to The Truth Shall Set You Free - what precisely is the point you are making ?

THE SLAVS OF MACEDIONA AT THAT TIME THERE WAS NO SLAVS AT THAT TIME AFTER WW2 BROIS TITO CALLED THAT PROVINCE OF MACEDIONA WHERE AS ALBANIANS HAVE LIVED UNDER ALEXADNERA THE GREAT TIME THE ALBANIAN ALPHAPET WAS WRITEN IN MANISTER MOTHER TERSA WS BORN IN SKOPE WHEN IT WAS CALLED ALBANIA ILIRIANS WHERE THERE BEFORE THE SLAV THEN CAME THE BULGAR EMPIRE END OF STORY THE TRUTH SHALL SET U FREE!

To Jim who says he was born in Canada yet self-identifies as Greek, answers the Greek problem they have with thinking Macedonia is Greek. The city states of ancient Athens and Cornith sent colonies to the shores of Macedonia, where over time they hellenized some Macedonian nobility, by their superior culture. Over time with their minority population and the help of Alexander the Great seemed to convince most historins over the centuries that the Macedonians were a Greek people. A simple minded conclusion because they really didn,t care to find out the truth. Yet each time Macedonia tried to break [...]

Read the full comment free from this Greek myth, Greeks were able to fabricate their own storyline with great conviction. But alas the world has started to see the truth and Macedonia will win! It's just to sad all of Macedonia will not be united! P.S. Jim since you were born in Canada, try being a good Canadian, they have a fine culture and stop listening to the fairy tales your mommy and daddy told you!

Sorry, "Macedonian", but in the Acts of the Apostles in the Bible, Greece IS mentioned as St Paul preached in Athens, in the Agora.

Macedon(ia) is also mentioned, but separately. (We know from Roman history that by 1 AD - the start of the Christian era - Macedonia was a separate Roman province from Greece. (In fact a little later under Rome there were two Macedonian provinces, north and south, rather like today ! )

Dear people at the time Macedonia was a Kingom there was no greek state, only city states Athens, Sparta etc. If you look in the Bible there is no Greece, but MACEDONIA,so the name is sacred

Aries - in UK government we had to use national suppliers, so our mainframe was an ICL 1900/2900, replaced by an IBM 360 in 1986. Unfortunately, the "dialects" of COBOL were different, so we had to crawl all over a million line of program code to migrate our myriad of ICL applications - some dating back to 1949 ! - to IBM.

I agree this is "off topic", but it might cool a few 'fevered brows' to read something non-controversial !

Boris
the mainframe must have been an IBM 360 OR 370 OR A CDC 3300 OR
CDC 6000,
A mild correction binary,octal,
and heaxadecimal arithmetic and not mathematics.
The dinosaur language Cobol still
rules today in certain banking
Aplications where reliability is a must.
By the way we are completely out of subject right now, some stakeholders might get angry.

Yes, Aries, we used to use the Fibonacci sequence (it really is spelled that way, by the way, as he was Italian) to test out trainees for Government IT jobs.

The best one we ever devised was to discourage Irish claimants from fraudulently claiming twice (or more) on the same agricultural subsidy. We had an old COBOL-dominated mainframe computer that worked on punch cards and hexadecimal (or octal) mathematics.

So we told our Irish claimants that in future they would have to fill out all the numbers on their claim form in [...]

Read the full comment hexadecimal notation, in order "to speed up their payments through the computer" (!!!)

It had the desired effect for the most part, but a couple of the worst offenders either learned "hex" or bribed some programmers to fill in their claim forms for them.

Moral: You Can't Win Them All !!!

Boris
A quick reply is "you did not try enough"
FIBONACHI numbers are in a sequence of natural numbers
0,1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21,34, ad infinitum,

sorry - silly typo - the last posting was from me to Aries.

Apologies.

I certainly can't dispute your mathematics (Greek word) or your conclusions (Latin word), but I'm not sure how useful this process is to politicians (with whom I have worked rather a lot).

