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Executive Editor, Journals Dept. University of Hawai‘i Press
by | 6 May 2005 · 8:32 am

Edirne (Adrianople) in 1912

In 1912, Edirne was the capital and administrative center of a large and central Ottoman province (vilayet) by the same name, comprising an area of 42,500 square kilometers and a population of almost 1,500,000. The city of Edirne and its suburbs had a population of more than 100,000, and according to one source, in 1912 the population consisted of approximately 55,000 Turks, 20,000 Greeks, close to 20,000 Jews, 10,000 Bulgarians, 6,000 Armenians, and an unspecified number of foreign nationals of various European states.

Edirne was an important crossroads and a major Ottoman military, commercial, and economic center in the eastern Balkans. From a historical and cultural perspective, Ottomans regarded Edirne, a former imperial capital, as second only to the current capital, Istanbul. The political and economic importance of Edirne was underscored by the fact that Austria, Britain, France, Russia, and Bulgaria all maintained consulates in the city. In addition, the city had foreign schools, hospitals, and various religious institutions under the protection of Austria, France, and Italy.

The Jewish community of Edirne was historically one of the oldest and most important in the Ottoman Empire. It was probably the largest and most important Ottoman Jewish center in the period between the Ottoman conquest of the city in 1361 and its transformation into the Ottoman capital and the conquest of Constantinople (Istanbul) in 1453 and the transfer of the capital to the latter city. In subsequent years other Jewish communities–especially those of Istanbul, Salonica, and Izmir–surpassed the community of Edirne in their size and importance. Nevertheless, until the end of the Ottoman era, Edirne was known as a vibrant and important Jewish cultural center.

Following a period of decline in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the community became stabilized in the mid-nineteenth century and began flourishing anew. At the end of the nineteenth century, the numbers of the Jewish population increased from approximately 4,000-5,000 in 1870 to some 15,000 by the beginning of the twentieth century. The Jews constituted then approximately 17 percent of the city’s total population that numbered 87,000, and they were the third largest group after the Turks and the Greeks. This growth was due to some extent to Jewish emigration from eastern Europe and the Balkan countries, especially from areas that the Ottoman Empire had lost to the Balkan states following the 1877-1878 Ottoman-Russian war. The Jewish population continued to increase in the first decade of the twentieth century, and in 1911 it numbered some 17,000.

SOURCE: “The Siege of Edirne (1912-1913) as Seen by a Jewish Eyewitness: Social, Political, and Cultural Perspectives,” by Avigdor Levy, in Jews, Turks, Ottomans: A Shared History, Fifteenth through the Twentieth Century, ed. by Avigdor Levy (Syracuse U. Press, 2002), pp. 156-157

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by | 5 May 2005 · 7:44 pm

The Port of Salonica in 1912

Salonica … is a paradise for Jews. When you are rowed ashore there, your boatman is an Israelite masquerading in Turkish fez and trousers. On landing, you are hustled by porters in turbans and red shoes; but they are Jews. You enter the Customs-house: the mobs of officers, with their continuous gabble, are Jews. Jews in turbans and Jews out of turbans; Jews as builders of houses and Jews as barbers–the children of Israel are everywhere, in every kind of work.” –Samuel S. Cox, Diversions of a Diplomat in Turkey

In 1912, at the end of its life as an Ottoman city, Salonica was flourishing as a major industrial and transportation center. Railroads that first reached Salonica in the early 1870s, as well as the telegraph linkages that came in the next decade, played crucial roles in the growth of the city. Before the end of the century, railroad lines connected Salonica to the Ottoman capital, Istanbul, as well as to the Serbian network and thus to Europe. Salonica boomed as the railhead of three lines that redirected the import-export trade of the southern Balkans through the city. As a result, ship tonnage at the port of Salonica doubled to two million tons by 1912. At this time Salonica was tied with Beirut as the third-largest Ottoman port, surpassed only by the much larger ports of Istanbul and Izmir.

