Slavic Greece toponyms

[Glory2Cabinda]

I was inspired by this thread.

Hypothetical Germanic city names in a Germanic-occupied Eastern Roman Empire

In the alt-scenario where the Germanic tribes would have occupied the ERE as well as the WRE, how the Germanic names for the ERE cities would have evolved there if compared to how some of them did it in the WRE (i.e. Mogontiacum -> Mainz, Treverorum -> Trier, Mediolanum -> Mailand)? Some...

www.alternatehistory.com

So lets say sometime during the 600s or early 700s during some war with the Arabs or Persians they invade and colonize Greece . What do they city names look like in this world?

Constantinople is the exception no way that could take that.

 

[Dan1988]

The toponyms would probably, more or less, remain as is with some phonological adjustment - because the early written forms of Slavic, especially OCS, heavily borrowed a lot of vocabulary, syntax, and the writing system we now associate with Slavic-speaking Orthodox Christianity from Greek. So there would not be much in terms of drastic change.

 

[Osman Aga]

I was inspired by this thread.

Hypothetical Germanic city names in a Germanic-occupied Eastern Roman Empire

In the alt-scenario where the Germanic tribes would have occupied the ERE as well as the WRE, how the Germanic names for the ERE cities would have evolved there if compared to how some of them did it in the WRE (i.e. Mogontiacum -> Mainz, Treverorum -> Trier, Mediolanum -> Mailand)? Some...

www.alternatehistory.com

So lets say sometime during the 600s or early 700s during some war with the Arabs or Persians they invade and colonize Greece . What do they city names look like in this world?

Constantinople is the exception no way that could take that.

Not militarily but maybe in a Fourth Crusade Way. Help a certain pretender and take over when the agreements are not honored while your forces are in the city.

 

[Gloss]

The toponyms would probably, more or less, remain as is with some phonological adjustment - because the early written forms of Slavic, especially OCS, heavily borrowed a lot of vocabulary, syntax, and the writing system we now associate with Slavic-speaking Orthodox Christianity from Greek. So there would not be much in terms of drastic change.

This is not really the case, many other exampels of linguistic replacement without a relatively large(even if sizeable) genetic replacement saw toponyms changed drastically, for example with the Norse in Northern Scotland, England with the Anglo-Saxons, the limes with the Germanic tribes, Eastern Germanic with the Slavs first and Germans later.

Most of Greece would lose a lot of Greek toponyms, also South Slavic is not nearly as influenced by Greek as you imply, it's not even close to, say, English and French/Latin.

 

[Dan1988]

also South Slavic is not nearly as influenced by Greek as you imply,

I was thinking primarily of Old Church Slavonic, which was the main early literary forms of any Slavonic language, which cribbed quite a bit from Greek, sometimes explicit and sometimes implicitly (as is the case with « Богородица », the common word for the Virgin Mary in both East Slavic and South Slavic, which is a calque from the Greek « Θεοτόκος »). For the most part, as well, like other members of Standard Average European, during the breakup of Proto-Slavic to the various other Slavic languages, they seemed to be pretty conducive to substratal influence from existing languages, and South Slavic in general was not immune. It may not necessarily be Greek, but it was definitely other languages that were spoken in the area, and in turn literary South Slavic in the form of OCS soon influenced other Slavic languages - the most obvious being Russian, but was also true of others as well.

 

[Gloss]

I was thinking primarily of Old Church Slavonic, which was the main early literary forms of any Slavonic language, which cribbed quite a bit from Greek, sometimes explicit and sometimes implicitly (as is the case with « Богородица », the common word for the Virgin Mary in both East Slavic and South Slavic, which is a calque from the Greek « Θεοτόκος »). For the most part, as well, like other members of Standard Average European, during the breakup of Proto-Slavic to the various other Slavic languages, they seemed to be pretty conducive to substratal influence from existing languages, and South Slavic in general was not immune. It may not necessarily be Greek, but it was definitely other languages that were spoken in the area, and in turn literary South Slavic in the form of OCS soon influenced other Slavic languages - the most obvious being Russian, but was also true of others as well.

Sure but Latin has influenced English too and on a raw numerical value toponyms in England are mostly Germanic and if not they are likely of Celtic orign despite Celtic itself having very little influence on English.

Even Romania is full of Slavic toponyms and even in the pre-Slavic toponyms there was Slavicization and no continuation with the Romanian phonology. All evidence points to that in the case of complete Slavic takeover, toponyms would either be of Slavic origin or significantly Slavicized and only larger settlement, rivers and geographical features would preserve their previous name, like elsewhere.

In modern Bulgarian only something like 10% of the vocabulary comes from both Latin and Greek(I suspect Romanian is counted in Latin in the sources I saw) and probably like in English, or even more so, loanwords would tend to be words that are less used anyway.