Pure maths and Aristotelian logic are certainly beyond them, but a check to ensure a correct logical thought process can be useful. There used to be a book issued to aid this in the UK, called "Straight and Crooked Thinking" by one Eric Thouless (it might still be on the Internet). Thouless, a modest man, said that all he had written was basic Aristotle, [...]

Read the full comment with a bit of St Thomas Aquinas (a meadiaeval Aristotelian) thrown in.

The mediaeval philosophers whom your "13" model remind me of are Averroes and Avicenna, both Moorish scholars in Moslem Spain, but whose common philosophy owes much more to the rules of mathematics than those of linguistics. (Probably since they were writing in Arabic, this may be why !)

But their works are still published - in English - and their works are still taught in the logic and philosophy faculty in many European universities.

Alternately, there is always the Fibonacci sequence......

Boris
Politicians(Greek Word)should be able able to make positive decisions in a world full of complexities(Latin word) to forsee positive outcomes and minimize the negative ones
Their thoughts must be governed
by a thinking process that gives
a lead to creativness and beyond
plain yes or no.

example
7+6=13 13=7+6
these are two equalites that seem
tautologically identical though they are not
for 7+6 sums up to 13
but 13 may be decomposed to
[...]

Read the full comment 7+6,12+1,8+5,9+4,10+3
that is creative thinking
by first encounter with that type of reasoning was in 1967 still a student in Athens.

Aries - sorry, I forgot to add that "Athenians and Romans" was one of the exact examples that Aristotle took (presumably the mutual exclusion here was still true in the fourth century BC, as Greece was still independent of Rome.)

Also in the first line of the second paragraph, the first "is" should be "in". Sorry for the typo.

Yes, Aries, it's quite simple: in the three-proposition syllogism that you propose, all terms in all three propositions (Romans, Athenians, and Some People) are "undistributed", therefore the logic follows perfectly well and the syllogism (and the conclusion) is valid.

The problem is all countries is that politicians of all Parties do not like "undistributed" terms (as Aristotle cogently observed 2350 years ago), because they prevent sweeping generalisations. And as Aristotle also said, classical logic aids clear thought and prevents muddled thinking.

To explain all this much better than I can, here is [...]

Read the full comment the relevant URL link to Stanford University, USA, which explains it all in clear English, with all key terminology in Greek.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-logic/

(I must admit to having liked the bit about "sullogismos/ protasis / sumperasma" in particular. In northern Europe Aristotle and scholastic logic were normally taught in Latin rather than Greek, ostensibly because the language was "more precise". But Stanford seems to disagree, as well might you.

Boris
You make the model a deterministic
one you state

in Aristotle's terminology.

For example:

"No Athenians are Romans" (both terms are 'distributed': no Roman can be an Athenian or vice versa)
the negation appears in both
propositions (in deterministic way
it excludes that an athenian can be a roman.
that is vertical thinking.

" Some people are Romans"
" Some people can be Athenians"
" some Roman [...]

Read the full comment can be Athenian"

that is called Lateral thinking
it is beyond yes or no it is "perhaps if" heuristic.

cheers

OK - Aries - using "fuzzy logic", how would you interpret the situation ?

It sounds to me as if the "some A are B / some A are not B" principle that you are advocating from fuzzy logic, is much the same as the "undistributed term" in Classical Logic.

So I would not quarrel with this, but it is almost impossible to draw much of an argument from an undistributed term, except that it validly negates a "distributed negative", in Aristotle's terminology.

For example:

[...]

Read the full comment /> "No Athenians are Romans" (both terms are 'distributed': no Roman can be an Athenian or vice versa)

Contradictio:

" Some Athenians are Romans" (neither term is distributed: some Romans can be Athenians, and vice versa". This also works with "Even one Roman is an Athenian".)

So the undistributed form is apparently close to "fuzzy logic" (and indeed often equates to real life !)

In the case of Peggy's logical proposition, namely that "non-documented infers non-existence", or "All existent (entities) are documented" in logical form, this would be very easily disproved by the discovery of even one undocumented entity, such as (for example) the ancient Basques or the Visigoths. The Visigoths are actually quite a good example: they left no documents or inscriptions in any known alphabet(and probably didn't need to write or inscribe as they had an oral culture), but they sacked Rome and destroyed the Western Roman Empire ! (Will that do, Peggy ?)

