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Why not? Everyone else seems to be considering the Romans and the Byzantines to be a single contiguous entity. Sauce for the goose.

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Rome and Byzantiums are a continued empire in every sense of the word. The people there didnt consider it different. It was totally contiois for a long time.

This is totally different for the islamic empires. The invovled massive chamges of the leading elites, internal organisation, sometimed completly know peoples.

Saying the Ottomans were continues with the older empires is ridiculus assertion.

That's the original argument I made to which you were replying. The Byzantines carried on the Roman torch.

The "Byzantines" WERE Roman and always called themselves such. They were the "Rum" to the Turks because they called themselves Roman.

I'm not sure how a state which can trace a direct lineage of law and rulers back to Romulus is "carrying the torch".

We're falling into pedantry here. I'm very well aware of that fact, which is why I referenced it in the original post.

I guess we agree to disagree. I just don't like calling them the "other" Romans, or even referring to them as the Byzantines who were carrying on the torch, when they never considered any such thing, and would never have referred to themselves as such.

Then again, despite being an engineer by trade, I'm a historian specializing in Late Roman Antiquity (specifically, the Eastern Empire from Leo the Isaurian to Alexios I, so I'm probably a little pedantic about it.

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