Sifting the Evidence for the Reconstruction of Pannonian Slavic

Sifting the Evidence for the Reconstruction of Pannonian Slavic*Ronald O. Richards' The Pannonian Slavic Dialect of the Common Slavic ProtoLanguage, a revision of his UCLA Ph.D. dissertation, takes on the challenging task of wringing from the Hungarian-language evidence information on the Slavic dialect(s) that over time disappeared after the entrance of the Hungarians into the Carpathian basin in the ninth century AD. The difficulties Richards faces, as have others before him, are formidable. Although the corpus of borrowed Slavic material in Hungarian is not small-altogether some 1500 lexical items-the time and locus of borrowing are difficult if not, in some cases, impossible to pin down because (a) some lexical items may have entered during a period of prior Slavic-Hungarian contact, and (b) some degree of Slavic-Hungarian contact has remained in effect-virtually to the present day-even after the geographical continuity of the Slavic speech territory in the north and south was severed. To complicate matters further, the Slavic speech territory during the period under scrutiny was undergoing an exceptionally dynamic phase of expansion and internal differentiation. Additionally, Sprachbund phenomena coupled with the lengthy time parameter along which Slavic material has been deposited in Hungarian have contributed to multifarious transformations of the material, making it difficult to determine whether variation found in the borrowed Slavic material is to be attributed to Slavic dialect differentiation or to internal Hungarian developments. In principle the Sprachbund phenomena could be sorted out better if the Hungarians had left some close' (surviving) relatives behind during their migration into Europe. As it stands, the closest linguistic relatives, Khanty and Mansi, who make up the Ob-Ugric group, separated from Proto-Hungarian some three millennia ago, making this avenue of investigation virtually meaningless. The ambiguities and internal contradictions in the Slavic borrowed material in Hungarian have led previous investigators to conflicting assessments.As is common in this genre, the work is embedded in a tradition of drawing conclusions, both explicit and implicit, on the "ethnogenesis" of the peoples in question, a tradition that is especially fraught with extravagant claims and unpleasant connotations in the European context (for a review of the issues see, for example, Curta 2002, Mees 2003). For this reason, works that are honest and explicit about their epistemological underpinnings are particularly called for. In this regard, Richards' book is a refreshing departure in that it continually questions the knowability of the details of the past. Commendably, the author takes great pains to explain how he comes to the conclusions that he does. he likens his approach to the arduous and somewhat unaesthetic process of mining particulate minerals, which only after several stages reveals wealth from the rocks and soil (xiv) (perhaps "Panned Slavic?")The book is divided into four chapters: (1) Introduction (1-48), treating previous views of the settlement history, focusing in particular on the problem of the Avar-Slavic relationship and the surmised ethnolinguistic composition of Slavicspeaking Pannonia until the arrival of the Magyars; (2) Methodologies (49-88), including sketches and discussion the problems of both the Slavic and Hungarian phonological systems, as well as consideration of semantic factors, of the relevant periods as means of identifying Pannonian vs. non-Pannonian Slavic loanwords; (3) Examining the Corpus (89-190), a lexeme-by-lexeme examination of the Pannonian-Slavic loanwords; and (4) Conclusion (191-214). A Selected Bibliography (215-228) and an Index Verborum (229-234) are also included.In the Introduction Richards attempts to model the succession of settlement in the Carpathian Basin using non-linguistic evidence as a background to the linguistic analysis. Crucial for his understanding the dynamics of the pre-Magyar population is the nature of the relationship between Slavs and Avars. …