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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   33062 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 24, 2023

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Nationalism lead to the fracturing of empires that didn't unify hard enough. France brutally suppressed Gascon, Basque, Norman, Provencal, Breton identities, subsumed them under Paris. They eliminated local variation in languages, forcibly required that everything be written in proper standard French.

If the Austrians had the state capacity and the will to forcibly replace local languages with German, the Habsburgs would still be enthroned in Vienna.

It’s worth noting that Austria thought a ‘many nations, one empire’ plan wherein the various subjects would be United by religion and the monarchy was a better bet than nationalism, and that the proximal cause of this plan failing was losing a major war(which was due to a combination of terrible foreign policy decisions, nepotism, and geographic disadvantages rather than internal instability), not revolts among the subjects, and nationalist sentiment opposed to membership in the empire was mostly an import- Princep was a Serbian(from outside the empire) wanting to incorporate a subject people into being forcibly required to be good Serbians, and not a local activist, after all.

There is a big difference between pushing a certain dialect and changing the entire language. Hungarian isn’t even an Indo-European language.

Basque is not Indo-European, either; Breton is, but as a Celtic language it's more closely related to Irish and Gaelic than to French. Occitan/Provencal is much closer to French, but you could say the same about, say, Catalan; I believe even Occitan is generally recognized as its own language (of course, the difference between a dialect and a separate language is often arbitrary).

EDIT: the beginning of the Lord's Prayer as a sample, taken from Wikipedia:

French: Notre Père, qui es aux cieux, que ton nom soit sanctifié, que ton règne vienne, que ta volonté soit faite sur la terre comme au ciel.

Occitan: Le nostre Paire que es els cèls, sanctificatz sia lo teus nom, avenga lo teus regnes, e sia faita la tua voluntatz sicò el cèl et e la tèrra.

Breton: Hon Tad, c'hwi hag a zo en Neñv, ra vo santelaet hoc'h anv. Ra zeuio ho Rouantelezh. Ra vo graet ho youl war an douar evel en neñv.

Basque: Gure Aita, Zeruetan zaudena, santu izan bedi zure izena. Etor bedi zure erreinua. Egin bedi zure nahia zeruan bezala lurrean ere.

Come on - Basque is a language isolate!

Basque and Breton are very definitely not French- one is more closely related to welsh and the other is thought related to other languages only by schizos. And I am a speaker of a ‘French’ dialect descended from 18th century Norman, it is barely mutually intelligible with standard french at all. And I think several of the other ‘dialects’ are now recognized as full fledged languages.

My understanding of the Habsburgs was that they were quite consciously a multicultural empire in the old sense, as opposed to a nation-state. You could go on being a Slovene, Hungarian, or Croat as long as you paid your taxes and homage to the power center in Vienna (in the form of the royal family, not the German or Austrian people), rather than being forcibly assimilated.

In the aftermath of WWI many of the older generation lamented what they saw as a rising tide of intolerance that led to the disintegration of the old monarchical order where everyone got along just fine to one where people clung instead to their parochial ethnic and linguistic identities and were all made weaker for it.

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