User talk:Ffdj

January 2024
Welcome to Wikipedia. Unfortunately, content you added to a Wikipedia article appears to be a minority or fringe viewpoint, and appears to have given undue weight to this minority viewpoint, and has been reverted. To maintain a neutral point of view, an idea that is not broadly supported by scholarship in its field must not be given undue weight in an article about a mainstream idea. Feel free to use the article's talk page to discuss this, and take a look at the welcome page to learn more about contributing to this encyclopedia. Thank you. Jingiby (talk) 03:41, 15 January 2024 (UTC)


 * Dear Jingiby, thank you for this civil welcome. I took some time to learn about the principles of contributing to Wikipedia, as you suggested. I think I understand it better now, thanks to these standard helpful directions you gave me. So, I hope you’ll find that this Wikipedia-hallmark approach to engage in constructive discussion is much better as well, instead of the removal of content without adequate explanation or using edit comments that are uncivil, inappropriate, or otherwise nonconstructive (“wtf”, “Macedonian was codified in 20th century for the first time”).
 * Having great respect for Wikipedia, which recommends assuming good faith in new contributors like me, I will assume good faith in you as a more experienced contributor, and would like to continue the discussion.
 * I. Defining the problem
 * Please, elaborate your view on my edits being a minority or fringe viewpoint and adding undue weight. What exactly is my minority or fringe viewpoint?
 * If I understand you correctly, I think you might have thought that adding the term only in Macedonian would seem as a minority or fringe perspective, but I think you misundestood the wider context of the edit. I respectfully disagree with your assessment of the issue at hand.
 * In my view, the neutral point of view is gravely endangered in this article by:
 * 1) not adhering to mainstream science in the field of Byzantine studies on this topic, at all;
 * 2) not incorporating all the significant views and reliable sources, but unduly favoring one truly fringe point of view on the subject (Florin Curta’s) with undue weight instead; and
 * 3) giving disproportionately less weight to the more significant Slavic viewpoint on this historical topic, since this historical person has Slavic origin—or to be more precise, Macedonian Slavic origin (from the Sclaveni/Slavic tribes of Macedonia, as you prefer).
 * So, more mainstream science is needed by incorporating more relevant reliable sources, as well as due weight and balance between the most prominent Greek and Slavic historic perspectives.
 * II. Proposed first step in editing
 * To get straight to the point of beginning to work on solving the problem better, I propose the following solution (explanation is below). This edit will do for the time being, but I think that more ought to be done in near future. For now, I propose to add the following text and reliable sources (with quotes in footnotes) in the opening paragraph:
 * Perbundos (Greek: Περβοῦνδος, Perboundos ; Macedonian, Serbian, Russian: Пребонд, Првуд,  Prebond ,  Prvud  ; Bulgarian: Пребънд) was a 7th-century king of the Rhynchinoi, a Slavic group in Macedonia. In ca. 675 he was taken prisoner by the Byzantine Empire due to his hostile intentions towards Thessalonica, and transported to Constantinople. Perbundos managed to escape, but was recaptured and executed, whereupon the Slavic tribes of Macedonia rose up and laid siege to Thessalonica. Perbundos was his Medieval Greek name (the name by which the Byzantine Greeks called him), while his slavic noble men called him by his name in Proto-Slavic, since in the 7th century, as Paul Lamerle emphasizes, “Macedonia was more Slav than Greek”.[1] In modern Slavic languages he is mostly called Prebond and Prvud.[2] [3]
 * [1] Lemerle 1945, p. 115–6.
 * [2] Andonov-Poljanski 1985, p. 36, footnote 96: “καΓά του των 'Ρυγχίνων ρήγας, τοΰνομα Περβούνδου. About the name of the Rinhinian tribal leader Περβούνδου, as well as of his title ρήγας, ρήξ, there is a ramification of viewpoints among the experts of “The Miracles of St. Demetrius of Salonika”. In relation to the question of the name itself, some scholars have decided on Prebond, others for Prvud, and yet others for Pervund.”
 * [3] Ostrogorsky 1955. p. 199, footnote 32.
 * Sources:
 * Lemerle, Paul (1945). Philippes et le Macédoine Orientale à l'époque chrétienne et byzantine: Recherches d'Histoire et d'Archéologie. Thèse de Doctorat. Bibliothèque des écoles françaises d'Athènes et de Rome. Paris: E. de Boccard.