Despite these huge increases in sea-borne commerce, improvements in Salonica’s port facilities came very slowly. Financed by European capital and carried out by Western corporations, construction of more modern facilities was retarded by two quite different forces. The first was the Ottoman state itself, concerned that Western development of ports would lead to increased foreign control of the Ottoman economy and, perhaps, as in China, to extraterritorial port zones. In addition, merchants’ efforts to streamline operations were checked by the Salonica porters’ guilds. These workers, who were overwhelmingly Jewish, saw modernization neither as a blessing nor as progress, but rather as a threat to their jobs of manually hauling freight. As in other Ottoman ports, the porters’ guilds at Salonica prevented real improvements until the end of the century. Finally, in 1897, the Ottoman state yielded to foreign pressure and granted a concession to a French firm. The expansion of the port was completed by 1904. A few years later, the porters’ guilds were curbed further. In 1909 the Salonica Quay Company, the Oriental Railways Company, and the Salonica-Constantinople Junction Railway Company signed an agreement making it possible for trains to run all the way onto the quays, directly discharging to vessels in the port. Previously the trains had stopped at the railway station, where porters picked up the goods and manually carried them over one kilometer of bad road to the port. The new arrangement certainly did make handling more efficient. But the porters who had hauled the goods over that bad road now lost their jobs.

SOURCE: “The Industrial Working Class of Salonica, 1850-1912,” by Donald Quataert, in Jews, Turks, Ottomans: A Shared History, Fifteenth through the Twentieth Century, ed. by Avigdor Levy (Syracuse U. Press, 2002), pp. 194-195

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by | 5 May 2005 · 9:58 am

Escaping the Gulag with a "Walking Supply"

Generally, memoirists agree that the overwhelming majority of would-be runaways [from the Gulag] were professional criminals. Criminal slang reflects this, even referring to the coming of spring as the arrival of the “green prosecutor” (as in “Vasya was released by the green prosecutor”) since spring was when summer escapes were most often contemplated: “A trip through the taiga is possible only during the summer, when it is possible to eat grass, mushrooms, berries, roots, or pancakes baked from moss flour, to catch fieldmice, chipmunks, squirrels, jays, rabbits…” In the very far north, the optimum time to escape was the winter, which criminals there referred to as the “white prosecutor”: only then would the swamps and mud of the tundra be passable.

In fact, professional criminals were more successful at escaping because once they had gone “under the wire” they stood a far better chance of surviving. If they made it to a major city, they could melt into the local criminal world, forge documents, and find hiding places. With few aspirations to return to the “free” world, criminals also escaped simply for the fun of it, just to be “out” for a little while. If they were caught, and managed to survive, what was another ten-year sentence to someone who already had two twenty-five-year sentences, or more? One ex-zek remembers a woman criminal who escaped merely to have a rendezvous with a man. She returned “filled with delight,” although she was immediately sentenced to the punishment cell….

Not all escapes involved clever flights of fancy. Many–probably the majority–criminal escapes involved violence. Runaways attacked, shot, and suffocated armed guards, as well as free workers and local residents. They did not spare their fellow inmates either. One of the standard methods of criminal escape involved cannibalism. Pairs of criminals would agree in advance to escape along with a third man (the “meat”), who was destined to become the sustenance for the other two on their journey. Buca also describes the trial of a professional thief and murderer, who, along with a colleague, escaped with the camp cook, their “walking supply”:

They weren’t the first to get this idea. When you have a huge community of people who dream of nothing but escape, it is inevitable that every possible means of doing so will be discussed. A “walking supply” is, in fact, a fat prisoner. If you have to, you can kill him and eat him. And until you need him, he is carrying the “food” himself.

The two men did as planned–they killed and ate the cook–but they had not bargained on the length of the journey. They began to get hungry again:

Both knew in their hearts that the first to fall asleep would be killed by the other. So both pretended they weren’t tired and spent the night telling stories, each watching the other closely. Their old friendship made it impossible for either to make an open attack on the other, or to confess their mutual suspicions.

