Talk:Suebi

Names

Poles refer to all Germans "Shvabs" or "Shkops", (both terms being extremely derogatory); not just to Ukrainian ones, of whom knowledge in Poland is practically non - existent.

The official slavonic name for Germans - Nemce, or Niemcy meant: "mutes" or "dumb people".

Space Cadet

Suevi = Sueones = Svear?

The Svear of Sweden and the Suevi/Suebi/Suabi were all closely related Germanic people. What evidence or probability exists of the Suevi and the Svear being identical, i.e., a single tribe, during the first few centuries A.D.?

Why not give your Swedish quotes of Svear and their sources (dates are important), and leave the question open? --Wetman 04:51, 20 August 2005 (UTC)

"Sueve" or "Suebic"?

Which is the better adjectival form in English? --Wetman 00:00, 22 January 2006 (UTC)

I would say "Suevi", but if not that, "Suebi". I wouldn't use Sueve or Suebic, but I've never before seen Sueve, and what do I know? What is the basis for the massive edits by a recent unnamed user? I have a feeling many should be reverted and some info retained and rewritten. Srnec 01:50, 22 January 2006 (UTC)

Agreed. This article is being anonymously rewritten. "Elbe-Germanic" is a linguistic category—and not a widely-used category at that (Google it!). Its application to identify a historical population needs to be introduced for the general reader. New edits show a tenuous control of English: "Sueve" is not the adjectival form: "Suebic" is. Take the following:

Part of the Suebi, called Nord-Schwaben (northern Suebi) were mentioned in 569 under Frankish king Siegbert I. in areas of today's Saxony-Anhalt. In connection to the Suebi Saxons and Langobards (Lombards) returning from Italy in 573, are mentioned.

No text of 569 mentions "Nord-Schwaben", as the reader is being told. The reader is being given someone's POV reading, with dates adding a tone of credibility. A sounder approach: to identify the Chronicle entry then quote it, and then to report on the usual inference drawn from the brief chronicle entry. Once the "Sueve" (!) warbands split up, two threads have to be separately traced, in Germany and in Galicia. This article needs professionalizing: out of my competence, to be sure. --Wetman 15:59, 13 February 2006 (UTC)

I would not use the modern German word "Schwaben" as some readers might confuse it with some of the inhabitants of the modern German states of Baden-Württemberg and Bavaria. Furthermore, to use "Schwaben" in the context of the 6th century or earlier is unhistoric. It would be better to use an anglicised Latin form.Ekki01 16:13, 13 April 2007 (UTC)

ambuguity of Drusus

the link of Drusus must be "de-ambuguiated"

Done!--Berig 17:25, 2 May 2007 (UTC)

Tacitus' "misunderstanding"

The following is incomprehensible without some enlarging: "[Tacitus] included all North Germanic and East Germanic tribes that were not directly annexed by the Romans, but this was due to a misunderstanding." What misunderstanding? What then were the actual facts, according to modfern historians? --Wetman 09:55, 15 September 2007 (UTC)

Drusus securing the frontier

The statement is made that the Suebi remained a threat until Drusus secured the frontier. I can't imagine what that can mean; it is an oversimplification by far. Which Suebi did he secure it against? Troubles on the Suebian border went on and on right to the end of the empire. The gains of Drusus were soon nullified; his brother Tiberius had to campaign again. Shortly the Marcomanni required military operations and they were under the name of Suebi. That region between the Rhine and the Danube was the most heavily fortified with 3 or more big bases, walls and river commands. If the border was secure, why maintain this apparatus? Well, I looked at the citation on this and it requires me to learn Swedish and buy access to the Swedish national encyclopedia! I bet, even if I did so, I would not find the statement there and if I did it would not mean what it implies in the article, that Drusus achieved a permanent security of the Rhine-Danube border against the Suebi on the other side. So, I am taking the liberty of changing a couple of words to make it fit.Dave 19:18, 13 October 2007 (UTC)

The encyclopedia says:

De förblev ett hot mot romarna vid Rhen tills Drusus d.ä. säkrade gränsen 9 f.kr.

Translation:

They remained a threat to the Romans at the Rhine until Drusus the Elder secured the border 9 BC.

