Rag. Historian

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Founding date

Hi Rag. Historian, first of all I'd like to apologize if my initial response to your first post on Talk:Republic of Ragusa seemed harsh. We often get "historians" here who falsely claim they have degrees just so they can get an upper hand in discussion. You, however, appear to be the real thing :). Wikipedia's coverage of the Republic of Ragusa is sorely in need of professional attention, most importantly, there are discussions on two main subjects:

1) The "official language" of the Republic of Ragusa. The dispute is between Italian, Illyrian, and Latin.

2) The year which is best suited to be listed in the article as the date when the Republic of Ragusa was founded.

I think every user involved on Ragusa-related articles would appreciate your input on these issues. Remember, though, that Wikipedia needs sources. Whether you use internet links to documents, or list books as your source, please do your best to support any statement: the whole matter is rather controversial and sources are the best way to avoid fruitless debates with nationalists. --DIREKTOR ^(TALK) 14:50, 14 December 2008 (UTC)

Direktor, I can understand why you reacted that way. I've heard a lot of Greater Italian and Greater Serbian opinions myself. At least you didn't resort to insults, which is better than a lot of Wikipedians, as I can see. I'm afraid that today a lot of the things I said are autocensored by historians because they are "politically inappropriate" (I guess the low rank that Croatia has in the area Freedom of speech is deserved).

1) concerning the official languge, I'll have to check on the dates, but I know Latin and Old Ragusan were official during the Middle Ages (until the 1450s I think) and later on Italian (during the Renaissance) because Ragusans simply used the lingua franca and when the lingua franca changed, Ragusan regulations changed accordingly. I guess today English would probably be the official language. I'm sorry to say Slavic (or whatever we wanna call it) was never the official language, but it was probably the only language used in the Senate and Council sessions (after the 1450s).

2) There is no document which states: "We the people..." But there is the document of the Croat-Hungarian king guaranteeing specific privileges to Dubrovnik. Actually there are two documents, the original and the revision, but I think we should put as the date of founding the date that the Ragusan Major Council accepted and confirmed both documents together (June 18th 1358), altough I think we should write that the first explicit mention of the Ragusan Republic (and I have a source to confirm all of this) is dated March 7 1385, when the Major council said: nostra res publica ragusina (it is important to remeber that in Latin respublica means both republic and just simply state, so this could have very well been: our Ragusan state). We should also mention that there was a tendency for independence since the Byzantine administration of Dubrovnik, and that the Ragusan Republic doesn't have its foundations in a proclamation in 1358 - the Republic would have never happened if Dubrovnik didn't have the institutions and the privileges we got in the Byzantine time. Those are (and I think we should list them all): 867 (a new theme, Upper Dalmatia, was created and Dubrovnik made capital), 999 (Ragusan Archbishopric and Metropolitan province) and a few dates concerning the creation of the councils.

Also, I would like to write the Ragusan versions of the names in List of Ragusans (and as the titles of their own individual pages), but maybe as a compromise, to write the ones most used today in brackets, e.g. Beno (Benedikt) Kotruljić, Đivo Frana (Ivan) Gundulić. What do you think?

P.S. Why are we talking in English? This is a user talk page and I think we can simply speak Croatian here (or is there a rule against that?)

Rag. Historian (talk) 12:41, 15 December 2008 (UTC)