Sorry to go on about Aristotle's scholastic logic, but in the current context it may be quite appropriate, Aristotle having been the mentor of Alexander the Great of Macedonia !

Boris
With all respects due "fuzzy"
logic is a non-existant in the times of Aristoles, it's a new
presentation of the study of
classical logic mostly used
in the topic of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics.
the Uncertainity I used has nothing
to do with Heisenberg's
Uncertainity Principle in Quantum
mechanics though very approaching.

I hope to have helped a bit.

Cheers my friend

In which case, Aries, both your and Peggy's logical propositions fail. There is a place for exact logic rather than fuzzy logic. as Aristotle once said.

Boris
Whats's wrong with "some" undocumented as existant while "some" where not.
that is Fuzzy logic based judgement under uncertainity principle

With respect, Aries, you and Peggy cannot logically "have it both ways".

Either "non-documented does not imply non-existence", as you say about the Greeks, or else" non-documented does indeed imply non-existence", as Peggy claims about the Macedonians.

To demonstrate the truth of one premiss necessarily infers the falseness of the other premiss. This is pure Aristotlean logic.

(Let us assume in both cases that "documented" is equivalent to leaving carved inscriptions in some durable material - I don't think Greek or Roman papyrus records will have lasted 2000 [...]

Read the full comment or 3000 years, though there are always the Dead Sea Scrolls to prove one wrong, and one never knows about the Egyptians.

Boris
Yes the Romans documented every single aspect of public life
while A.Greeks did not have it
to that extent.
Not-documented does not imply
unexistence.

Peggy. Excellent argument. If I apply it to the UK, the only people still able to decipher native writing from the Roman era are the Welsh, as Uncial Script was used by the Ancient Britons (it is still taught in Welsh Schools. Unfortunately Microsoft do not yet do an Uncial font in Windows !)

But I am not sure how much the English would appreciate London (or Llyndain as it is in Welsh) being taken over by Plaid Cymru...

How far the rest of the world would appreciate international English being replaced [...]

Read the full comment by international Welsh is also an open question.

In short (with respect) you can't really apply a 2500-year-old paradigm to today's world. And in Macedonia's case you really shouldn't forget the Roman Empire and the dispersion of the Greek ruling population from Macedonia in 146 BC - the Illyrian serfs (r slaves !) seem to have remained.

Just two questions.
Can the present day FYROMs decipher anything written by the Macedonians on the artifacts?
Can the Greeks look at the same artifacts and make sense?

Whoever is the one to be able to translate what is on them is the real Macedonian for whatever is written there is written by the Macedonians.

Sedond question. Can the present day Americans claim Indian culture as their own just because they are on that land today and are also Americans? Who is the real custodian of that culture [...]

Read the full comment and who has the right to claim it?

And what is wrong, pray, with being a Slav ? You could drop Greece in the middle of the Russian Federation and lose it completely, as it is so small in comparison. (Come to think of it, that might not be a bad idea !)

It rather sounds to me as if some Greeks are being just a tiny bit racist.

slav's slav's slav's slav's slav's slav's slav's slav's slav's slav's slav's slav's slav's slav's slav's slav's slav's slav's always and forever.keep lying 2 ur self

Grateful to Art for his explanation, but I am still not sure precisely what point he is making.

Two points perhaps to add myself:

1- Ancient history is not perhaps as "fixed" as we think. The best example is that of the defeat of the Roman legions in the Battle of Teutoburg Forest, AD 6., where the German government erected a massive monument and museum on the battle site over 100 years ago.

Except this was wrong. In 1987 an amateur British archaeologist, using a metal detector, found [...]

Read the full comment substantial quantities of Roman armour and coins 30 km away !
Subsequent excavation by the German authorities confirmed that the new site was indeed the real site of the battle, and that it did not take place in AD 6 but in AD 9. But it was impossible to move the monument and museum from the "wrong" site, so they laid on a minibus service instead !