It's referenced, so if you disagree it's better that you find a source that also disagrees.--Berig 19:55, 13 October 2007 (UTC)

The word ethnic

Hello Wetman. This is just a theoretical observation; I don't yet see where it impacts the article seriously, but "ethnic" even though you don't like it has a fairly concrete meaning in English and often nothing else will do. The classical writers certainly believed in it and used it often, and it formed their observations and beliefs, so we can't just drop it from the classics and from modern English. I understand why you don't like it as it has all sorts of unscientific and often deadly connotations and denotations and is vague and imprecise. Nevertheless we use it and so did the ancients. So any identity is likely to be a "race" or a "people" or a "tribe" on any basis whatever and it is up to us to figure out what they meant. We can't just excise ethnic from English.Dave 19:48, 13 October 2007 (UTC)

The reader may wonder at this! I had removed "ethnic" from the remark "...Indo-european root *swe-. Some related English words are: sibling, sister, swain, self, ethnic." Why? In this list the derivation of "ethnos" from PIE *swe- is remote enough to distract the ordinary reader— while goosing the well-informed amateur PIE linguist with a little self-congratulatory flush. I deleted it simply to strengthen the point that was being made. As to Dave Botteville's other deletion, I know and Dave Botteville knows, and you all know, that the asterisk in front of *swe- indicates that it is a reconstruction. Dave informs us "You don't need the postulated; all IE roots are reconstructions, which is designated in linguistics by the *. Nothing is being asserted or 'postulated.'" Needless to say. But there's no reason to hang on quite so tight to information that may orient the Wikipedia reader through this thought. --Wetman 00:45, 14 October 2007 (UTC)

The polarities

Removed from article:

"as it was intended as a hortatory essay for a Roman public that set up cultural polarities,"

Objection your honor! The prosecutor is leading the witness! In the first place we have no idea at all what you mean by hortatory essay. And second, how can you say what it was intended for? That is a long and arduous task of scholarship for which you have not given a source. If it is your opinion, well, it is an interesting opinion. Publish it somewhere else, tip me off, and I will make sure it gets in there. As for the Roman public setting up the polarities, really, that goes too far. You are giving sociological conjectures as the reason why the words of Tacitus might not be taken at face value nowadays, thus involving yourself in cultural relativism. We don't care if he or they happened to be bipolar or if this condition mandated a hortatory approach, what we want to know is how trustworthy are the statements of Tacitus with regard to the truth. He himself admitted that he was relying on different sources with contradictory stories. You make it sound as though just now after 2000 years we are discovering that because of the sociology Tacitus can't be trusted, a fact never ever revealed before in the long history of Tacitean scholarship. Really.Dave 23:43, 13 October 2007 (UTC)

The "scholarship" that is news to Dave Botteville should be referenced under Germania (book), not here: I haven't looked at that article recently, but it is not news, even to an amateur like me, that Tacitus' purpose in Germania was an exhortation directed to Romans, not the supposed geographical and ethnological treatise for which the hundred-year-old pop references still being quoted in this article would mine it (following Th. Mommsen, I understand). I think we could unclench a little and let the information flow: Tacitus is indeed the classical source: in removing that fact, Dave Botteville says "What about Caesar, Strabo, Pliny and Ptolemy?" Yes indeed! Let their passing references be added by David Botteville, then, in a footnote: they have not yet appeared anywhere in this article. The article's footnotes are a bit strained: the remark that "Suebi" covers a large number of tribes in central Germany is supported by a 1912 annotation of a line in Widsith! Land sakes alive! --Wetman 00:45, 14 October 2007 (UTC)

I'm having trouble following you, Wetman, but I will reply to what you seem to mean. Whether or not Germania is an exhortation IS an opinion. The question is whether it is exclusively your opinion. If it is, then it is either basic knowledge that does not need a reference or it is not. I deny that it is basic knowledge. It is NOT obvious to the general reader. As it is not basic knowledge and if someone else has it, how about a note? You can't just say "following Mommsen I understand." You need a citation with a page number and I would further suggest you quote a phrase as I did, but in the article on Germania. The latter needs reworking and expansion but so do most articles in this area and I would face the same problem if I were to do it, which, if no volunteers come forward, I may have to. For the rest, Tacitus is not THE classical source. I deny that. The other classical authors do not appear in the article because no one put them there yet (I did not write the article). I do plan to cover them but I'm going sequentially so I encountered these statements by you first. And for the "land sakes alive", I got no idea vis a vis the subject why you would have that reaction. The reader needs to know the classical sources are equivocal. That note on Widsith actually is rather extensive even though the Suebi are mentioned in one line of the poem. It does present the issue fairly with ancient sources. It is not a new or obscure issue. In case the book is not available to you, it can be previewed on Google. And, I don't know what you mean by strained notes, but that brings me to mind, would you mind using proper citation format on your citations?

