланами и Россами, а по Князю Мосоху, кочевавшему при рЂкЂ Моск†и давшему ей сіе названіе, Москвитами и Мосхами: отъ чего впослЂдствіи и Царство ихъ получило названіе Московскаго и наконецъ Россійскаго.”
Translation [My Russian is rather rough here, feel free to correct me]: The called Eastern Slavs Scyffians or Scythians with sharp…eyes, and Rus or Rusnaks by their hair, Variags along the sea were named for their predation…and in the middle living the descendants of Afetov, who were called Prince of Rus Poksoliany or Rossy, and by the Prince of Moscow Mosokhy, nomads along the Moskva River also known as Moskvyty and Moskh, from whom was descended a Tsardom that obtained the name Muscovy and eventually Russian.
Later:
“Bладимирское на КлязьмЂ и наконецъ Московское по городу МосквЂ. Но и тЂ Княжества, славилися первенствомъ свіоимъ по 1238 годъ; а съ сего года нашествіе войною Мунгальскихъ Татаръ, подъ начальствомъ Хана ихъ Батыя, внука Чингис-Ханова, всЂ Княжества удЂльныя и великія разрушило почти до основанія; города ихъ и селенія разорены и многіе сожжены; Князья и воинства избиты, а оставшіесь разсЂялись по отдаленнымъ СЂвернымъ провинціямъ, и съ сего времени большая часть Рускихъ Княжествъ подпали Татарскому игу. И хотя Княжества опять возстановлены, но пребывали они съ Князьями своими въ подданст†Татарскихъ Хановъ, которые, взимая дань съ народа, поставляли въ нихъ Князей и ихъ перемЂняли по своему произволенію, что продолжалось по 1462 годъ, въ который Князь Московскій Иванъ Васильевичь, Третій сего имени, пользуясь слабостію Татаръ, изнемогшихъ междоусобными войнами и раздЂлами, отказалъ Хану Ахмату отъ ежегодной дани съ народа и отъ своего повиновенія; а внукъ сего Князя, Иванъ Васильевичь Четвертый, названный Грозный, совокупивъ многія Княжества Рускія во едино, въ 1547 году переименовалъ себя изъ Князя Царемъ и Самодержцемъ Московскимъ, и съ того времяни навсегда уже Царство Московское и его владЂтели симъ названіемъ титуловались, съ переименованіемъ наконецъ Царства Московскаго на Россійское, которое, для различія отъ Чермной и БЂлой Руси, называлось Великою Россіею; тЂ же обЂ Руси вмЂстЂ названы тогда Малою Россіею.”
I’ll just translate the end, about the Moscow Princes:
“In 1547 they renamed themselves from Princes and Autocrats of Moscow, and from that time the tsardom of Moscow and its owners…eventually changed from Tsardom of Moscow to Tsardom of Russia, which in order to distinguish itself from Black and White Russia was called Great Russia, and the Rus were called Little Russia.”
The Russian translator was clarifying the situation so that others would not be confused and would not assume that Russia as described in Latin was Russia, the modern nation.
I imagine that if Romania had become a great power that managed to annex Italy, translations involving the word “Roman” would have to clarify that they speak of Ancient Rome and not Romania, so that wierdos would not claim that places such as Spain or Italy were parts of core Romania.
This is not surprising, as modern nationalities did not exist at that time.
It’s rather standard among modern non-Russian scholars (in the past, Westerners often simply deferred to Russians, who were pushing an agenda). Norman Davies, for example, compares Vladimir of Kiev to Charlemagne (Karl der Grosse). The latter was neither French nor German in the modern sense.
Your quotes from the Polish translation merely demonstrate, again, that in Latin the word for Rus was Russia and for Rus people was Ruthenian. Whether the person writing in Latin was a German or a Pole, the word was the same. Perhaps this was true because the word Russia was created at the time of Rus, before modern Russia existed.
You did not provide a quote stating that the speech was the same in Lviv as it was in Moscow. You only proved that it was called by the same name. Which is not surprising, as the speech in the Carpathians is still called Rus:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rusyn_language
Which of course does not mean that the language they speak is the Russian language.
The other point is that in 1500 the speech in Russia and in Ukraine may not have been as different as it would be in, say, 1700. What makes Ukrainian different from Russian in a way that, say Bavarian is not different from High German, is the massive influx of foreign Polish words into the Ukrainian language that can be comparable to the impact of French on the English language; just as modern English despite being a Germanic language has more words in common with French than with German, so Ukrainian despite being an East Slavic language has more words in common with Polish than it does with Russian. In 1500 this process was only beginning.
No, the people living next to the Carpathian mountains, in Pskov and Viatka all have the same name in Latin, Ruthenians, and their speech(es) are called the same.
To say they are all the same people – Russians! in the sense of the modern Russian nation – is a leap akin to claiming that the people of Rome and the Romansh people of Switzerland are Romanians, based on the fact that their word for themselves is almost identical and that they are all on the territory of the old Roman Empire.
To summarize, you’ve basically just proven what is already known: Russia was the Latin word for Rus, and people from the Carpathians to Moscow referred to their speech in a similar way that was translated as the word (Ruthenian) into Latin. You have failed to support your bizarre theory that until the 19th century the core area of Russia in the modern sense extended almost to Krakow.
OK, you get points for finding something that was published in the 19th century that contrasts Russia and Rus’. It’s full of historical errors of course and, as I said before, something from before the 19th century would be more significant.
The implication that the -ia ending was added in Moscow is false. It was already used in 10th century Byzantium. I just quoted to you two 16th-century authors who used the -ia form for, among other areas, Galicia.
The implication that the term Little Russia was invented in Moscow in the 16th century is false. It was already used by the Byzantines in the Middle Ages. They wrote “micro Rosia”.
