Quagmire

In looking at pictures of Romanian crowds, I saw people that looked traditionally Eastern European or "Slavic," others that looked typically Mediterranean/SE European and akin to Greeks or southern Italians, and even some who looked vaguely Central Asian or Turkic/Tatar. I also saw Germanic looks and generic Western European looks as well. With the possible exception of Russia (because of its sheer size), I don't believe any other European country contains locals who run such a wide gamut (although France and Italy come close IMO).

I have also read that their origins are not completely clear and that it has been generally hypothesized and strongly believed that their origins reflect a mixture of, among other groups, the indigenous Dacians/Thracians, Roman soldiers and colonists from all over the Roman Empire (hence the name and Latin-based language), Goths, Huns, Slavs, Bulgars, Magyars, Cumans, and Tatars. I think that the combination of the diversity of the Roman citizens who settled the land, along with the many waves of invasions/migrations, explain this wide spectrum in looks.

I'm mostly of Italian descent with some Irish/German mixed in and consider myself to be Italian-American. Sometimes (not very often but it's happened on a few occasions), people have told me that I don't look like I'm Italian, and I have to be honest, it really rubs me the wrong way and I get irritated by that. Now on the other hand, I also get people who tell me I look very Italian or at least significantly so (which frankly I agree with...I have thick dark brown/black hair and eyebrows, green eyes, a pale but olive-ish complexion that will tan well if exposed to enough sun, and facial features that I think look rather Mediterranean/Southern European, like a Roman nose for instance. Even still, Italians vary widely in looks and range from blond and blue-eyed to nearly Lebanese-looking, with everything in between (with the average Italian honestly not looking too much like the stereotypical image that many Americans have of Italians).

Additionally, I also think it's rude to even ask a random stranger out of the blue about their ancestry and their ethnic background and to me it tends to suggest a lack of education or class. I don't do it to other people for this reason and I certainly don't question people's claims about their heritage/bloodline as that's even more offensive IMO. I know I probably shouldn't let this get to me, but I can't help it. Ignorance is annoying and I feel like a lot of Americans in particular are extremely ignorant about other peoples/cultures.

After Attila's death, they sort of seem to disappear into history almost without a trace. Did they end up settling down somewhere and just assimilate into certain European populations or did they migrate back east where they originally came from?

Or do most South Slavs also have significant ancestry from the original Slavs who migrated from their proposed original homeland in the Russia/Belarus/Ukraine region?

I'd imagine they're a composite group. Some Serbs, Croats, or Bulgarians do look like Ukrainians, Russians, etc., however others go in a more Mediterranean direction not unlike Greeks, Albanians or Italians. I've noticed that dark hair and light eyes is a frequent combination among many Balkan people, along with facial features that look intermediate between "traditional" Slavs and Mediterranean people.

An ancient Balkan tribe that inhabited much of modern-day Serbia, Croatia, Albania, Macedonia, etc. The Albanian language is an Indo-European language that is distinct from its Slavic, Romance, and Greek neighbors.

Is it a remnant of the ancient Illyrian language?

I've read certain accounts which have hypothesized that Columbus was not ethnically Italian but rather was descended from a family of Sephardic Jews who escaped Spain or Portugal at some point and settled in Genoa.

Columbus is said to have never written in his native language, which was presumably Genoese, but that he allegedly spoke Castilian Spanish with little trace of an accent.

I'm curious, is there any truth to any of these accounts?

What I mean is that, could one safely say that at least for the past couple thousand years, populations from Asia, specifically South and East Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa, have experienced fewer invasions and migrations and therefore have maintained a more constant gene pool?

Europe and the Middle East experienced tremendous internal and external migrations and invasions during and after Greco-Roman civilization and into the Dark and Middle Ages, and slavery was also widely practiced in both areas during these time periods.

For instance, I doubt the populations of China, India, Southeast Asia, or Japan have changed as much as the populations of various European countries on account of invasion/migration. Agree?

They were native to Southern Europe and lived in a Mediterranean climate, and their paintings, sculptures, and mosaics always portray people who are usually dark-haired, dark-eyed and with typical Southern European facial features.

Many people like to say that modern Italians and Greeks are darker than the ancients, but if anything it's actually the opposite. The subsequent invasions and migrations of Germanic tribes and other northern groups to Southern Europe during the Dark Ages and Middle Ages actually led to a somewhat greater frequency in lighter hair and eyes among Greeks and especially Italians. There were said to be Ancient Greeks and Romans with light hair and eyes, but they were a minority.

I've heard this to be the case, and that many Tuscans, Venetians, Genoese and others were attracted to the wine-growing regions of Northern California as well as to the San Francisco Bay Area. Also, most of the Italian-Americans I've met from this area tended to have a more Central European or "Alpine" look if you will, rather than a more stereotypical Mediterranean look associated with Sicilians or people from Italy's far south.

A lot of people seem to overemphasize the Moorish/Arabic influence on the genetic profile of Spaniards. Do they not understand that the growth and spread of Islam in Moorish Spain was primarily due to conversion of the native Hispano-Roman population rather than to a mass settlement of Arabs and Berbers from North Africa (or black Africans as some also believe)?

The study listed below provides more current genetic analysis of Iberians. It is said that only about 11% of Iberians have some Moorish ancestry whereas 20% or so actually have some Sephardic Jewish ancestry (many Jews entered Spain during the Moorish period and it seems many more of these converted during and after the Inquisition than the Moors).

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/05/health/05iht-05g...

In any event, the ancestry of the modern Spanish population is still predominantly pre-Moorish people who were a blend of the original ancient Iberians/Basques, Celts, Romans, Visigoths and others. They most closely resemble Italians and the southern French in terms of looks, not Arabs.