One last thing. This has been building up for some time has it not? We've often been in each other's sphere of interest ever since I got on Wikipedia 1.5 years ago, and you were one of the very first to demand references and get my first article deleted out of hand. You did that before I even had a user page. That's all right. I forgive you. Maybe it needed deletion. I can't remember that you ever had anything good to say about my editing, even though I have gotten some recognition from my other peers. Your remarks generally border on ad hominem, not quite enough to attract the attention of the administration. I am sure you are a valuable contributor and I appreciate you for many things you have done. As I gained more experience I thought you were often peremptory and wrong with a tendency to belittle rather than guide. However I accepted your comments with no complaint. What I am not going to do, though, is be belittled out of working on an article that needs work and in which I am interested. My apprenticeship is over. My notes are not strained. Your opinions are not obvious information. I know as much if not more than you about the topic. So, I'm not going to be belittled out of it. You might as well drop that tone. I think I'm a reasonable man and can work with reasonable men. If you do not reply reasonably I wiil stop responding to you in any way at all.Dave 02:26, 14 October 2007 (UTC)

PS: the rest of it does not make any sense either:

", but it is now read with increasing caution for its passing remarks on geography and ethnology; nevertheless,"

Why would the caution be any greater now than it ever was? Are you trying to say the students should not necessarily take it at face value? That's an editorial opinion and is not necessary. If the topic is the unreliability of Tacitus' Germania it seems to me you would want to take that up under Tacitus' Germania. I don't think we are neglecting the problems in the sources. Its nothing new. They've always been there. Tacitus' remarks have been passing around for a couple of thousand years. You fail to present enough detail to make your assertions anything more than your opinion on Tacitus. And anyway anyone who reads the Germania from the beginning is already tipped off by Tacitus himself that he does not have a consistent picture.Dave 00:16, 14 October 2007 (UTC)

Why would the caution be any greater now than it ever was? I don't know about "the student" but apparently Dave Botteville does take Tacitus at face value. --Wetman 00:45, 14 October 2007 (UTC)

I can't see how you can draw that conclusion. No, I don't take Tacitus at face value. I repeat, Tacitus himself pointed out the inconsistencies in his information. They have always been there and have always been considered with the widest possible spectrum of viewpoint. There is no new information leading to new suspicions and no need to caution the reader that now, as opposed to some theoretically credulous past, we have to be even more careful than ever in suspecting Tacitus.Dave 01:36, 14 October 2007 (UTC)

No doubt we all feel more memorable than we really are: I'm sure I do. So I try to treat every goose as a new goose; often, I find, it's the only kindly way. More seriously, I added the following quite sensible note, deleted by Dave Botteville: "The modern view of the Suebi is laid out in two volumes stemming from papers delivered at a series of seminars at Göttingen in 1986 and 1987, Günther Neumann and Henning Seemann, eds., Beiträge zum Verständnis der Germania des Tacitus, (Göttingen) 1989, 1992." Even skimming the English-language reviews of the two volumes would bring one up to speed. Well, almost anyone.--Wetman 06:56, 15 October 2007 (UTC)

The modern view

I removed this for now:

Modern historians consider this an over-simplification.

What it seems to say is exactly the opposite of what the scholars think. They think Tacitus has too many tribes in the Suebi. Thus Tacitus' view is not over-simple but over-elaborate, implying that the scholars have a view yet more elaborate of which Tacitus' is an oversimplification. I suppose you could argue that Tacitus is being oversimple in being overelaborate. This seems rather indirect to me. Now, the reference is on the oversimplification. What oversimplification? You have not in any way said and so the reader has to read the 2 volumes to find out what you mean. Unfortunately they are in German, so he has to learn German. We expect too much of him, don't you think? Moreover, the volumes are presented as "The modern view." Oh really? Is there any other or is it all there in those two volumes? Do they present one view or many? By what world-wide authority did it get to be "the"? This is really a weasel word, isn't it? You are trying to weasel out of saying anything.Dave 01:36, 14 October 2007 (UTC)

Repetitious or wrong text

I removed this:

Tacitus hypothesized that other tribes emanated from it, such as the Quadi and the Marcomanni and probably also the Hermunduri. The Suebi tribal group also included the Alamanni and the Langobards, but whether the latter group were part of the Suebi is doubtful.