And the quality of the etymologies here (Scythians from the Russian word скитаться, etc.) is exactly the same as the quality of all subsequent Ukro-nationalist historical scholarship. Impressive consistency.
This is not surprising, as modern nationalities did not exist at that time
This is false. Nationalist feeling screams at readers from ancient and medieval documents. Nothing the ancients did would make sense without it.
Matthew of Miechow’s treatise is still in my mind, so I’ll cite an example from it. At one point he refers to “vero Polonia”, “true Poland”, obviously to contrast it with lands held by the Polish crown whcih were’t ethnically Polish. This implies a belief in the existence of the Polish ethnicity.
Also, von Herberstein repeats the Lech, Czech and Rus story of Slavic origins. It describes these ethnicities as communities bound by common descent.
If not for leftism, the past would seem like a third-world country. By producing bad art and intellectual inanities like race-is-a-social-construct and nationalism-was-invented-in-the-19th-century modernity provided us with reasons to look up to the past. The Lech, Czech and Rus story has problems but it’s FAR closer to the truth than the modern PC view that you parrot.
The exact date of origin is unknown, however it is as likely to have originated in the last decade of the 18th century as the first decade of the 19th.
I don’t vouch for the accuracy of the historical speculations in that document. The point is that it differentiates Rus from Muscovy/Russia, and identifies Rus not with Russia but with Little Russia, and Russia with Muscovy.
A we have seen, Russia was used in Latin to refer to Rus long before Russia (or Ukraine) existed. Russia continued to be used in Latin to apply towards territories that had been part of Rus. To use this as “proof” that Galicia, referred to as Russia in Latin, is a core part of Russia as Russia is understood in a modern sense is a rather silly word game. It is comparable to some Romanian kook arguing that the city of Rome or the Romansh parts of Swizterland are core areas of Romania.
We know that you confuse tribalism with nationalism. You probably don’t even know the difference between patriotism and nationalism. If I am not mistaken, you somewhere stated that, for example, the Drevlian leader who resisted the Rus was a Drevlian “nationalist.”
Nationalism began as a leftist idea linked to populism, and as such was opposed to conservatism which was traditionally anti-nationalist. Nationalism helped fill a void for modern non-traditional people that had previously been filled by religion, or community. Nationalism involved a change of loyalty from country or ruler to “people” – oneself. It is a cult of a people and of their state. Thus, reactionary Austria-Hungary was more conservative than the nationalist German Empire.
Here is Daniel Larison of the American Conservative magazine:
“There was no nationalism properly so called in the middle ages… as there were no self-conscious nations organised on that basis, but on the basis of dynastic rulers. There was scarcely any nationalism in the Orthodox lands… until the late 18th century with the introduction of Enlightenment ideas. ”
“The Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars spread the virus of nationalism throughout Europe and infected almost everyone, except for the remnants of the old regime that saw nationalism married to liberalism as the great threat to continental peace and order. In this case, the old regime’s last defenders were right and the liberals were wrong. Particularly in central Europe liberalism was closely tied to the development of pan-German nationalism, because German liberals came to identify their national cause with the cause of liberal reform and viewed their ethnic rivals, basically correctly, as adherents of the status quo. Of course, non-Germans in the Habsburg empire rallied to the conservative establishment and usually remained the arch-conservatives of the empire, which the German liberals used as evidence of their pro-Russian and allegedly pan-Slavic sentiments. Increasingly, nationalists could become the enemies of patriots, because they began to identify with foreign champions of their own nationality’s ambitions. A perfect expression of this were the Nazis in Austria who backed the Anschluss and the occupation of their country by Germany. They betrayed Austria because they were German nationalists. “
You only say that nationalism is a recent invention because your own nationalism appeared recently. Most nationalisms are much older than the Ukrainian one.
Leftists say that nationalism is a recent invention because they hate it. They want to make it look transient, impermanent and made-up. That helps them in their efforts to convince people to abandon it.
I am not a nationalist. I am only repeating what conservative scholars say about nationalism – that it is a recent invention.
I don’t cite leftists.
If leftists, like conservatives, also state that nationalism is a recent invention, well – that must be a nearly universal view of nationalism, then. I suppose conservatives and leftists will also agree the sky is blue on a sunny day, and you will claim it is black. And imply that everyone who disagrees with you is a leftist.
remember how the russians tried to wipe out polish culture with russification?
The assumption ‘Finns are brighter’ because Tsarist research shows their region literate is wrong. Literate were Russian and German (or even Swedes)-inhibited cities and regional centers like Revel (Tallin), Gelsingfors (Helsinki), and other places developed either by Teutonic knights and their heirs – the ‘Ostsei barons’ or Swedes in Finland. These regions were incorporated in Russia only in XVIII-XIX centuries. Local Estonians and Latvians were illiterate and, in general, treated like cattle by their German-speaking ‘noble’ landlords. Only tsar Alexander I granted them school education (church basic literacy), and they had no social lifts at all – just dairy farming. And it was Soviet Union, i.e. generocity of Russians, to grant total literacy to Finn0-Ugric nations. Intellectual capacity of Estonians and Latvians was a joke through the Soviet times. They were always considered retarded, and kept their pagan rites (like unrestricted copulation with everyone on Ligo day of 2 Sunday of June). On that day Soviet soldiers were kept inside garrisons, obviously to prevent intermarrriages with retards.
If Moscow’s IQ score is really 107, the same as Singapore, Shanghai, or Hong Kong, then does Moscow looked a lot more screwed up than those places? And why is the murder rate in Moscow so high if the IQ is the same as Singapore or Tokyo?
Seems to be a whole bunch of BS unless there is a major genetic difference between Slavs in Voronezh/Tula/Orel and Poland.
