Andrew Higgins (“Reporting from Comrat, Moldova” — there’s a dateline you don’t often see!) explains the difficult situation of Gagauz for the NY Times (archived):
He has published collections of poetry, written more than 20 books, as well as plays, translated works by foreign literary giants like Moliere and is rated as a master of his native language. His prodigious output, however, is not matched by the size of his readership. His children can’t understand a word he has written.
Todur Zanet writes in Gagauz, an obscure Turkic tongue used by so few people that, the writer worries, the main value of his literary output probably lies with future scholars interested in dead languages. “At least they will have something interesting to study,” he said. “Our language is dying and within two or three generations it will be dead,” Mr. Zanet, 65, said in an interview in Comrat, the capital of his home region of Gagauzia, an autonomous ethnic enclave in the former Soviet republic of Moldova.
Others are less pessimistic and note that while used routinely at home and work by only a few thousand people, Gagauz is similar to Turkish and several other Turkic languages widely used in parts of the former Soviet Union like Azerbaijan and Central Asia. […]
Ignat Cazmali, a former Soviet military officer and historian from Gagauzia, founded a museum in his home village of Avdarma, east of Comrat, to try and untangle the settlement’s often painful journey through periods of Russian, Romanian, Soviet and now Moldovan rule, each of which had its own dominant language. […]
Under pressure from huge street protests asserting the identity of Moldova’s Romanian-speaking majority, the Soviet republic’s mostly Russian-speaking communist legislature in 1989 declared “Moldovan” — meaning Romanian — the “state language” and relegated Russian to a “language of interethnic communication.” Two years later Moldova declared independence.
The rise of Moldovan nationalism alarmed minority groups like the Gagauz, which mostly spoke Russian and feared falling victim to the identity politics of Moldova’s Romanian-speaking majority. Ethnic Russians in Ukraine had similar fears about losing out to newly empowered Ukrainian speakers.
Few Gagauz people by this time spoke their own native tongue. It had been taught in local schools for a brief period starting in 1958, but was then dropped as Moscow accelerated a drive to impose Russian. But fear of rising nationalism among the Moldovan majority set off a parallel push by Gagauz intellectuals to revive and assert their own language.
Todur Marinoglu, a Gagauz language activist in the 1980s, recalled that this immediately attracted the attention of the K.G.B., which infiltrated the movement to sideline activists genuinely interested in the local language and promote others mostly interested in keeping Moldova within the Soviet Union. […]
Realizing that the Soviet Union was falling apart, local communist elites in Gagauzia jumped on the Gagauz language revival bandwagon, at least briefly, though many did not speak it. They supported the establishment in 1988 of Ana Sozu, which translates loosely as Mother Tongue, the region’s first newspaper entirely in Gagauz. Mr. Zanet, the writer, became its editor. A year later, they declared Gagauzia an independent state, ostensibly to protect the Gagauz language but mainly to protect their own position against Romanian-speaking Moldovan nationalists.
The breakaway state folded in 1994 after Moldova agreed to grant the region autonomy. This entity has been dominated since by politicians who all speak Russian and have little or no knowledge of either Gagauz or Romanian, despite a legal requirement that all officials in the autonomous government know the local Turkic tongue. “There were never any official documents written in Gagauz,” Mr. Marinoglu, the former activist said, “so nothing changed. Everything is in Russian. This is the tomb of our own language.” […]
Of the 45 secondary schools in the region, 42 teach in Russian, two in Romanian and one in both. They offer classes in Gagauz as a second language but many parents want their children to focus on mastering Russian, a marker of education and social status. Natalia Cristeva, the head of the regional education department, said she was working to promote Gagauz; in 2021 she started a program of trilingual kindergartens, with children required to speak Russian, Romanian and Gagauz on different days.