Finally, one fell asleep. The other slit his throat. He was caught, Buca claims, two days later, with pieces of raw flesh still in his sack.

SOURCE: Gulag: A History, by Anne Applebaum (Anchor Books, 2003), pp. 395-398

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by | 4 May 2005 · 8:08 pm

May Fourth in China, 1919 and 2005

In yesterday’s New York Times, reporter Joseph Kahn reminds us of possible similarities between China’s current anti-Japanese demonstrations and those 86 years ago.

The Communist Party stirs patriotic feelings to underpin its legitimacy at a time when few, even in its own ranks, put much faith in Marxism. Official propaganda and the national education system stress the indignities suffered at the hands of foreign powers from the mid-19th century through World War II. Japan, which China says killed or wounded 35 million Chinese from 1937 through 1945, gets the most attention….

But China has never made nationalism the driving force of its foreign policy. The government mainly emphasizes its desire to have a “peaceful rise” that does not impinge on its neighbors, and the authorities are nervous about disrupting the flow of investment and technology that has powered economic growth.

Moreover, anti-Japan protests have a long and, for the government, a sobering history. A student-led march on May 4, 1919, to protest the decision by World War I Allied powers that allowed Japan to take over Germany’s colonial territories in China spawned Chinese resistance against Western colonialism. But the May 4 movement and uprisings in 1931 and 1937 turned against the government.

“My impression is that the well-educated elite in China are genuinely baffled and upset by how long the government has tolerated provocations from Japan,” said Wenran Jiang, an expert on China-Japan relations at the University of Alberta in Edmonton. “Every anti-Japan movement has sooner or later turned against the government.”…

But a senior editor at a party newspaper says the persistence of the anti-Japan campaign and the participation of urban professionals has alarmed the authorities. Officials are accustomed to dealing with unrest among peasants and workers who feel defrauded or disenfranchised by China’s economic boom, not among the urban elite, who are its primary beneficiaries.

“The white-collar middle class is supposed to be a pillar of stability,” the editor said.

On the other hand, maybe they are now the only ones who have the luxury of fighting about ideology and international status, rather than more material issues.

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by | 4 May 2005 · 9:20 am

Collaboration, a Gulag Survival Strategy

Perhaps the most famous exception to the near-universal refusal to admit to informing is, once again, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who describes his flirtation with the camp authorities at length. He dates his initial moment of weakness to his early days in camp, when he was still struggling to accustom himself to his abrupt loss of status. When invited to speak to the operative commander, he was ushered into a “small, cozily furnished room” where a radio was playing classical music. After politely asking him whether he was comfortable and adjusting to camp life, the commander asked him, “Are you still a Soviet person?” After hemming and hawing, Solzhenitsyn agreed that he was.

But although confessing to being “Soviet” was tantamount to confessing a desire to collaborate, Solzhenitsyn initially declined to inform. That was when the commander switched tactics. He turned off the music, and began to speak to Solzhenitsyn about the camp criminals, asking how he would feel if his wife in Moscow were attacked by some who managed to escape. Finally, Solzhenitsyn agreed that if he should hear any of them planning to escape, he would report it. He signed a pledge, promising to report news of any escapes to the authorities, and chose a conspiratorial pseudonym: Vetrov. “Those six letters,” he writes, “are branded in shameful grooves on my memory.”

By his own account, Solzhenitsyn never did actually report on anything. When recruited again in 1956, he says he refused to sign anything at all. Nevertheless, his initial promise was enough to keep him, while in camp, in one of the trusty jobs, living in the trusties’ special quarters, slightly better dressed and better fed than other prisoners. This experience “filled me with shame,” he wrote–and doubtless provoked his disdain for all trusties.

