I see problems with locating Western South Slavic so much to the east
Well it’s exactly this problem that the Pavle Ivic tried to explain, and according to him when the two dialect groups of the South Slavic tribes migrated to Balkans during the 7th century they were separated by a Vlach/Albanian buffer zone, situated in today’s East Serbia and West Bulgaria; once the Vlachs and the Albanians started to migrate from this Buffer Zone, both branches of the South Slavs stared to emigrate to this region, but it was the Western South Slavs who got the upper hand in this region (some toponyms in this area show feature of combining both dialects into one toponym). Pavle Ivic also points out those migrations continued during the Medieval period, so I think it’s difficult to pinpoint the precise border between the two dialects during the 7th century.
As discussed already, the older Slavic toponymy preserved in the Vlah areas in Negotinsko, Pozharevachko and in Albanian areas in southern Kossovo show Eastern South Slavic features. And now if we look at the map of the earliest Slavic penetration in the Balkans (in Vl. Georgiev, The genesis of the Balkan Peoples) we see that the Timok valley and the area between Nish, Sofia and Skopje was most densely penetrated. So are we to assume that there were both Eastern and Western South Slavic tribes crammed and living side by side in this area?
The Serbian linguist Aleksandar Loma has criticised Georgiev’s view on the apparent Slavic toponyms of some of the sites mentioned by the Byzantine historian Procopius in the 6th Century Balkans; some of them appear to be Slavic-sounding, but in fact Loma points out to Latin Vulgar- Proto Vlach features of some of the toponyms (I haven’t read the whole article he wrote on this, if he thinks that some of them are Slavic and how many of them are Vulgar Latin-Proto Vlach).
this was initially a Byzantine construct. It was the Byzantines, including the work of Cyrillus&Methodius, who created the construct called "Sloveni". The Slavic-speaking tribes had no idea of their common origins, no myths of a common ancestor, etc. The idea of common "Slavdom" became initially popular amongst the Slavs under Byzantine influence, but just a century or two later it was patriotically reversed, was turned upside down in each separate country. Thus, the translators of the Byzantine chronicles in mediaval Bulgaria routinely translated the Greek σκλαβηνοι as "блъгари". The same in Russia where the idea that all Slavic speakers are some king of Russians was entertained till the 19th c. and something similar in Serbia
This is Florin Curta’s interpretation. On the other hand, forms of the ethnonym “Sloveni” are (the Slovenians and Slovaks- Slovenci/Slovenski, Slovacki/Slovenski) and where use by Slavs that were not under Byzantine influence, notably the Ilmen Slavs- Sloveni in North Russia and the Pomeranian Slavs- Slovinci.
... this is exactly what I was talking about. Why do you think that the "Srbi" of the XII-XIII cc. were not a political construct, similar to "Blgari"? It is not about "Serbs preserving their identity" but about the amalgamation of various groups, Slavic or not, to form a state, a people. A single tribe, even as "purely Slavic" (a myth!) as the Serb one, cannot create a state, a fully fledged state with its organisational structures.
When I said that they preserved their identity, I mean that they continued to call themselves Serbs and not “Blgari” as the other South Slavic tribes did; there is no state of Berzitia, Sagudatia, Strimonia , or Draguvitia today in the Balkans, but there is a state of Serbia!
The ethnonym “Bl’gari”, first came to denote a “podanik” subjects of the Bulgar Khanate after the initial stage when it only denoted an ethnic Bulgar, and Byzantine writers clearly distinguished the two ethnic elements in that State, the Bulgars and the Slavs, but during the 10th century the ethnonym Bulgar came to denote an ethnos, as it did not anymore denote the ethnic Bulgars or simply the subjects of the Bulgar state regardless of their ethnic origin but the Slavic ethnos within that state, not the Vlachs, the Romei or Albanians, who also lived within the borders of the Bulgar Tsardom in the 10th century, but the people who assimilated the ethnic Bulgars.
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