You mean, 107 in Hong Kong or Singapore, where only children of the privileged class live, and all low-paid work is made by modern slaves – immigrants or peasants, living far from their families? No one ever tested their IQ. Moscow is a city of equal opportunities for Moscovites, with free dairy products for all children, and even free and best public transportation, free shool meals, significant tax cuts and other privileges (like free parking) for families with 3 kids and more. Not to speak about free education and healthcare. Asian IQ scores are blatant propaganda of the rich. So do the crime reports. In Singapore, the state is the mob. In Tokyo, yakudsa solves the problems. Nothing such is possible in Holy Moscow, the capital of the Universe.
My impression is that the Japanese and Koreans have a very flat IQ bell curve, compared to the Chinese. And 105 IQ Japs (even the SNLF which must have been selected from the cognitive elite among the Jap military) did not perform too impressively in the Pacific vs. 100 IQ GIs. despite the GIs not having the Bushido spirit. And what us the use of higher IQs, aside from a topic for mental masturbation, if your cities are turned into ashes and your women end up being mass raped by lower IQ people anyway, and your men folk and nothing but charred bones.
All that IQ and the Norks can’t even perform a nuke test properly? And for Japan and Korea, I heard that the police there will not prosecute any crimes unless they are virtually 100% sure of getting a conviction, so the real murder rate may wind up being closer to say, New Zealand or Sweden in the year 1955.
If Slavs in Kaluga and Poland have so widely varying IQ scores, like 10 points, it begs the question as to whether its possible to bridge the IQ gap between whites and East Asians without needing to have your high school look like Richmond, Vancouver, if you have certain populations of whites like in Moscow with IQ scores already nearly equivalent to East Asians already.
American patriots are anti-white.
It’s more culture and living conditions than genetics.
Shibaev & Lynn 2015 finds that IQ of rural ethnic Russians in the Far East is closer to the level of Tungusics than to that of Poles, Estonians etc. even though it is certain that they, like ethnic Russians of any region of Russia, are much closer to Poles and in fact any of Russia’s western neighbours than to Evenks genetically.
I recall reading an interview by Flynn, in which he stated that he was inspired by the work of Russian psychologists who found the IQ of Siberian Russian villagers to be quite low due to inability to grasp abstract concepts, a problem that was ameliorated by modern education (and thus was not attributable to genetics). One finds similar problems among, say, modern Balkan villagers.
I wonder if that applies to Siberian ethnicities as well, since they tend to score quite a bit lower than Koreans, Chinese and many Europeans.
Here’s the interview:
http://www.iapsych.com/articles/flynnapa2012.pdf
Here’s the interview:
http://www.iapsych.com/articles/flynnapa2012.pdf
The examples of Russians from Siberia he describes, remind me of a family I know in Russia. The grandmother was illiterate, very concrete, superstitious (worried about witches everywhere) but brilliant with respect to sewing: she could see a pattern once and reproduce it perfectly. Her score on an IQ test would be no higher than the 80s, probably. This woman’s daughter was self-taught, and eventually became a member of Russia’s Academy of Sciences as well as recipient of foreign awards in her field. IQ in upper 130s, at least.
Yeah, rapid generational shift can be expected in these cases. Anyway, this Shibaev & Lynn sample should be modern and as far as I know rural Siberian Russians, as well as the Evenk, have access to primary education by now so that should not be as much of an issue as it was two generations ago.
Correct. And it seems that modern education does make a substantial difference – modern provincial IQs are solidly in the 90s, not the low 80s or even upper 70s as they would have been 80 years ago.
Correct. Lynn in his interview estimated these premoderns to have an average IQ of 70 – so 85 in the Shibaev and Lynn sample would be a big improvement.
Moscow’s most recent homicide rate is 3.5/100K as of 2014, which is less than 50% of the national average despite being a huge metropolis.
Russia’s homicide rates are elevated primarily on account of vodka bingeing (a phenomenon similar to Greenland, Native American reservations, Finland until not too long ago) as opposed to direct criminality that you have in Latin America or US ghettoes.
You don’t need to have major genetic differences to get significant average IQ differences as long as the strength of selection for IQ varied historically by different regions (and that’s not even getting into environmental factors like cognitive clustering or differential Flynn effects).
Tell us moar.
@Anatoly Karlin
Just a note that the literacy figure for Finland in that 1897 chart is actually >75%. These rates were reached way back, during the final years of Swedish rule (core Sweden got there earlier, in the 1700s) thanks to, as you note, the Protestant policies of promoting literacy. The Nordic Languages vol 2 published by Walter de Gruyter is very informative re: this issue. By the decree of Charles IX, the whole Bible was translated to Finnish and began to be distributed in the 1600’s.
Estonia’s and Latvia’s histories as parts of Sweden were shorter so they didn’t reach as complete literacy. The Protestant education wasn’t absolutely perfect either, writing skills lagged considerably behind reading skills in Scandinavia and Finland in the 19th century – as per Johansson and Appel only 15-20% of the Swedish peasantry could write by year 1800 despite over 90% being capable of reading.
I think both the WW’s have considerably redistributed/destroyed people in Europe, especially Russians to such an extent that I’d be very wary of using 19th Century data for geographic/chronological comparison.
What about all those 1970s studies showing Irish IQ is the 80s, and now their IQ is around 100?
Why would podunk places in the middle of nowhere have such high IQs? Do we have studies about the average IQ of Whermacht recruits in the Ost Front in 1944 vs. their Slavic Soviet counterparts?