At the time of its publication, Solzhenitsyn’s description of the camp trusties was controversial–and it still is. Like his description of inmate work habits, it also sparked a running debate in the world of camp survivors and historians, one which continues to this day. Virtually all of the classic, most widely read memoirists were trusties at one time or another: Evgeniya Ginzburg, Lev Razgon, Varlam Shalamov, Solzhenitsyn. It may well be, as some claim, that the majority of all prisoners who survived long sentences were trusties at some point in their camp career. I once met a survivor who recounted to me a reunion of old camp friends he had once attended. The group had taken to reminiscing, and were laughing at old camp stories, when one of them looked around the room and realized what it was that held them together, what made it possible for them to laugh at the past instead of crying: “All of us had been pridurki [trusties].”

There is no doubt that many people survived because they were able to get indoor trusty jobs, thereby escaping the horrors of general work. But did this always amount to active collaboration with the camp regime? Solzhenitsyn felt that it did. Even those trusties who were not informers could, he alleged, still be described as collaborators. “What trusty position,” he asked, “did not in fact involve playing up to the bosses and participating in the general system of complusion?”

SOURCE: Gulag: A History, by Anne Applebaum (Anchor Books, 2003), pp. 367-368

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by | 3 May 2005 · 6:57 am

Evolution of a Fantasy-based Save-the-world Community

Aum is an extreme example of a religious movement that, operating from a position of righteousness, set out on a grand mission that reflected the ambitions and visions of its leader and that was affirmed and strengthened by the beliefs, actions and commitment of its followers. That mission, although it also began with a promise of universal salvation, had an innately polarising dimension in its conceptualisation of a sacred war between good and evil. In its rejection of the external realities and the materialist orientations of the everyday world Aum rapidly set itself apart, creating a spiritual hierarchy that claimed superiority over the world at large. Due to the continuing failures of its mission–or rather, in Aum’s terms, the refusal of the world to listen–its alienation from society increased, and as it did so, it constructed an alternative and self-directed view of morality. Its doctrines developed accordingly, sanctifying acts that were committed in order to protect the position and authority of its leader and to safeguard what it saw as its mission of truth. As it followed this path, Aum lost its grasp of external reality and turned inwards into a self-constructed world in which all who remained outside the movement were unworthy while those inside were transformed into sacred warriors who believed that they could kill with impunity and that in so doing, they could save in the spiritual sense those they killed.

The tragedy of Aum Shinrikyo is not just that its symbolic fight against evil and for world salvation was transformed into a real and brutal fight which resulted in indiscriminate murder, but that in claiming to operate on exalted spiritual ground beyond the boundaries of normal morality, it severed all links with the spiritual status to which it aspired. Asahara started with messages that resonated with the needs of many Japanese people and expressed ideas that have been at the heart of religions through the ages, such as the imbalances and problems of societies based on materialism and concepts of progress that fail to give due consideration to spiritual explanations and needs, and the affirmation of spiritual techniques and practices that can lead to happiness and liberation.

The tragedy and irony, of course, is that, in seeking to implement such messages, Asahara Shoko and his disciples–the buddhas and bodhisattvas with the mission to create a Buddhist new age of Lotus villages and a Shambala kingdom–betrayed every one of their ideals, killing not only those outside the movement who symbolised the corruption against which they fought, but their own devotees. In setting out with a mission to save the world from disaster, Aum ended up by killing the very people, such as Ochi Naoki [who died hanging upside down during religious training and was then incinerated], it needed in order to carry out its mission. The process through which it reached this position was centred around religious themes, doctrines and images, and was linked closely to its self-image as a religious movement with a sacred mission. As such Aum Shinrikyo provides us with a salient example of the violence-producing dimensions of religion and reminds us of how religious movements can, through a confluence of circumstances, engender, legitimate and commit acts of violence in the name of their faith.

SOURCE: Religious Violence in Contemporary Japan: The Case of Aum Shinrikyo, by Ian Reader (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2000), pp. 248-249

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by | 2 May 2005 · 9:44 am

Taiwan: Nation, Province, or Colony?