She said it had come as a big shock when the United Nations in 2010 declared Gagauz an endangered language — one of more than 2,600 languages, out of a total of 6,700 spoken worldwide, now classified as being at risk of extinction. As a child, Ms. Cristeva spoke Gagauz at home with her father but, after going to school in Russian and working entirely in Russian throughout her career, she now struggles to speak her native tongue fluently. […]
Mr. Zanet, the writer and newspaper editor, has kept his tiny-circulation journal alive thanks to support from Turkey’s overseas development agency but is still gloomy about the survival of his native tongue. “There is no future for small languages,” he said. “The future belongs to big languages — English, Russian, Chinese and Turkish.”
I’m glad to see this kind of attention paid to such a marginal language, and I’m delighted to learn about the very short-lived (six days!) Comrat Republic. But I find the reasoning here bizarre: “Others are less pessimistic and note that while used routinely at home and work by only a few thousand people, Gagauz is similar to Turkish and several other Turkic languages widely used in parts of the former Soviet Union…” Because a tiny, endangered language is “similar” to other related languages, we shouldn’t worry about it? Also, why can’t they include the umlauts in Ana Sözü? But never mind, it’s a surprisingly substantial article, and good for the Times for publishing it. (Thanks, Eric!)
The Gagauz, just like the Bulgarians, the Arnauts, the Germans or the Jews, have come to the Pontic steppe in response to the privileges and grants from the Czarist government to settle these hitherto desolate areas of “New Russia”, once the threat of Tatar and Cossack raids has been eliminated at the turn of the XIX century. 200 years later, this “New Russia” project has been largely abandoned by most of its participant communities, but with Putin’s government’s egging and encouragement, the Gagauz are still playing along. It isn’t just an almost lost cause, but also a cause deeply enmeshed in the reborn Russian Imperialism, and it seems that such an alliance ultimately hurts more than it helps the language survival.
BTW my relatives moved to Komrat soon after becoming uprooted by Russian loss of Southern Bessarabia after the Crimean War, and were well known or even prominent there – teachers, pharmacists, mid-level government administrators. Not sure if anything but graves is left now…
Notably, nothing was written down in Gagauz until 1904, and very little until it became an official language of the USSR, with an official orthography, in 1957.
When Stalin seized Bessarabia from R[o/u]mania in the 1940’s he ended up dumping most of it into the Moldavian SSR but the Budjak (the southern, more coastal piece) got cut-and-pasted into the Ukrainian SSR instead. Which may not have mattered as much in Soviet times, but now means that the remaining ethnic-Gagauz population is separated by an international border. I don’t know how the language is faring on the Ukrainian side of the current border and this article sheds no light on that. (Indeed, it’s not clear if the writer is even aware of the situation.) Wikipedia’s summary of 2001 census results says that only 4% of the total Budjak population is ethnic-Gagauz (although many of them may not speak the language) but that it’s 20% in one raion near the border, which might be enough critical mass for some Gagauz-language elementary schools if the politics worked out.
As to the politics … I recall reading that in the run-up to last year’s invasion the Ukrainian government had cracked down somewhat on toleration of Russian-medium-of-instruction schools near the eastern border, perceiving some sort of “splittist” threat, but as a side effect (maybe as a fig leaf to pretend Russian wasn’t being singled out?) was being less tolerant of the small number of Hungarian-medium-of-instruction schools clustered near one piece of the western border where apparently Stalin had been sloppy about post-1945 ethnic cleansing. Which needlessly antagonized the government in Budapest at a time when it was foolish for the Ukrainians to antagonize any of their non-Russian neighbors.
forgive my skepticism, @X, but: the pontic steppe was part of the ottoman empire, and of various turkic-speaking polities before them. it didn’t require tsarist machinations for there to be turkic speakers there, any more than it did in the balkans.
“arnaut” as a designation also marks that history, being an ottoman turkish term for a population of ottoman subjects, including their communities near the black sea.
similarly, while the yiddish-speaking jewish communities of the littoral and steppe east of the dnister/nistru/nester/turla generally arrived while it was part of the polish-lithuanian commonwealth and then russian empire, they (i guess i could say “we”, in a lineage sense) were preceded in the region by other jewish communities, greek-, tatar-, ladino-, slavic-, and likely turkish-speaking.
