Re: THEORY: Languages divided by politics and religion

>From: Tom Wier <artabanos@...>
> >  English and Dyirbal have at least a
> > very small mutual intellegibility since both languages have the word
>_dog_,
> > meaning "dog".  Almost zero, but not exactly.
>
>If an monolingual English speaker heard someone speaking Dyirbal and heard
>that person say /dOg/ within the stream of other phonemes, do you think the
>English speaker would recognize that for what it was?  Most people who hear
>a foreign language they don't know are likely not to be able even to
>discern one
>word from another.
Whoops, you found a big error in my reasoning.  If the Dyirbal speaker was
pointing to a dog and saying "dog", and I did the same, then we'd have an
understanding.  Beyond that...

>During Soviet occupation, a fictional Czechoslovak standard language was
>more or less imposed on the country, IIRC.  It incorporated elements of
>both Czech and Slovak.
That was -- and is -- pretty much one of the agendae of communism, in
blurring the lines between nationalities.  I think Soviet policy was to try
and unify the "three Russians", that is, the three East Slavonic languages
Russian, Ukrainian and Belarussian.  Or at least Stalin had that approach
(he did have a lot of Ukrainian Catholics in the L'viv area killed because
if their cultural and religious distinction, and he deported a lot of Jews
to southeastern Siberia, to the Jewish Autonomous Oblast mainly).

>Perhaps.  But then you're not talking about the people involved, so
>much as outsiders who don't really care about the situation.
Most people, in the US particularly, don't care about linguistic details.
We're a rare breed.

>Well, that's a tougher issue.  Eritrea during colonial days was a distinct
>colony, controlled by Italy IIRC.  After the war, the Allies handed it
>over to the Ethiopians for their part in resisting Mussolini.
Another case of artificial nation-making, splitting countries by force, a
feature of colonialism; forcing nations together as in communism being its
opposite.  Eritrea, if I'm not mistaken, is dominated by northern
Ethio-Semitic Africans such as the Tigray which also are prominent in
northern Ethiopia including the holy city of Aksum.

The war between the two nations, which is one of the main causes of another
harsh famine in the south and southeastern areas which are home to Cushitic
people such as the Oromo, has become a bit less severe since the Eritreans
forwent their claims to bordering areas in Ethiopia.

Sudan is probably another example.  A Muslim Arab north and a Christian
Black south, they too in a state of civil war.

And there's the lonely port of Djibouti, which is nothing but one port, and
all this mess going on in the surrounding countries.

Give peace a chance.

DaW.
________________________________________________________________________
Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com