Elite dominance vs. Practicality/Turkey

[X99Lynx at aol.com]

In a message dated 11/17/2000 5:52:28 PM, X99Lynx at aol.com writes:

<< I heard someone roll off 22 languages that reportedly were spoken
in the general area of modern day Hungary during the first millennium AD.
And of course the area of modern day Turkey may well have had similar
diversity before Ottoman Turkish became the "universal" language. >>

The idea was that perhaps Turkish became universal in part because it solved
the problem of too much language diversity among the speakers already there.

On the pre-Turkish language diversity in Asia Minor I have this:
"The coastal areas, save for the mountainous part of Cilicia (Isauria), where
the Taurus range advances to the very edge of the sea, had been hellenized
for a good thousand years and more before Justinian's reign....

Quite different from the coastal areas of Asia Minor was the high inland
plateau,... The ethnic composition of the plateau had not undergone any
notable change for some seven hundred years before Justinian's reign. It was
a bewildering mosaic of native peoples as well as immigrant enclaves of long
standing, such as the Celts of Galatia, the Jews who had been planted in
Phrygia and elsewhere during the Hellenistic period and Persian groups of
even more ancient origin. It appears that many of the indigenous languages
were still spoken in the Early Byzantine period: Phrygian was probably still
extant, since it appears in inscriptions as late as the third century AD,
Celtic in Galatia, Cappadocian farther east. The unruly Isaurians, who had to
be pacified by force of arms in about 500 AD and many of whom drifted all
over the Empire as professional soldiers and itinerant masons, were a
distinct people speaking their own dialect, often to the exclusion of
Greek....

Lying to the east of Cappadocia and straddling a series of high mountain
chains were a number of Armenian provinces that had been annexed to the
Empire as late as 387 AD when the Armenian kingdom was partitioned between
Persia and Rome. These were strategically very important, but practically
untouched by Graeco-Roman civilization...

All [this was before] the ethnographic changes that the Empire witnessed
after the sixth century...  The Persians initiated a development that was to
have important demographic consequences by striking at Constantinople through
Asia Minor. In so doing they caused immense havoc. When the Arabs had
succeeded to the Persians and made themselves masters of all the territories
up to the Taurus mountains, they, too, struck into Asia Minor- not once or
twice, but practically every year- and this went on for nearly two
centuries....

...it is also known that Greek survived in Asia Minor on a continuous basis
only in Pontus and a small part of Cappadocia, whereas it had become
practically extinct in the western part of the subcontinent until its
reintroduction there by immigrants in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The Emperor Justinian Il... moved 'a great multitude' of Slavs to
Bithynia.... In the 760s, however, we are told that 208,000 Slavs came to
live in Bithynia of their own accord.... In addition to the Armenians and the
Slavs, there were many other foreign elements, such as the Georgians and the
Balkan Vlachs.   A massive influx of Syrians and other Christian orientals
followed the eastward expansion of the Empire at the end of the tenth
century....

Early in the 11th century Turkic [but not necesaarily Turkish] tribes and
families in ever-increasing numbers had begun to filter into Asia Minor....
- Cyril Mango,  Byzantium: The Empire of New Rome (1980)