Postwar Taiwan is difficult to categorize: is it a nation, a province, or some combination of the two? The case studies of Taiwanese reactions to Nationalist rule contained in this chapter raise still another possibility: a colony. Although even the suggestion of colonialism is politically sensitive, colonialism merits discussion because it captures the complexity of the Taiwanese interaction with the Nationalists and forms part of the ideological underpinning for the independence movement today. Since retrocession, when islanders compared Japanese and Nationalist policies, aspects of colonialism were not defined in any abstract sense, but by the similarities between the pre- and post-1945 administrations.

One common way of describing colonial rule is the model of core and periphery. The metropole is the core, which dominates and exploits the less developed periphery. A variation of this model is the notion of internal colonialism developed by Michael Hechter. Essentially, Hechter places the core-periphery paradigm within one nation-state; in his case study, the Irish, Welsh, and Scots within the United Kingdom. He writes that a “spatially uneven wave of modernization over a state territory creates relatively advanced and less advanced groups.” Hechter points out that the core has economic dominance and political control, and practices “national discrimination on the basis of language, religion or other cultural forms.” The core uses its political power to maintain its advantages, much as a colonial power seeks through direct or indirect rule to dominate a colony. “Disadvantaged groups,” Hechter notes, “are likely to demand that decision-making be ‘localized’ so that their special problem might become appreciated and therefore taken into account in the allocation process.” This describes the goals of the Taiwanese elite.

However, to describe Taiwan as a colony or internal colony under Nationalist rule is problematic. First, this peripheral island was more advanced economically than the mainland. Second, immigrants from the mainland after 1945 were more exiles than colonists. Furthermore, the government struggled to prove that the local population was culturally, politically, and historically one and the same with mainlanders. The Nationalists never thought of themselves as colonizers, and in fact based their legitimacy on a claim of restoring Chinese rule to the island. This idea was even embedded in language, as retrocession (guangfu) became the term used by the Nationalists to describe their takeover of the island after the war. To the Nationalists, three factors “proved” Taiwan was not a colony: international law (the Cairo Declaration returned the island to China), intent (mainlanders did not seek to make Taiwan a colony), and policies (government measures were designed for the entire nation). Specific programs such as local self-government represented the fulfillment of long-term goals for China, not a specific colonial policy.

Nevertheless, when examining the island’s elite, the model of Taiwan as a colony has some validity. The various positions taken by Taiwanese vis-à-vis the Nationalist state, and the divisions among prominent islanders, had many similarities to the pre-1945 colonial experience. As these case studies illustrate, most islanders found ways to reconcile their personal, professional, and political aspirations with the reality of Japanese, then Nationalist, control without resorting to violence. This is not to gloss over the brutality of Jiang Jieshi’s [= Chiang Kai-shek’s] police state…. However, the authoritarianism of the Nationalist regime constituted just one of many factors that shaped the provincial elite’s relationship with the government. Continuing a trend initiated during the Japanese period, many islanders participated in an impotent system of local self-government even as they tried to reform it. Although the Nationalists preferred to have the support of islanders, they were satisfied if Taiwanese simply avoided all political activity and did not openly oppose the regime …

Terms like assimilation and independence do not convey the complexity of the Taiwanese understanding of their place in China and the Republic of China. Most islanders hoped to find a modus vivendi that fell between these two ends of a continuum–usually articulated as a drive for expanded local self-government. In the same way, the term colonialism is too simple and does not fully explain the reality of Nationalist policies on the island, even if the Taiwanese elite reacted like a people living under colonial rule. Perhaps this lack of clarity is to be expected in postwar Taiwan. The advocacy of local self-government, itself an ambiguous concept whose meaning shifted over time, corresponds to this situation just as nationalism can be a reaction to “pure” colonialism. Ultimately, Taiwan is best understood by examining the complex interaction of all three of these seemingly contradictory elements: nation, province, and colony. After the Nationalists’ defeat on the mainland, Taiwan represented a nation with a state that insisted it was a province, and the Taiwanese were a people whose political activity suggested they were living in a colony. Ironically, the real colonizers were the Han Chinese immigrants to the island during the late Ming and Qing periods who had conquered Taiwan and subdued the aboriginal peoples–the first Taiwanese. This fact, like so much of the island’s history, was conveniently forgotten by Han Taiwanese and mainlanders alike.