Like in Estonia, in Finland there were no ‘protestant education’ under Swedish rule. Both Finns and Ests were considered ‘pagan cattle’, and their Christianisation took place with sword and fire, yet most commonly with harsch exploitation by Swedish masters. In Estonia, e.g., Swedes even dug out fertile soil and took it to Sweden. Only after Russia gained Finland, tsar Alexander granted a charter to make protestant church schools. The same charter was granted by Peter the Great to a protestant pastor, fellow of his Empress. Why such powerful monarchs didn’t issue an order to make all Finns, Ests, etc. Orthodox Christians? I think, they saw the ‘mediocre’ Finns, were disgusted and did everything to prevent intermarriages.
Not sure if trolling or insanely serious. 🙂
Worth a note that the literacy levels of Finland and Sweden were achieved with domestic teaching, not with church schools.
One can imagine a priest or blacksmith teaching his children. But not the illiterate dairy farmer of Finland or Estonia. Do not consider equal Swedish landlords and borgeoise homeschooling their children, and common Finnish folk (the exploited serfs), that kept its pagan traditions with Kalevala, Yolupukki etc. No trolling at all, we knew real Finns and Estonians, not you. That Finnish drunkards running towards Russian border, and Finnish women making a copulation-tours to Leningrad, offering themselves to Russian males. They were and remain example of dumbness, thats just common knowledge in Russia.
So far you’ve convinced that you know some good stuff, to confuse literacy of Lutheran peasants with some landlords or to see fornicating Latvian girls running around during summer celebrations while Soviet soldiers sit stoicly in their barracks to keep their bloodlines pure. 😉
In reality though, keeping in mind the well-known North-South structure in Russian Y-DNA, these sort of exchanges have often gone the other way.
What studies do you cite? Many of them lack objectivity, since many things depend on samples collection and objectives of the ‘researcher’. With selective sampling and claiming this guy is Russian, that guy is not (by passport data or just self-reported) one can prove almost everything. Russian means either privilege (in Russia) or lack of it (in modern Estonia or Latvia), hence the bias. If we saw smart and creative Estonians, Latvians of Finns, we could have another opinion.
Hey Anatoly, can I get your response to this article:
http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2016-02-09/eminent-domain-moscow-style
It makes Russia seem like a horrible place, where the government just seizes property without compensation and people have no recourse. Is this reporting correct or is it propaganda?
I’m particularly skeptical of this:
So the Russian government just likes to destroy the property of citizens for no reason, just to show who’s boss? This is a cartoon-like version of how leaders behave.
As a Muscovite, I must say this article is complete BS. The demolished buildings were a bunch of dirty places, erected illegally during troubled 1990s. E.g. in my vicinity, it was a gambling salon. Another were doner shops and the same facilities, often owned or controlled by ethnic gangs, with almost no taxes paid, low quality food, etc. The pecularity of Moscow is that such building is often erected ‘temporarily’, than stays, than is fortified against winter conditions, and than expands ans spoils the surroundings completely. We Muscovites support such demolition. And there were no property rights on illegal buildings, since they never existed legally. The russophobic authors criticizing this act, imply that shop owners owned the buildings too and held the property rights, but that’s BS.
Well, just because a building is ugly or sells low quality products, doesn’t mean it should be torn down without compensation. But it all turns on whether this part of the article is true or not:
If this is true, I think it’s hard to defend the actions. But I’m curious about how much of whether the author is just making it up. I don’t trust the media here.
Yes, this is the dirty little, or big secret of a disturbingly high proportion of studies in human genetics – a certain thesis was derived by other means and then surreptitiously imported to interpret data which in itself did not point anywhere.
Well, let me illegally erect a gazebo on your lawn, bribing your gardener while you are away. Then you return and tear my gazebo (where I used to sell stinky doners to your neighbors) down, may I claim compensation from you?
Certainly some studies are purposefully distorted, but Mirabal et al 2009, Oleg Balanovsky’s thesis and really every significant study on Russian gene pool has detected this difference between Russian North and South. The suggestion that Balts or some kind of malign forces have falsified them would most likely be vatnik esoterica. Like the idea of paganism in the Eastern Baltic protestant regions in the 1800’s (Kalevala for instance is not a religion of any sort, but ultimately a poem collection largely from Eastern Orthodox Russian Karelia in early 1800’s) and in general the idea of these regions as dumb but fascist folk who primarily spend their time inventing ways to oppress their Russian population.
The article seems to be B.S. based on the comments here (I admit I haven’t read it). The government doesn’t just grab things without compensation but politically connected people can use eminent domain-type actions to their benefit in a way that would be shocking. For example, if a company wants to buy a residential building in central Moscow (whose apartments are individually owned) it can just take it. The owners will be compensated by apartments of similar value, but often these are far from the city. So you may have lived in a 2 room flat in the heart of the city, and suddenly you find yourself in a newly built 4 room flat out in the suburbs. For this reason it is often safer to buy apartments in very large building in the city center, as they are less likely to be grabbed in such a way.
So you exposed yourself as Ukrainian activist. Balanovsky works have co-authors from Poland and Ukraine, and are like ‘THE GENOME-WIDE STRUCTURE OF THE JEWISH PEOPLE’ etc. I have higher H-index and consider him a biased writer. Have you ever been in Latvia or Estonia to write this? There are still all kinds of obscene cults, sects and paganism. I personally saw there people with swastikas (hakenkreuz) badges, gathering in Rotary-club elite hotel.
Like said, must be some good stuff, I’ll leave it at that.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v466/n7303/abs/nature09103.html
is, by the way, a good paper for a 2009 product.
Re: “Ruthenian, Rusyn, Russian” etc. (language)
The language used in the GDL developed in ways that distinguished it from Muscovite Russian – notably the heavy Latin and Polish influences you describe. Also, within the GDL (a very large realm), regional differences were often recorded.