Sicilian was distinct enough from Standard Italian to be regarded as a separate Romance language in its own right, but are there substantial influences from the previously spoken non-Romance languages on the Sicilian language, whether in terms of pronunciation, vocabulary, etc. I know that both Greek and Arabic were widely spoken in Sicily prior to the Norman conquest of Sicily, which resulted in a "Latinization" of the island as Italian immigrants from the mainland flooded into Sicily, bringing Roman Catholicism and Italian dialects, along with some Norman and French settlers who brought French and Occitan-Provencal.

After the Greeks and Arabs were assimilated into the increasingly dominant Latin culture, to what extent did they leave traces of their languages on the emerging Romance language that gave rise to the Sicilian language?

I'm half-Sicilian so I've always been interested in this subject and would like to know more. My grandparents spoke Sicilian when they were younger but haven't for many years, but they recall always having a very hard time understanding people from northern and central Italy when trying to converse with them.

Primarily in terms of phonology and pronunciation rather than vocabulary necessarily. In terms of vocabulary, Romanian is probably the most distant on account of the heavier Slavic influence, but French sounds quite different from Latin when compared with, say, Italian or Spanish. Could this be the influence of ancient Celtic/Gallic languages and the way they pronounced Latin after adopting it, along with influences from the Franks and other Germanic tribes that settled in France after the fall of the Roman Empire?

My guess would be somewhere in Europe's far south, like maybe southern Spain/Portugal, southern Italy, or Greece, but I honestly don't know.

I know Romanians descend in part from Roman citizens, mainly legionnaires and colonists who brought Latin with them providing the foundation of the Romanian language, but I've read conflicting accounts of where the settlers came from. Were they mostly from various provinces from around the empire or primarily from Italy?

By the time the 2nd century rolled around, the Roman Empire was very cosmopolitan, however by the same token, wasn't citizenship still restricted mainly to Italians or to families of Italic origin living in the provinces? I know that Emperor Trajan's plan (the conqueror of Dacia, modern Romania) was to thoroughly Romanize Dacia on account of its remote location as a frontier province, hence his decision to heavily populate the province with Roman citizens.

Another reason I ask is that quite a few Romanians I've seen look very much like Italians. I'm wondering if it's merely due to the fact that the Roman colonists would've at least been drawn from Southern Europe even if not Italy itself, or if it's because there is a more direct connection.

Romanians I suppose? However, I'm also aware that "Roman" ceased to necessarily mean Italian as the Roman Empire expanded over time and began to incorporate and assimilate other peoples into the Roman identity through granting of citizenship and adoption of the Latin language and culture.

I say Romanians though because many Roman citizens were sent to colonize Dacia after being conquered by the empire, hence the Latin-based language that took root there and the name "Romania." The Roman soldiers and colonists who settled the land are one of the main groups of ancestors of modern Romanians.

In the other provinces of the empire where Roman civilization became firmly entrenched, such as in Spain and Gaul (France), it seemed that it was mainly a question of local people assimilating into Roman culture rather than there being a large influx of Roman citizens into those provinces, largely because these other provinces were occupied for much longer periods than Dacia. However, I could be wrong there, especially with respect to Spain, which may have experienced a migration of Italic Roman citizens in the earlier years of the empire, hence the emperor Trajan (conqueror of Dacia) was born in Spain.

On one hand, a nihilistic anarchist with a sadistic and psychopathic sense of humor causing chaos just for the sake of chaos, and on the other hand a psychopathic terrorist who is hell-bent on executing his own twisted plan of murdering millions of people in the name of carrying out his delusional vision of justice.

Bane has an Osama bin Laden aspect to him (i.e. a terrorist or a leader with his own very perverted idea of justice and thinking he is doing the right thing) whereas the Joker just wants to spread fear and mayhem while sadistically enjoying it all the same, but with no clear goal or vision in sight.

My vote actually goes to the Joker precisely because he has no sense of justice, regardless of how perverse or twisted Bane's sense of justice is. He's not necessarily mentally insane and is fully aware of the chaos and murder he spreads but does it out of pure enjoyment rather than feeling it is necessary or just. Still, a very tough call either way.

I've always thought Armenians mostly varied from Southern/Eastern European-looking to Middle Eastern-looking. Andre Agassi to me for instance looks rather like a Greek whereas Kim Kardashian (I know she's half-Armenian but favors her Armenian ancestry) looks like Turkish or Persian to me. Is it fair to say that they're kind of a blend of the two?

I can burn but I'm also capable of getting a good tan. Many have called me fair-skinned but I don't have a pinkish undertone to my skin, whereas others have called me olive-skinned. Frankly I don't think I'm either, but rather "medium Caucasian" if you will. Does that sound right?

The Khazars were a Central Asian Turkic tribe whose leaders and some of the population converted to Judaism in the Middle Ages. After their kingdom fell, was there some migration of Khazars to Eastern Europe, where they would've merged into the surrounding Jewish communities there?

I know Ashkenazic Jews are mainly a mix of Levantine (the original Jews - Hebrews) and European ancestry (Central/Eastern European mainly), but was there a Khazar contribution to their ancestry as well?

Conservatives love to advocate "limited government" and cry about "big government liberals," yet when it comes to social issues like abortion, gay marriage, and overall religious freedom, too many of them want to impose their own values on everyone else who may not necessarily share them.

There's something out there called the 1st Amendment and it has a clause that explicitly outlines the freedom to profess one's own religious beliefs or none at all. Courts have in turn interpreted it to mean just this.

Keep in mind, abortion is not a black and white issue. There are many shades of gray that come into play, like rape, a threat to the life and health of the mother, or incest. To claim that "God wills a rape" or something similar is just absurd.