SOURCE: Between Assimilation and Independence: The Taiwanese Encounter Nationalist China, 1945-1950, by Steven E. Phillips (Stanford U. Press, 2003), pp. 136-139

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by | 1 May 2005 · 2:59 pm

German and Chinese Classmates in My "Curs de Perfecţionare"

My year of linguistic research in Romania in 1983–84 was pretty much a bust. Having done fieldwork in a kind of New Guinea Sprachbund, I intended to study the Romanian literature on the Balkan Sprachbund. But my advisor, an Albanian specialist, wasn’t interested in much but a Daco-Thraco-Illyrian substrate. And no one wanted to talk about any Slavic substrate or superstrate. I came away much less impressed by the Balkan Sprachbund than by the Western European one, with all those preposed articles, a stronger tendency to render subordinate clauses in the infinitive rather than the subjunctive, and a clearly discernible Latin superstrate.

But one of the many peripheral bright spots was the chance to sit in on a Romanian “curs de perfecţionare” with classmates from China, East Germany, and the U.S. What made the class interesting was not the sometimes stupifyingly dull lectures, but rather the need to use Romanian to communicate with our classmates, not all of whom were stupifyingly dull.

The four young German girls were all Russian majors (at the University of Leipzig, I believe) picking up a second language to enhance their translator/interpreter career prospects. Two of them were very reliable members of the Party; the other two were not. I ran into one of the latter, a chunky little red-head, at an art exhibit and reception in the West German embassy. She panicked and begged me not to tell anyone I had seen her there. I didn’t and, as far as I know, she didn’t get in any trouble.

When it came time to give oral presentations in one of our classes, they all chose safe and boring presentations on such topics as sports terminology and shipping terminology. The latter talk, by a girl from the Baltic seaport of Rostock, is where I first heard the term “roll-on/roll-off” (also roro) for a type of ship.

During the second term, I got permission to attend their course introducing Bulgarian, but I couldn’t keep up since the class assumed prior knowledge of Russian.

The two Chinese women in the class were broadcasters for Radio Beijing’s Romanian broadcast service. In fact, they still are! One was very reserved, and I never got to know her very well, but the other was quite outgoing and I found her not only far more interesting, but much less frustrating to talk with than the only other American linguist among my classmates. (That’ll have to be another post.)

At one point during the long, lean winter, with markets usually barren of fresh meat and vegetables, she managed to supply us with a chunk of meat from the Chinese embassy. Just before we left, we passed on to her the cassette player/shortwave radio we had brought with us.

Her class presentation was the most interesting one of all. A group from the Chinese embassy had taken a holiday trip through Yugoslavia and Hungary, but she focused mostly on Janos Kadar, less about his economic reforms than about his anti-personality cult. He was so modest, according to her sources, that he would not cut to the head of a line waiting to get into some place–at least not until someone noticed and then everyone deferred to him. As she was talking, I would occasionally glance up at the portrait of Mr. Personality Cult himself that hung in every Romanian classroom. Our professor, the most pleasant and sensitive of our lot, did a good job of taking it all in stride. I thought, if any of us could trash a personality cult, it was someone who had lived through the last years of Mao Zedong. (I learned only recently about the long relationship between Janos Kadar and the Chinese Communist Party.)

Four years later, on a trip to Beijing after a year teaching English in a small town in Guangdong, we had a chance to meet again. I called Radio Beijing and managed in my barely adequate Chinese to get someone to call her to the phone. But then when she answered and I tried to switch to my somewhat faded Romanian, I had trouble keeping Chinese out of it. She brought her six-year-old son and her husband to our small hotel near the Temple of Heaven and spent a few hours chatting in the courtyard garden during a blackout with my wife and me and our two-year-old daughter. Fortunately, her husband spoke a fair bit of English, having worked as an Italian translator/interpreter for a travel agency, so we didn’t have to depend entirely on my rusty Romanian befreckled with dots of Chinese.

