more
on Ruggero
A
year ago [WEEKLY110522]
I’ve argued how fruitless and pointless is the insistence of
Croatian intellec- tuals to identify Ruggero Giuseppe Boscovich as
"the greatest and most famous Croatian philoso- pher and
scientist Ruđer Bošković" just because he was born
in Dubrovnik. There I suggested the phrase "famous European
scientist and philoso- pher of Dalmatian origin", somewhat in a
favor of Croatian nationalists. Or so I thought at the time. Now,
after reading The Great Sea by David Abulafia (Oxford
University Press, 2011), the book on human history of the
Mediterranean, I realize I was mislead by the use of term Dalmatian
at Ruggero’s time.
Says
D. Abulafia about the trading republic of Dubrovnik, known to the
western Europeans as Ragusa: "Its origins lay in the group of
refugees from barbarian invasions who occupied a rocky promontory in
southern Dalmatia, protected by a wall of mountains from Slav
incursions. The Latin Ragusans were soon joined by a Slav
population, and by the late twelfth century the town was bilingual,
some speaking south Slav dialects and some speaking Dalmatian, a
romance language closely related to Italian." Slavonic
inhabitants were known as Dubrovčani, 'those of the
woods'.
Here,
see? No wonder Ruggero identified himself as a Dalmatian from Ragusa.
His mother was Italian, he used Italian language in private letters, historians say - or was it Dalmatian? |
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