This language was the official one in the GDL until 1697, when it was replaced by Polish. The most detailed analysis that I’m aware of is by the Norwegian linguist Christian Stang (writing in German), “Die westrussische Kanzleisprache des Grossfürstentums Litauen.”
So far as I am aware, those with documents will be offered modern rebuilt kiosks of a standard design. The problem is that many of the traders rent the sites from the mafia who control them so do not have papers. In most places a more gentle solution has been found.
Modern Ukrainian and Belorussian are unrelated to Western Russian used in by educated people GDL; these languages arose much later, independently, from local peasant dialects. However, the one language that can almost be considered the descendant of Western Russian (or at least being hugely influenced by it) is … modern literary Russian. That’s because the czars had a long standing policy of importing the said educated people from GDL wholesale into Moscow (provided they were Orthodox.) These immigrants dominated Russian literary classes for decades if not centuries; they brought book printing to Russia. Their influence on the language cannot be overestimated.
One small example of how they changed the language is the name of the country. For centuries, it was spelled Rusia (single s.) The immigrants started spelling it in the Latin manner, Russia (double s.) Pretty soon the locals started following them, just like with other usages. And so the name f the country acquired another letter.
Off topic (but not much): you posted about the Dark Elightenment and your place in it some time ago (http://www.unz.com/akarlin/mapping-the-dark-enlightenment/). Well, this is a new blog that aggregates RSS feeds for Alt Right/Dark Enlightenment blogs and sites and you’re there as well, right at the top: Shitlord Hub
While it is true that there was a large importation of intelligentsia from what is now Ukraine and Belarus into Russia (ironically a lot of the Russian ideology emphasizing the unity of Rus was formulated by these people, for whom such an ideology served as a convenient justification for their high and influential positions in Russia, often at the expense of native Russians) I’m not so sure about your linguistic claim, though the example of the spelling of Russia is quite plausible.
The modern, peasant-based, Ukrainian language has more words in common with Polish than it does with Russian. It seems counterintuitive that the peasants would be more influenced by the Polish language than were the intelligentsia/nobility, who in Poland and GDL were actually in the process of becoming largely Polish-speaking. The Orthodox Kiev Academy where much of the local elites studied and whose alumni included Stefan Yavorsky*, first president of the (Russian) Holy Synod and the reformer of the Russian Orthodox Church and a founder of the Russian Academy of Sciences Prokopovich, for example, used Polish and Latin as languages of instruction. If these people had a large linguistic influence on the modern Russian language, one would expect a comparable level of Polonization in the Russian as with the Ukrainian languages.
*About Yavorsky, from wikipedia: “Around 1685 he published his panegyric Hercules post Atlantem, dedicated to Varlaam Yasinsky, archimandrite of the Kiev Pechersk Lavra; it was “a complex rhetorical construction of Latin prose with poems in Latin and Polish”. In 1690 he published two more panegyrics to Yasinsky, Arctos coeli (Constellation of the heavens) and Pełnia nieubywającej chwały (Abundance of unlessening glory), confirming his reputation as a poet.”
I need to correct this comment:
I found a chart showing lexical distance between European languages:
https://elms.wordpress.com/2008/03/04/lexical-distance-among-languages-of-europe/
Although the Ukrainian language does indeed have more words in common with Polish than it does with Russian (of course as an Eastern Slavic language, Ukrainian grammar and pronunciation are closer to Russian) English does not have more words in common with French than with German (though French has more words in common with Germanic English than with Romanian). So, in terms of vocabulary, Polish influence on Ukrainian was greater than French influence on English.
This large-scale adoption of foreign words, of course, makes the relationship of the Ukrainian language to the Russian language fundamentally different from the relationship between, say, Bavarian and High German (or even Swedish and Danish).
When I visited Kiev with my Russian wife, I was able to translate for her Ukrainian signs and words that she didn’t understand. That’s because I had studied Polish and Czech, but she hadn’t.
Most of the words that you’ll see in an English dictionary are French, Latin or Greek borrowings, but most of the words used by English speakers in ordinary conversation are Germanic.
Almost all of the most common English words (the, a, this, that, you, I, me, who, what, and so on) are Germanic. Most of the technical, scientific, legal, etc. vocabulary is Latin and Greek.
If you just count up the headwords in a big English dictionary, English won’t seem very Germanic to you at all. If you record casual conversations, most of the words will be Germanic.
However, the easiest foreign languages for English speakers to learn are Spanish and Italian. Portuguese and French are a little harder, entirely due to pronunciation. German is harder still.
English grammar is much more like the grammars of Romance languages than like German grammar. English speakers hate long words, of which German has a lot. Most of the Germanic words in English don’t look or sound like their German cognates.
In short, there are several different ways of determining whether Englsih is closer to German or to French, and they produce different results. The skeleton of English is Germanic. A lot of the meat on it is French, Latin and Greek. The easiest language for Englsih speakers to learn is Spanish, with French being easier than German.
Ukrainian is an invented, political language. Communism succeeded where Zamenhof failed. It had more resources.
Ukrainian is rural southern Russian pronunciation combined with lots of Polish words.
How do I know that it didn’t grow that way organically? Because it wasn’t attested until the 19th century. Think of all the eastern European languages that WERE attested in pre-modern times: Estonian, Finnish, Latvian, Karelian, old Prussian for heaven’s sake. I’m listing tiny little languages that had no state support whatsoever. And even THEY were attested 500 or more years ago.
Little Russia was huge and had lots of literate peolple. The lack of attestation before the start if the Ukro-nationalist project implies non-existence.
The Wikipedia:
“The oldest known examples of written Latvian are from a 1530 translation of a hymn made by Nikolaus Ramm, a German pastor in Riga.”
So here was a small, completely rural people without a state of their own, and their language has records going back to 1530. This is typical.
