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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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