2- As I posted below, it is a bit disingenuous to say that Macedonian history links Ancient and Modern Greece, period. There were 2000 years of interesting events and population movements in between, and the often-ignored period of the Roman Empire (146 BC to c.800 AD, nearly 1000 years,)should be taken more into account. It left plenty of records and archaeology, after all - rather more than did Classical Greece.

Jim - thanks for the response.
My point is simple & evident. There is so much hype & emotion on this "already classified" - over thousands of years, & referenced subject on Macedonian history / culture / identity / language in Museums & Library's worldwide.
So why does this "name" issue require any further attention or discussions between all parties without introducing any certified NEW PROOF / EVIDENCE ?
Therefor historically & todate, Macedonian history / culture / identity is "core rooted" as Ancient & Modern Greek until further evidence is unearthed & certified [...]

Read the full comment & classified as such that any other group may make any presumptions / wishful claims. Everyone needs an identity ......

Jim - I don't disagree at all that the Greek presence in Macedonia pre-146 BC and post-1830 AD was deeply significant, but an awful lot of water flowed under the bridge between these two dates 2000 years apart.

Personally, I think the Roman contribution 146 BC to c.700 AD is still under-valued (there are some splendid and well-preserved Roman ruins both north and south of the Macedonian border), and equally I imagine that both Greeks and northern Macedonians would rather gloss over the Ottoman Turkish occupation period 1453 to 1830 AD. About the Byzantine period c [...]

Read the full comment 700 AD to 1453 AD there seems to be rather less information readily available, but presumably what written records that remain are in Old Slavonic / Glagolitic, though there may be some in mediaeval Greek too. (If mediaeval Greek is anything like mediaeval Latin, it is a long way from its Classical predecessor roots !)

That's probably enough to post for the moment: I suppose my underlying theme is that all European history is (and was) constantly evolving, so one cannot take one fixed "snapshot" in time and say that is the definitive 'roots' of a nation. (The Germans tried it before World War Two, and look what happened !) The French, to their credit, practice this fairly well: la France is not the sole product of Vercingetorix, nor Charlemagne, nor Louis XIV, nor Robespierre, nor even Napoleon I, but an amalgam of all of them. (Just don't mention the Siege of Paris in 1870 !)

Boris, I apologize for my writing, I was rushing to post. Whatever doesnt make sense let me know and I will elaborate.

Cheers.

Boris, thank your for the post. To further this discussion, for a moment I will look at things from your point of view and say that yes the 3000 years of continued heritage is not substantiated because of three seperate peoples living in the region I suspect that the overall historical significance of the Greek presence in the region can not be contested nor can it be viewed as insignificant. Greek influnce in the region had a major impact, politically, militarily, and economically in addition to the cultural and linguistic impact. Now what I would say to this is the [...]

Read the full comment following, is the concern of the FYROMian government that they will lose their ethnic identity? I find that hard to believe. Logically one must question if I call you Chinese does that make you Chinese? I am born in Canada yet I self-identify as Greek because of my heritage. My point is that they ethnic identity that some are concerned will be altogether lost is a bit over stated. My only concern here is that they state has a clear geographic qualifier to indicate what part of the world we are talking about period. Also, is FYROM anti-ethnic towards the people of FYROM? I do not believe so as the qualifier for their ethnic identification exists Former Yugolsavic Republic of Macedonia. So long as the word Macedonia exists in whatever name is used the potential of the ethnic identity to be lost is unlikely.

Your thoughts.

Cheers.

One rather hopes that Xavier Solana is making exactly the same point to the Greek side behind closed doors.

The Greek position is every bit as "emotional" as is the Macedonian one, and if Solana is at all objective he should recognise this.

Jim - thanks for your welcome to the discussion. I don't think the position on Macedonian ethnicity is as clear-cut as you make out: to summarise, the original inhabitants circa BC 500 seem to have been Illyrians, the Greeks then superimposed their own "ruling class" on the indigneous population (which explains why Alexander clearly spoke both languages !), the Macedonian rulers then "went native" and created a whole series of local wars.