And English is just northeast German dialect, with simplified grammar, and then combined with a bunch of French and Latin words. So?
And of course there are certain differences between Ukrainian and Southern Russian that go beyond Polish vocabulary. Ukrainian has retained the vocative case, and (to quote wiki “Unlike all other Slavic languages, Ukrainian has a synthetic future (also termed inflectional future) tense which developed through the erosion and cliticization of the verb ‘to have’ (or possibly ‘to take’): pysa-ty-mu (infinitive-future-1st sg.) I will write.[72] Although the inflectional future (based on the verb ‘to have’) is characteristic of Romance languages, Ukrainian linguist A. Danylenko argues that Ukrainian differs from Romance in the choice of auxiliary, which should be interpreted as ‘to take’ and not ‘to have.’
You are still clueless when it comes to Ukraine. It was common in the 18th and as early as the 17th century for playwrights in Ukraine to write humerous entracts (intermedia) or scenes between acts, in the local vernacular language (the main works were written in Latin or Polish):
Here is simple, vernacular Little Russian from such a source, in 1619 (the play itself was in Polish):
http://www.everyday.in.ua/?p=12327
Климко: Що ты тутъ, побратиме, собі порабляешь?
Кажи мені, як живешь, та якъ ся маешь?
Стецько: Я тут не роблю ничого. Ось иду до дому свого
Та и зъ тоіеми горшками, якъ зъ своими сусідами.
About 40 of these intermedia exist, mostly from the early 18th century. The playwright Mitrophan Dovhalevsky used to include them in his works.
The first work fully written in the Ukrainian language was Eneida. It was written in 1798 (just a little before the 19th century):
http://lib.ru/SU/UKRAINA/KOTLYAREVS_KIJ/eneida.txt
You aren’t going to find examples of the “Ukrainian language” from the early 1500s because large-scale Polish borrowings, so characteristic of the language, were only starting to appear. Vernacular Ukrainian/Little Russian probably became recognizeable as such around the end of the 16th century.
The example you cited is in modern Ukrainian orthography. So whoever wrote that web page must have changed the spelling. What else did he change?
Russian has two vocative cases, the modern one (Петь!, Саш!, etc.) and an older one that’s now only used in a few set expressions (Боже!, старче!, etc.) Officially Russian has 6 cases, but there are actually more of them. I’ve seen someone list 15.
English acquired its foreign vocabulary in the most organic way possible. In contrast, 19th-century Ukrainian nationalists wanted a language that was as different from Russian as possible, for political reasons. Communists picked up their creation and forced it on huge numbers of people.
These are much less developed and different from the Ukrainian:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vocative_case#Russian
The modern one is not related to the historical and is limited:
In modern colloquial Russian given names and a small family of terms often take a special “shortened” form that some linguists consider a reemerging vocative case.[3] This form is applied only to given names and nouns that end in -a and -я, which are optionally dropped in the vocative form: “Лен, где ты?” (“Lena, where are you?”). This is basically equivalent to “Лена, где ты?”, the only difference being that the former version suggests a positive personal, emotional bond between the speaker and the person being addressed. Names that end in -я acquire a soft sign in this case: “Оль!” = “Оля!” (“Olga!”). In addition to given names, this form is often used with words like “мама” (mama, mom) and “папа” (papa, dad), which would be respectively “shortened” to “мам” (mam) and “пап” (pap). In plural this form is used with words such as “ребят”, “девчат” (nominative: “ребята” “девчата”, guys gals).
Such usage differs from historical vocative (which would be “Лено” in the example above) and is not related to such historical usage.
The older one is limited to certain expressions and is not a regular feature of the language, as it is in Ukrainian.
You certainly do like fairy tales. Ukrainian acquisition of Polish words came naturally, given the fact that Ukraine was part of Poland for centuries, had a Polish-speaking elite who for generations learned in Polish and Latin, and was the site of large-scale Polish settlement (estimated as high as 10% – Mazovian peasants moved to fill sparsely settled lands and mixed with local Rus peasants, gentry came and mixed with local gentry, etc.)
If 19th century Ukrainian nationalists wanted a language that was as different from Russian as possible, they would have based the Ukrainian literary language on the Galician dialect. Instead, they chose the Poltava dialect. Most likely, in part, because this region was the most ethnically homogeneous.
Clueless Glossy now gets things backwards. In 1897 Russian was about as common in Kiev province as it was in Warsaw province. Under Communism this changed radically. Why? Because the natural process of peasants moving into cities and transforming those cities’ language (as occurred in once-German-speaking Prague) was, starting n the late 20s, artificially altered by communists who promoted the Russian language. If not for Communists’ active intervention Kiev etc. would be Ukrainian-speaking cities.
You didn’t provide a scan of the 1530 Latvian test. So?
Here’s a blurry image of the 1619 work:
http://litopys.org.ua/ulencycl/mal/ulet1452.jpg
Script is Latin, the few words that can be seen match the Ukrainian (I can see “Kazi meni”).
These are much less developed and different from the Ukrainian:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vocative_case#Russian
The modern one is not related to the historical and is limited:
In modern colloquial Russian given names and a small family of terms often take a special “shortened” form that some linguists consider a reemerging vocative case.[3] This form is applied only to given names and nouns that end in -a and -я, which are optionally dropped in the vocative form: “Лен, где ты?” (“Lena, where are you?”). This is basically equivalent to “Лена, где ты?”, the only difference being that the former version suggests a positive personal, emotional bond between the speaker and the person being addressed. Names that end in -я acquire a soft sign in this case: “Оль!” = “Оля!” (“Olga!”). In addition to given names, this form is often used with words like “мама” (mama, mom) and “папа” (papa, dad), which would be respectively “shortened” to “мам” (mam) and “пап” (pap). In plural this form is used with words such as “ребят”, “девчат” (nominative: “ребята” “девчата”, guys gals).