 * https://books.google.mk/books/about/Philippes_et_la_Mac%C3%A9doine_orientale_%C3%A0.html?id=Kk0eMQAACAAJ&redir_esc=y
 * Andonov-Poljanski, Hristo (ed.) (1985). “Byzantium prevents the Macedonian Slavs from establishing their state headed by the Rinhinian rex Prebond, 674–677 A.D. (From the Miracles of Saint Demetrius of Salonika, II)”. Documents on the Struggle of the Macedonian People for Independence and a Nation-state: From the Settlement of the Slavs in Macedonia up to the End of the First World War, vol. 1. Skopje: The University of “Cyril and Methodius”, Faculty of Philosophy and History, Department of History, Institute for National History). pp. 35–40. https://books.google.mk/books/about/Documents_on_the_Struggle_of_the_Macedon.html?id=jXMiwgEACAAJ&redir_esc=y
 * Available online at the Internet Archive (p. 35–40 (17–22), footnote 96 on p. 36 (18)), but by the wrong title: https://archive.org/details/ByzantineSourcesForHistoryOfThePeoplesOfYugoslavia/mode/2up
 * Острогорски, Георгије (ур.) (1955). „Чуда Св. Димитријa Солунског, II, 4: Погубљење словенског кнеза Првуда, двогодишња герилска блокада и тродневна опсада Солуна од стране словенских племена“. Византиски извори за историју народа Југославије, том 1. Коментари: Фрањо Баришић, Мила Рајковић, Бариша Крекић, Лидија Томић. Посебна издања, књига CCXLI (In Serbian). Београд: Византолошки институт Српске Академије Наука, Научна књига. стр. 198–206. [Ostrogorsky, Georgе (ed.) (1955). Miracles of Saint Demetrius of Salonika, II, 4. Byzantian Sources on the History of the Peoples of Yugoslavia, vol.1. Commentary by F. Barišić, M. Rajković, B. Krekić, L. Tomić. Special edition, CCXLI. Belgrade: Institute for Byzantine Studies of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Naučna knjiga (In Serbian). pp. 198–206.]
 * Further reading:
 * Barišić, Franjo (1953). Mir. II, 4. Чуда Димитрија Солунског као историски извори (Miracles de St. Démétrius comme source historique). Belgrade: Institute of Byzantine Studies, Serbian Academy of Sciences (in Serbian with summary in French). pp.106–26. https://dais.sanu.ac.rs/bitstream/handle/123456789/9179/Cuda_Dimitrija_Solunskog_kao_istoriski.pdf
 * Moorhead, John (2013). The Roman Empire Divided: 400-700 AD. London and New York: Routledge. p. 209
 * https://www.google.mk/books/edition/The_Roman_Empire_Divided/nCQuAgAAQBAJ
 * Graebner, Michael David. 1975. Chapter II: Prelude — Byzantium and the Slavs during the era of migrations. The role of the Slavs within the Byzantine empire, 500–1018. Rutgers University. pp. 31–56. (p. 45)
 * Obolensky, Dimitri. 1971. Byzantium and the Slavs: Collected Studies. Variorum Reprints. https://books.google.mk/books?id=wH4JAQAAIAAJ
 * Stojanovich, Trajan (2015 [1997]). Balkan Worlds: The First and Last Europe. New York: Routledge. https://books.google.mk/books?id=lKVzCQAAQBAJ
 * III. Explanation:
 * Since this article belongs to the categories South Slavic history (and I would add: Slavic history, Sclaveni, Slavs, Macedonian Slavs, Medieval history of the Balkans, History of the Byzantine Empire), I would argue that the Slavic viewpoint is especially relevant. In order to maintain a neutral point of view, more weight on the Slavic side of this historical person from the Slavic medieval history is necessary. There is an issue of conflict of interest involved here, since the only source material for this instance of Slavic history is in Medieval Greek, and advocating the Byzantine Greek point of view, but the topic of interest is the historical person of Slavic origin here. So both of these significant and related perspectives should be at least balanced in the article. We should also keep in mind that Byzantine studies are quite a narrow field of interest, and most contemporary people whose interests are affected (like the contemporary Slavs) ought to be accounted for. Therefore, I insist that the fist step in editing this article should at least be adding the here-proposed two sentences on the scientific data regarding the Slavic pronunciation of the person’s name in contemporary Byzantine science (as important and necessary) and the standard bracketed linguistic information on the transcription of the person’s name in those languages/scripts (as a normal multi-linguistic term-identification opening in any article in Wikipedia or any other encyclopedia).
