Slavs and nemtsy

[Sibelan Forrester]

At 3:44 PM +0200 9/21/00, FRISON Philippe wrote:
>As far as 'nemets'is concerned, I have always been told that the term comes
>from the usage imposed by Russia's authorities in the Middle Age, according
>to which Russians were not allowed to speak to foreigners.
> [snip....]

That explanation would be more convincing if other Slavic languages
did not use the same term for Germans (nemets, nijemac, etc.) -- they
could not do this because of a Russian merchandising rule, the word
was shared at a time when there weren't any Russians yet, and
certainly not any Russian state that could issue and enforce that
kind of edict.

It seems more likely (forgive me, specialists who know, for not
citing the sources I've forgotten) that the term came into use
because the Slavs or proto-Slavs, at some point where just about all
the various tribes were still mutually intelligible, called
foreigners (perhaps only foreigners who LOOKED similar to Slavs and
so could be expected to speak the same way?) ne^mets, because their
language sounded like senseless babble.  The Germans were the closest
big foreign group, and if their first big contact with the Slavs was
via Clarlemagne (king of the Franks, whose name was adopted as the
word for king, kralj or korol' etc.) and his slash-and-burn
conversion program, then there may have been a reason for the term
"nemec" to have a pejorative connotation, if only to mean someone
whose speech is equivalent to no speech in terms of how much we
understand it!

This assumes that the Slavs in the common or proto- period were
familiar enough with other linguistic groups they rubbed up against
(Greeks, Bulgars, Finns, Magyars, various other Finno-Ugric tribes,
Balts, Khazars, and -- perhaps most puzzling -- Scandinavians, whose
languages must have sounded a lot like Old German at that point) that
they recognized their speech as speech, rather than something foreign
or sub-lingual.  (Perhaps relevant note here:  Grand Prince
Vladimir/Volodymyr Monomakh married Gytha, daughter of Harald
Hardraada, the last Saxon king of England, whose family lived after
the razgrom of 1066 as emigres in Kyiv/Kiev.)  While Muscovite
history would explain a lot about why Russians would see Germans as
the first really foreign Europeans (given the historical willingness
to interpret other people speaking any Slavic language or dialect as
"little brothers" or even as deluded Russians who could still be
saved from the error of their ways given enough educational
encouragement), and while for the West Slavs the Germans clearly were
the next language group over, the South Slavs use it too --  the term
still must come from a period when the Prussians were still speaking
a Baltic tongue and the French were still German(ic).

Obligatory asides here about the fact that "German" in English means
a language that sounds familiar or fraternal to us (comp. "germane"
or Spanish "hermano"); the fact that there was no German state to
hate until the 19th century; that if the Prussians were originally
not a Germanic ethnicity (anyone want to write an article on the
etymological links of Prus' and Rus'?) then the whole argument that a
certain set of traits are ethnically typical of Germans loses a bit
more of its "logic."

A useful comparison to "nemec" is the Greek root "barbar" for people
from other language/ethnic groups (which would have included the
Slavs), originally onomatopeia for a language that could not be
understood, that sounded like "bar bar bar" -- today we'd say "blah
blah blah" or "yadda yadda" or something.  Interesting too how the
language thing and the culture thing become linked.

Back to work --

Sibelan


Sibelan Forrester
Russian/MLL
Swarthmore College

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