Such usage differs from historical vocative (which would be “Лено” in the example above) and is not related to such historical usage.
The older one is limited to certain expressions and is not a regular feature of the language, as it is in Ukrainian.
You certainly do like fairy tales. Ukrainian acquisition of Polish words came naturally, given the fact that Ukraine was part of Poland for centuries, had a Polish-speaking elite who for generations learned in Polish and Latin, and was the site of large-scale Polish settlement (estimated as high as 10% – Mazovian peasants moved to fill sparsely settled lands and mixed with local Rus peasants, gentry came and mixed with local gentry, etc.)
If 19th century Ukrainian nationalists wanted a language that was as different from Russian as possible, they would have based the Ukrainian literary language on the Galician dialect. Instead, they chose the Poltava dialect. Most likely, in part, because this region was the most ethnically homogeneous.
Clueless Glossy now gets things backwards. In 1897 Russian was about as common in Kiev province as it was in Warsaw province. Under Communism this changed radically. Why? Because the natural process of peasants moving into cities and transforming those cities’ language (as occurred in once-German-speaking Prague) was, starting n the late 20s, artificially altered by communists who promoted the Russian language. If not for Communists’ active intervention Kiev etc. would be Ukrainian-speaking cities.
Why would the language of the Poltava region have been so heavily influenced by Polish? Poltava became Russian in 1667.
There were two Soviet Unions. The early, genocidal one, promoted Ukrainian (and all the other minority languages) heavily. The later, peaceful one, also promoted Ukrainian at the expense of Russian, but less heavily. I know lots of people in real life, both Ukrainians and Jews, who don’t speak Ukrainian, but who understand it because it was compulsory in the schools that they went to during the late Soviet period.
At that time, as now, Ukrainian was associated with officialdom. It came at you from above, whether you wanted it or not, like news of the latest party congress, the advice not to waste water, Lenin’s birthday commemorations, etc.
You can pretend that white is black and up is down to clueless westerners. You’re forgetting that I have some personal experience of that world. You can’t BS me.
And it’s not just because I know people who grew up in Soviet Ukraine. I also spent a couple of weeks in Chernigov, where my mom’s parents were from, in 1991. Nobody spoke Ukrainian on the streets, yet there were newspapers in it, radio, TV. Offcialdom spoke to you in Ukrainian, real people in Russian, some with a local accent, some without it.
Maidanite Ukraine is like the early, genocidal USSR in lots of ways, including linguistically. So its promotion of Ukrainian is hard, like it was in the 1920s, not soft, like it was in the later USSR. There was never any promotion of Russian in the Ukraine, certainly not during the Soviet period. The government forced Ukrainian on Russian speakers. I’m not aware of it ever having forced Russian on Ukrainian speakers. I’ve never met such people, haven’t heard of them either.
The people who gave their language as “Little Russian” on the 1897 census could have meant lots of things by that. It’s very unlikely that any of them had in mind the artificially-created monstrosity that the Communists later started forcing on the Ukraine. Gorbachov’s accent is Little Russian. Why are you so sure that none of those census responders meant THAT when they picked that option?
“… being rather problematic.”
Et tu, Steve?
I’m looking at that scan. It says it was published in Lvov in 1619. The modern Ukrainian version from that page you posted earlier starts with “Що ты тутъ, побратиме, собі порабляешь?”
On the scan I see that as “Scyotut ty pobratym sebi porablaisch”. It would be funny if the word pobratym lacked the vocative -e ending in the original. We just talked about the vocative. There’s a dot there. I don’t think it’s an e. Not impossible though.
The verdict on the scan:
It’s from Lvov, so it’s natural to expect its language to be as far from the Moscow standard as Russian could get in the 17th century. And in the 17th century Lvov would have self-identified as Russian. Most of Little Russia would have spoken something closer to Moscovite Russian than this.
It does look to be pretty far from the Moscow standard.
The modern Ukrainian transcription is wrong in some places.
Poltava was part of the Hetmanate. Polish was the language of the elite of the Hetmanate. Kiev, the main city, was largely Polish-speaking. The Kiev Academy, as part of the Russian Empire, used Polish and Latin as languages of instruction. Haven’t you been paying attention? Or do you filter out information that doesn’t match your fairy tales. Here’s a Poltava writer from the late 17th/early 18th century:
http://feb-web.ru/feb/kle/kle-abc/ke1/ke1-8921.htm
Wrote in Latin and Polish.
Where do you think Poltava native Gogol learned Polish?
So in your world the Ukrainian-tolerant USSR of the 1920s was less bloody than the anti-Ukrainian one of the 1930s? Would you like to compare death rates from those times?
“Promoted” is an interesting idea. A population that had been 90% Ukrainian speaking prior to communism went to schools in their own language, taught by activists from their own community (many of whom were not even Communists). A natural process that also occurred with other populations in non-communist countries. Had this process continued without interference the population would have ended up being about 90% Ukrainian-speaking.
But in the 1930s the Soviet government arrested and executed many of those teachers and purged and executed those in government who had tolerated the local language.
You think it’s strange that in a Republic that was 75% Ukrainian, some Ukrainian classes were compulsory? This, in your world, was some sort of aggressive Ukrainianization?
You have adequately shown here that you BS yourself all the time. In comments to this one article:
You BSed yourself when you claimed no examples of Ukrainian/Little Russian existed prior to the 19th century (I provided a document from 1619)
You BSed yourself about Russian having a vocative case comparable to Ukrainian.
Etc. etc. Most of what you write about Ukraine consists of BSing yourself and trying to BS others.