 * Furthermore, if mainstream science is to be represented, I would insist that using Florin Curta as a source is highly questionable in this article at best. Curta is considered to be an extremist in the field, he is widely criticized and rejected by the mainstream science due to his views on Slavic identity and ethnicity, as you can plainly see in the Wikipedia article on him. The sources I propose above are mainstream in Byzantine studies: like Paul Lemerle and George Ostrogorsky, while Andonov-Poljanski remains to be the only available English translation of this only medieval text where Perbundos is mentioned, “The Miracles of St. Demetrius”, thereby used in many academic and peer-reviewed papers today. There is an Old Church Slavonic translation of the Miracles of St. Demetrius from early 16-th century also, but I am not aware of its availability at the moment (In: Великия миней и четий [ Great Menaion Reader], Петербург 1880, pp. 1923—1944. Mentioned in Barišić, Franjo (1953) pp. 31–2). Although Curta is cited on general matter-of-fact information, I don’t think he should be cited as many times, and I do insist that more relevant mainstream scientists are given priority. The two above sources (Andonov-Poljanski in English, and Ostrogorsky in Serbian, are translations of “The Miracles of St. Demetrius”, so they may be cited on the contents retold in the section “Life”, together with the encyclopedic article in German (Lilie, Ralph-Johannes; Ludwig, Claudia; Pratsch, Thomas; Zielke, Beate (2000)).
 * IV. Related issue:
 * Regarding your remark on the contemporary Macedonian language as being undeserving of any due weight here, please consider the scientific data that languages are not as old as their contemporary codified form. Please be informed that:
 * It took Greece more than a century to codify its language since the establishment of the new Greek state in 1830. The current Standard Modern Greek was codified in 1976, when Demotic was declared the official language of Greece, as a merger of the vernacular Demotic variety with the written Katharevusa features. While Standard Literary Macedonian was codified in 1944, at the very beginning of the establishment of the Macedonian national state, based on a book from 1903.
 * In order to find out how old is the Macedonian vernacular, however, and if it is related to the historic period in question here, one should know that mainstream science confirms the following on these topics (reliably sourced and quoted from Wikipedia articles):
 * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macedonian_language:
 * Macedonian developed out of the western dialects of the East South Slavic dialect continuum, whose earliest recorded form is Old Church Slavonic. [...] Macedonian belongs to the eastern group of the South Slavic branch of Slavic languages in the Indo-European language family, together with Bulgarian and the extinct Old Church Slavonic.
 * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Church_Slavonic:
 * Old Church Slavonic is thought to have been based primarily on the dialect of the 9th-century Byzantine Slavs living in the Province of Thessalonica (in present-day Greece). […] The term Old Macedonian is occasionally used by Western scholars in a regional context.
 * [10] "There is disagreement as to whether Cyril and his brother Methodius were Greek or Slavic, but they knew the Slavic dialect spoken in Macedonia, adjacent to Thessalonika." (Waldman & Mason 2006, p. 752)
 * [18] "Old Church Slavonic, the liturgical language of the Eastern Orthodox Church, is based on the Thessalonican dialect of Old Macedonian, one of the South Slavic languages." (J P Mallory, D Q Adams. Encyclopaedia of Indo-European Culture. Pg 301)
 * [19] "Macedonian is descended from the dialects of Slavic speakers who settled in the Balkan peninsula during the 6th and 7th centuries CE. The oldest attested Slavic language, Old Church Slavonic, was based on dialects spoken around Salonica, in what is today Greek Macedonia. As it came to be defined in the 19th century, geographic Macedonia is the region bounded by Mount Olympus, the Pindus range, Mount Shar and Osogovo, the western Rhodopes, the lower course of the river Mesta (Greek Nestos), and the Aegean Sea. Many languages are spoken in the region but it is the Slavic dialects to which the glossonym Macedonian is applied." (R. E. Asher, J. M. Y. Simpson. The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, Introduction)
 * Old Church Slavonic was initially widely intelligible across the Slavic world. However, with the gradual differentiation of individual languages, Orthodox Slavs and, to some extent, Croatians ended up in a situation of diglossia, where they used one Slavic language for religious and another one for everyday affairs. The resolution of this situation, and the choice made for the exact balance between Old Church Slavonic and vernacular elements and forms is key to understanding the relationship between (Old) Church Slavonic and modern Slavic literary languages, as well as the distance between individual languages.
 * As the oldest attested Slavic language, Old Church Slavonic provides important evidence for the features of Proto-Slavic, the reconstructed common ancestor of all Slavic languages.
 * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_Slavs:
 * Proto-Slavic developed into a separate language during the first half of the 2nd millennium BC. Proto-Slavic reflects the language that was probably spoken at the end of the 1st millennium AD.
 * Later, having split into three groups during the migration period, the early Slavs were known to the Byzantine writers as Veneti, Antes and Sclaveni. The 6th century historian Jordanes referred to the Slavs (Sclaveni) in his 551 work Getica, noting that "although they derive from one nation, now they are known under three names, the Veneti, Antes and Sclaveni" (ab una stirpe exorti, tria nomina ediderunt, id est Veneti, Antes, Sclaveni). The early Slavs were known to the Roman writers of the 1st and 2nd centuries AD under the name of Veneti.