In the 1st century AD, the Suebi were concentrated at the Elbe river, but the Huns would make some of them cross the Rhine and reach the Iberian Peninsula.

Tacitus makes no such implication and the on-line Britannica - what we can see of it without buying - does not mention the topic. As for the Swedish ref, most of us can't read that so I don't know what it does say. If it says Tacitus says these tribes "come from" the the Suebi in the narrow sense, it is wrong. More generally, the problem with hypothesizing that all these tribes come from Caesar's Suebi is that first of all Tacitus does not take that view and second Suebia is a very large territory, over half of Germany. Although you can argue that the Marcomanni and Quadi came downstream from Caesar's Suebi, you can't deal at all with Suiones, the Balts and the Finno-Ugrians in this way and have no choice but to arbitrarily reject all parts of Tacitus except those that fit that narrow hypothesis; hence, the need to invent a great skepticism of Tacitus. But if Tacitus is unreliable in those parts, why would he be reliable in all the rest? We need to take the most general and open interpretation here and in fact all the articles on the Balts take Tacitus seriously about the Aestii and the etymologists do connect Suebi with Suiones. So, whatever the prehistoric migrational situation was we can't assume it all happened just before Caesar got there. Either we just throw Tacitus totally out as some kind of hortatory propaganda or we have to consider everything he says. I don't say we can't find evidence to dispute it. But in fact Tacitus corresponds more or less to Ptolemy and the other sources, which I will be bringing in below. As for the part about the Huns, well, that information is covered in the parts of the article that deal with that time, which is at the very end of the classical Suebic identity. Understand, the population of the Suebi did not suddenly vanish, they only started assuming other identites, such as Alamannic, Alsatian, Bavarian, Swiss, eventually Austrian, what have you. In any case only some of them were concentrated on the Elbe; that is, the statement takes the narrow view. On to the rest of the article.Dave 15:51, 14 October 2007 (UTC)

Talessman's map

Mr Talessman: what your map's contribution? There are better executed and more precise maps already in the article.Andrarias (talk) 04:58, 24 November 2007 (UTC)

Mr Andrarias, have you actually looked at the maps, or are you just sockpuppeting for Srnec? They show the location of Suebian Kingdom, along with other nations. What's wrong with that? I'll be replacing them with zoomed-in versions soon, but for now I have to waste time with bigoted editors who think they are wiki-gods because they get to be anonymous here. Thomas Lessman (talk) 20:16, 24 November 2007 (UTC)

Please stop edit warring. I appreciate that a new map is included, showing both Suebian areas at once, in Portugal and at the Rhine, but then huge a "one size fits all" map that covers half of Africa and Asia, too, is a temporary solution at best. Please crop to relevant area, cutting non-relevant parts. Also, the spelling "Alammania" is new to me (and Albania at the Kaspian Sea). -- Matthead  DisOuß   15:52, 25 November 2007 (UTC)

Suppressed

The following sourced information might be valuable, though it's been deleted twice: John of Biclarum, however, places the Suebic conversion later and ascribes it, not to a Suebe, but to a Visigoth, placing it alongside that of the Goths, which occurred under Reccared I in 587–589. John of Biclarum might not be any more credible than Isidore of Seville, but wise readers of Wikipedia don't neglect to read the Talk pages. --Wetman (talk) 09:14, 25 March 2008 (UTC)

The Second Council of Braga and The Conversion

Well, I`m a little upset now -and when I say little I mean it-. Recently I modified the article, adding a reference to the Second Council of Braga. It was a catholic council celebrated the Spanish Era 610, i.e. 572 A.D., under king Miro. Here is the headline "CONCILIUM BRACARENSE SECUNDUM DUODECIM EPISCOPORUM habitum anno secundo regis Mironis, die Kalendarum Iuniarum, aera DCX." So, the first council is not the only contemporary record, and there is some evolution from the first to the second one.

Then, also, in the Third Council of Toledo, that met the year 589, the visigothic king expressed about the recent conversion of its kingdom: "Nec enim sola Gothorum conversio ad cumulum nostrae mercedis accessit, quin immo et Suevorum gentis infinita multitudo, quam praesidio caelesti nostro regno subiecimus." That is, king Reccared celebrates not only the conversion of the Goths, but also of an infinite number of Suevi.

So, I would say that John Blicarense's Chronica is second hand to this conversion, thought it is a primary and reliable source for the time.

Accordingly, I`m changing again the article, trying to be respectfull with other editors choices.--Cadroiolos (talk) 09:35, 25 March 2008 (UTC)