Next installment: the three weird Americans in my class.

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by | 29 April 2005 · 9:57 pm

Unglamorous Scottish Glamour

Virginia Postrel posts a bit of Scottish etymology:

In his poem “The Lay of the Last Minstrel,” Sir Walter Scott introduced the word glamour into English from Scots, where it meant a literal magic spell that kept the subject from seeing things as they really are:

And one short spell therein he read:
It had much of glamour might;
Could make a ladye seem a knight;
The cobwebs on a dungeon wall
Seem tapestry in lordly hall;
A nut-shell seem a gilded barge,
A sheeling [a shepherd’s hut] seem a palace large,
And youth seem age, and age seem youth:
All was delusion, nought was truth.

The last bit certainly applies to much of modern syntax, if not grammar more generally.

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by | 29 April 2005 · 9:39 pm

Language Hat on Barbarian Names

Language Hat quotes an interesting take on name etymologies from O. Maenchen-Helfen’s The World of the Huns (University of California Press, 1973). Here’s a bit of it:

We must be prepared to meet among the names borne by Huns Germanic, Latin, and (as a result of the long and close contact with the Alans) also Iranian names. Attempts to force all Hunnic names into one linguistic group are a priori doomed to failure.

“Let no one,” warned Jordanes, “who is ignorant cavil at the fact that the tribes of men use many names, the Sarmatians from the Germans and the Goths frequently from the Huns.” Tutizar was a Goth and Ragnaris a Hun, but Tutizar is not a Gothic name and Ragnaris is Germanic. The Byzantine generals who in 493 fought against the Isaurians were Apsikal, a Goth, and Sigizan and Zolban, commanders of the Hun auxiliaries. Apsikal is not a Gothic but a Hunnic name; Sigizan might be Germanic. Mundius, a man of Attilanic descent, had a son by the name of Mauricius; his grandson Theudimundus bore a Germanic name. Patricius, Ardabur, and Herminiricus were not a Roman, an Alan, and a German as the names would indicate, but brothers, the sons of Aspar and his Gothic wife. There are many such cases in the fifth and sixth centuries. Sometimes a man is known under two names, belonging to two different tongues. Or he has a name compounded of elements of two languages. There are instances of what seem to be double names; actually one is the personal name, the other a title. Among the Hun names, some might well be designations of rank. It is, I believe, generally agreed that the titles of the steppe peoples do not reflect the nationality of their bearers. A kan, kagan, or bagatur may be a Mongol, a Turk, a Bulgar; he may be practically anything….

In addition to the objective difficulties, subjective ones bedevil some scholars. Turkologists are likely to find Turks everywhere; Germanic scholars discover Germans in unlikely places. Convinced that all proto-Bulgarians spoke Turkish, Németh offered an attractive Turkish etymology of Asparuch; other Turkologists explained the name in a different, perhaps less convincing way. Now it has turned out that Asparuch is an Iranian name. Validi Togan, a scholar of profound erudition but sometimes biased by pan-Turkism, derived shogun, Sino-Japanese for chiang chün, “general,” from the Qarluq title sagun. Pro-Germanic bias led Schönfeld to maintain, in disregard of all chronology, that the Moors took over Vandalic names.

I particularly like the first comment, from John Emerson:

Boodberg and Wolfram have both argued that steppe peoples are not “peoples” the way that anthropologists think of it. They are armies, together with their families. Voluntarily or otherwise, whole groups of other peoples could be absorbed.

The supposed ethnicity of a group is a function of the ethnicity of its leader and his clan, and also of the language spoken in the leadership councils. So the Huns weren’t really Huns, nor the Goths Goths — not the way we can say that a people that’s been living in a certain valley for five generations might have a given ethnicity.

That’s somewhat similar to my impression of many peoples along the coast of New Guinea.

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