 * In order to find out how old is the Macedonian writing culture, however, one should know that mainstream science confirms the following:
 * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Church_Slavonic:
 * Initially Old Church Slavonic was written with the Glagolitic alphabet, but later Glagolitic was replaced by Cyrillic, […] in the 9th century. Of the Old Church Slavonic canon, about two-thirds is written in Glagolitic.
 * The manuscripts of the Ohrid recension or "Western" variant are among the oldest of the Old Church Slavonic language, only predated by the Moravian recension. The recension is sometimes named Macedonian because its literary centre, Ohrid, lies in the historical region of Macedonia. At that period, Ohrid administratively formed part of the province of Kutmichevitsa in the First Bulgarian Empire until the Byzantine conquest.
 * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glagolitic_script:
 * The Glagolitic script (/ˌɡlæɡəˈlɪtɪk/, ⰃⰎⰀⰃⰑⰎⰉⰜⰀ, glagolitsa) is the oldest known Slavic alphabet. It is generally agreed that it was created in the 9th century by Saint Cyril, a monk from Thessalonica.
 * The creation of the characters is popularly attributed to Saints Cyril and Methodius, who may have created them to facilitate the introduction of Christianity. It is believed that the original letters were fitted to Slavic dialects in geographical Macedonia specifically (the Byzantine theme of Thessalonica). The words of that language could not be easily written by using either the Greek or Latin alphabets.
 * A hypothetical pre-Glagolitic writing system is typically referred to as cherty i rezy (strokes and incisions) – but no material evidence of the existence of any pre-Glagolitic Slavic writing system has been found...
 * [However, there is archeological evidence and plenty “pseudoscientific ideas” explained in cherty i rezy, going back to 4th and 5th millennium BC...]
 * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrillic_script:
 * The Cyrillic script (/sɪˈrɪlɪk/ sih-RIL-ik), Slavonic script or simply Slavic script is a writing system used for various languages across Eurasia. It is the designated national script in various Slavic, Turkic, Mongolic, Uralic, Caucasian and Iranic-speaking countries in Southeastern Europe, Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, Central Asia, North Asia, and East Asia, and used by many other minority languages.
 * As of 2019, around 250 million people in Eurasia use Cyrillic as the official script for their national languages, with Russia accounting for about half of them.[4] With the accession of Bulgaria to the European Union on 1 January 2007, Cyrillic became the third official script of the European Union, following the Latin and Greek alphabets.
 * The Early Cyrillic alphabet was developed during the 9th century AD at the Preslav Literary School in the First Bulgarian Empire during the reign of Tsar Simeon I the Great, probably by the disciples of the two Byzantine brothers Cyril and Methodius, who had previously created the Glagolitic script.
 * Also, there is much more to learn on these subjects in contemporary original scientific research, as well in the field of alternative theoretical formulations, in regard to pre-Glagolitic or pre-Christian Slavic writing systems. For instance, contemporary Greek linguistic scientists are almost clueless about the characteristics of Ancient Macedonian as a dialect of Ancient Greek:
 * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Macedonian_language:
 * “Due to the fragmentary attestation of this dialect or language, various interpretations are possible”
 * “Because of the fragmentary sources of Ancient Macedonian, only a little is understood about the special features of the language.”
 * “The available literary evidence has no details about the exact nature of Ancient Macedonian; however it suggests that Ancient Macedonian and Greek were sufficiently different that there were communication difficulties between Greek and Macedonian contingents, necessitating the use of interpreters as late as the time of Alexander the Great. Based on this evidence, Papazoglou has written that Macedonian could not have been a Greek dialect,...”
 * But contemporary Macedonian and Slavic linguistic science publishes original research on deciphering and revealing strong and still intelligible Slavic characteristics of the vernacular of Ancient Macedonians, present in the various scripts they used on material archaeological evidence (for instance, the middle text in Egyptian Demotic script on the Rosetta Stone with the Ptolemaic Decree from 196 BC), or in the vernacular of contemporary Asian tribes, which consider themselves descendants of the troops of Alexander the Great. However, since Wikipedia has a strong no-original-research policy, I will not go into those until I can find evidence of it being more peer-reviewed. Yet, I must urge Wikipedia administrators to think more about discouraging scientific monopolies as a realistic and discernible hindering factor in the scientific process of original thought or alternative theoretical formulations moving from the spectrum of fringe theories to gaining more acceptance in mainstream science. Think about the heliocentric theory, for instance, and how the geocentric theory proponents held on to their monopolistic position in all institutions of authority, hendling it in a systematic monopolistic and hegemonic manner, unfairly using all authoritarian tools in their disposal.
 * Thank you for having this discussion. Ffdj (talk) 20:19, 27 January 2024 (UTC)