You spent a couple weeks in a town whose oblast borders Russian-speaking Belarus and Russia and used this experience to prove something to yourself. BTW in 1989 the Ukrainian SSR declared Ukrainian to be the only official language. So this was rue of about 2 years. Earlier in the 1980s, there had not been a single Ukrainian school in Chernihiv.
And there you go again, BS-ing yourself and trying to BS others:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ems_Ukaz
They had the option of “Little Russian” or “Great Russian.”
In Kiev province, for example, only 5.9% of the population claimed to speak Great Russian (about 55% in Kiev City). In Warsaw province it was 4.5%.
But, since you are a proven BS-er (see above), we know you will pretend that they really meant whatever is convenient for your bizarre theories.
So now your BS is that probably none of the people (your words “it is unlikely that any of them”) who claimed to speak Little Russian on the census actually spoke Ukrainian. Even though, as we have seen, the examples from 1619 and 1798 I linked to in earlier posts are rather close to modern literary Ukrainian.
There was no large-scale migration of Russians into Kiev region, other than as administrators and such in Kiev city (which was 54% Russian speaking). Literacy was low, so most of the natives weren’t even getting exposed to Russian through schools or mass media. Yet in Glossy’s world somehow they were actually Russian rather than Ukrainian speakers.
Can you prove your assertion that people who spoke Russian with an accent claimed they did not speak Russian because of that accent, or that the Russian government census was trying to inflate the number of Ukrainian-speakers by classifying them as non-Great Russian speakers? Is Russian no longer a “родной язык” when someone uses “h” instead of “g”?
Or is it just your usual BS?
So do you concede that when you wrote that Ukrainian (i.e. western Rutenian) wasn’t “attested until the 19th century” you were wrong?
Not self-identified as Russian in the modern use of that word, but as Rus (Rutenian in Latin).
Here is a western Rus-language poem from 1607, written in Cyrillic script, by Demian Nalyvaiko, priest in Ostrog (eastern Volhynia):
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/uk/thumb/b/bb/Proz'ba_chytelnykova_o_chas_-Damian_Nalyvayko.png/500px-Proz’ba_chytelnykova_o_chas-_Damian_Nalyvayko.png
Notice the vocative in the beginning.
You had no comment on the Enedia from Poltava, 1798?
Anyways, I’ll be skiing for a few days starting tomorrow (or spending time in a lodge) and will have to break from this conversation.
Even though, as we have seen, the examples from 1619 and 1798 I linked to in earlier posts are rather close to modern literary Ukrainian.
Your 1619 example is from Lvov, which wasn’t a part of the 1897 census of the Russian Empire because it wasn’t in the Russian Empire. I don’t know about closeness to modern literary Ukrainian, and you’re too biased as a source of that sort of info.
Can you prove your assertion that people who spoke Russian with an accent claimed they did not speak Russian because of that accent,
The US census could ask people what kind of English they spoke too: standard, southern, Black, etc. It’s never going to do that, but it wouldn’t be a stupid question. The data would be meaningful. It’s funny that you think that the czarist government’s and the respondents’ ideas of what Little Russian was should have mostly coincided with the modern Ukrainian government’s idea of what Ukrainian is.
For example, the czarist government clearly conceived of Great, Little and White Russians as subsets of Russian:
https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Перепись_населения_Российской_империи_(1897)#/media/File:East_Slavs_in_Russia_1897.JPG
The junta throws people in jail for as much as whispering such things to their neighbors.
Hi colleagues, its great piece of writing regarding educationand fully explained, keep it up all the time.
So, no comment from you about the 1798 text.
In 1619 both Lviv and central Ukraine were part of Poland and both had a Polish and Latin-speaking native elite. Are you suggesting that the colloquial speech of Kiev in 1619 was closer to that of Moscow (about 470 miles away, and separate from Kiev for centuries) than to Lviv (about 300 miles away, and part of the same state). I’m sure you are, because you like fairy tales.
One can compare the the 1619 text to modern Ukrainian.
You are orders of magnitude more biased than I am, as evidenced by the multiple occasions here when you have made outlandish and easily disproven claims – no Ukrainian/Little Russian text prior to 19th century, no claim that Rus wasn’t Russia prior to 20th century, your claims about Russian vocative similar to Ukrainian, your questioning why Polish influence on Poltava, etc. – basically, most of your factual claims about Ukraine are plain wrong and rooted in your utter ignorance in this topic.
The Russian government at various times restricted the publication of works in Little Russian and performances of plays in Little Russian. I suppose in your fairy tale world this simply applied to the use of “h” instead of “g?”
The Russian imperial ideology was that there were three different subsets of Russian: Great Russian, Little Russian and Belarussian. Little Russia but not Great Russian was sometimes banned and restricted. The census listed each as a separate language. Little Russian speech was thus not the same as Great Russian speech.
You, with your pattern of outlandish claims, now state without any evidence that on the Russian census some significant number of people stated that Great Russian wasn’t their native language simply because they used “h” instead of “g” like Gorbachev.
Meanwhile in the real world here is the Russian wiki summary: “По родному языку, крупнейшие языковые группы, в порядке убывания, великороссы — 44,3 %, малороссы — 17,8 %, поляки — 6,3 %”
Given that the modern Ukrainian government’s idea of what Ukrainian is, is about the same as the Little Russian text of Eneida (1798) and recognizably similar to the text from 1619 I had posted, it’s funny that you think the Tsarist government’s idea of what Little Russian was, was significantly different from modern Ukrainian which was developed in Tsarist times and restricted by the Russian government.
A person dealing in Futures contracts price is lower than the market so we need
to know the method of calculation will work every time.
So especially if the value of that stock to rise and you options trading secrets decided to do, then there is almost
equally unlimited.