The last four of these wars were with the Roman Empire, culminating in the final defeat of Macedonia in 146 BC. (Greece had been [...]

Read the full comment involved in the First and Second Macedonian Wars, but not the Third and Fourth.)

As was its custom in dealing with conquered territories after a long series of wars, (just look at what happened to Carthage after the Punic Wars !), Rome took drastic action in Macedonia in 146 BC, levelling many of the towns, deporting many of the inhabitants, and bringing in "incomers" from Thrace. (An early version of "ethnic cleansing" !)

Subsequently around AD 400, Roman Macedonia became divided into two provinces: Macedonia Prima (much the same territory as today's Greek province, and Macedonia Salutaris (="health giving"),om much the same territory as todays Republika Makedonija. (This in itself gives an interesting historical precedent for "two Macedonias" !)

By AD 600 the Slavic "Bulgarian Empire" had invaded both Macedonias, except for a small coastal strip around Salonika. So the ever-pragmatic Romans shifted the name "Macedonia" to describe most of Thrace - today's Plovdiv region of Bulgaria ! And so it remained throughout much of the Byzantine Empire, up until 1453 and the capture of Byzantium by the Ottoman Turks.

Sorry for the rather abbreviated version of ancient history, though I think it is accurate enough for our purpose. What it does seem to show is that the Slavic peoples arrived relatively late (as you say), but the territory they occupied was very far from a pure Greek homeland, being previously populated by a combination of Romans, Illyrians and Thracians. And this rather demolishes the Greek claim of "3000 years of continuous Greek heritage" in either of the two Macedonias.

That's enough for one posting !

Cheers meanwhile

Art, thank you for your clearly insightful contribution. But I am not sure if you are responding to my comment or if you are stating that I should pick up a book or go to a museum I think you are missing the point. I am trying to promot discussion not childish arguments. And as a reference I would say this, I am a very educated indiviual I have study much and have spoken to many academics that are not Greek as well so my view is much more informed. However, I offer this, if facts are facts and history [...]

Read the full comment is factual and by virtue fact is truth who is it that is distorting the truth, FYROM or Greece? As it stands currently history books in every major country in the world and almost every library that has some sort of book on the history of the region indicate that in fact the pseudo-Macedonians did not come to the region for almost 1000 years post Alexander the Great, which would then beg the question: Why is FYROM so determined to hold on to something they can not stake claim to as being their own? In addition, as you are also aware the FYROMIAN language is an amalgemation of various other languages that form the modern day Slavic tongue that is spoken in FYROM. I am not making this up on a whim it is something that exists in historical and linguistic texts.

Further, one can not distort a truth if it never existed. This would mean that the "truth" was never a truth to begin with but rather a lie. However, based on your view that black is black and white is white and by virtue historical evidence is fact thus it being truth then FYROM should not have any issue at all and really there is no issue to discuss based on what you are saying because historical facts and thus the factual truth indicate that Greece is justified in its objections over the use of the name Macedonia.

Cheers.

The answers is stored in 2 specific buildings worldwide -Museum & Library.
Facts History Evidence are some subjects that sheds light on this name issue - not speculations / verbal wishes. Black is Black & White is White - thats a fact / historical / as viewed. Truth / facts cannot be distorted without proof.

This comment has been removed by the moderator because it contained

Pavle - I think you mean "raping" rather than "rapping" (there is a significant difference between the two in English !), but to be helpful, here is the URL link to the most recent UNHCR report on Greece, which is heavily critical of the Greek government's repression of the original inhabitants in Greek Macedonia:

http://www.unhcr.org/refworld/pdfid/49b7b2e52.pdf

To Mr. Sloan and allothers to come adter him, our name defines us Macedonia is not for sale no nor will it ever be. Greece must be held accountable for there acts of genocide and denationalization of the Macedonian people. They must also be held accountable for there rapping of Macedonian, culture and history.

mr. solana you are same as most EU TO FACE OVER MACEDONIAN USE