Re: CHAT: The EU expands (was Re: THEORY/CHAT: Talmy, Jackendoff and Matchboxes)

Quoting Frank George Valoczy <valoczy@...>:

> > Danny Wier said:
> >>
> >> The EU now has languages from three families: IE, Uralic and
> >> Afro-Asiatic.
> >> Malta was a close vote; the others were not. Turkey got rejected, and I
> >> assume Cyprus means only the Greek part, so no Altaic languages yet.
> >
> > Cyprus means Cyprus, which is bilingual. (There are probably some Cypriots
> > who would disagree, but that's the EU position as nearly as I can tell.)
> > The Translation Directorate is expanding to include Turkish as a
> > co-official language or something like that -- Turkish Cypriots are
> > certainly not being left out in today's expansion.
> >
>
> No, it seems to mean only the Greek part, from the way they've been
> talking about it here (Canada)
The Republic of Cyprus (Greek Cyprus) is the internationally recognized
authority of the whole island, and so theoretically the whole island gets in.

However, the RoC, of course, does not control Turkish Cyprus (the
self-proclaimed Turkish Republic of North Cyprus, only recognized by Turkey),
which will remain effectively outside the EU, thanks to the Greek Cypriots' 'no'
in the recent referendum on the UN's reunification plan (the people of the TRNC
voted yes, but that's no help). It seems ATM very much an open question whether
there will be an eventual reunification, or if the TRNC will eventually be
int'lly recognized - in the later case, it could join the EU separately at some
point, perhaps if and when Turkey joins.

What rather annoys me is that the RoC has now got an effective veto over further
EU policy wrt TRNC and Turkey. Athens are currently being not very popular in
Brussel for backmailing the rest of the EU to accept the RoC in reunification or
not - they threated to veto the accession of the Central European countries (and
Malta, I guess) otherwise.

                                                                  Andreas