—
and, echoing our host’s crankiness about the bizarre reasoning, it seems to me that the various turkishes of southeastern europe are in an upsetting squeeze, pinned between nationalist (and increasingly christian-nationalist) governments where they’re spoken and pressure to merge into ankara-turkish (linguistically and ethnically).
Yup. A bad situation.
The Gagauz are historically mostly Christian even though that seems to most people misaligned with having a Turkic language. The medieval backstory for the unusual combination* seems to be obscure, with any number of rival inconsistent theories. But that’s a plausible reason why they might have migrated into Bessarabia from somewhere in the Balkans at a time when the ruling autocrat was a czar rather than a sultan. AFAIK they never had enough numbers or clout within the Christian community to get the services done in their own language (heck it wasn’t until the 16th or 17th centuries that Orthodox Romanians got services in Romanian rather than Slavonic), which is a pity because it would be cool to attend a Liturgy served in a Turkic language. (There are rumors of Christian villages in pre-1923 Anatolia where the local folks all spoke Turkish rather than Greek because of language shift generations earlier, but I expect the priest did the services in Greek, just like priests in e.g. Albanian-speaking areas did before the 20th century.)
*Elsewhere in the former тюрьма народов you have the Ossetians, historically Christian but speaking an Iranian language, in another reminder that these various boundaries and divisions don’t always map cleanly on to each other.
@rozele – the Gagauz are Orthodox Christians from Bulgaria and were among the plethora of Orthodox Balkan groups (Slavic-, Turkic- and Albanian-speaking) who received land grants and relocation assistance to move to the South of today’s Moldova and Ukraine. They weren’t locals (but there were very few locals in this war-and-raid-ravaged plain) and weren’t targets of Christian chauvinism.
Almost all Jews of Bessarabia weren’t local either, but, just like most of the Orthodox Christians, they initially moved from the surrounding region (mostly from Podolia but many were subjects of the Moldovan gospodars or Austrian kaiser). My kin moved from Podolia in the 1830s. Up until ~1700, even Upper Podolia was as desolate as Bessarabia a century later, for the same reasons of scorched-earth warfare and raids. So I suspect that just a few generations before their relocation to Bessarabia, they relocated from Galicia to Podolia in a similar manner…
The Nağaybäk are another example of an Orthodox Christian Turkic population group.
“They offer classes in Gagauz as a second language but many parents want their children to focus on mastering Russian, a marker of education and social status. ”
Absolutely.
Everything is about higher education here: better Russian, better the result at the entrance exams to a university (“here” is Russia, but it seems for Gagauzia it is the same). But what I don’t know is why many parents object to “second language” classes. I mean, there are many classes in school which are not really needed – why opposition to specifically language lessons?
“another example” – There are also Turkic speaking Greeks here and there (see Urums for USSR – but I suppose there were many more of them in areas where Turkic was dominant.).
To this day many people are surprised to learn about Christian Arabs, though the Maronites of Lebanon have featured prominently in the news for as long as I’ve been reading news (since the ’50s).
Yes, I only learned how many Christian Lebanese there are when I was 34:)
I apologize for the question that is not relevant to the topic. Two or three years ago, I met in your blog a mention of a book that tells about a man who began to live with the indigenous people of the far north.
Maybe this book was written by a Russian, maybe the book character was repressed, maybe it was just my stereotypes superimposed on a false memory, or maybe I completely invented it all, and convinced myself that I read about this book in your blog.
I understand that the chances are small, but maybe you can remember the title of this book?
I apologize for the presentation style, English is not my native language, so I used an online translator.
The Kryashen (‘Christian/ized’) Tatars are Orthodox Christians as well.
American Trump-and-Netanyahu-worshipping parafascist paraChristians are largely unaware that the great majority of Christians in Israel are Arabs. (But then, awareness is not really their thing. Being aware is probably uncomfortably close to being woke.)
Ted:
Of course it’s hard to be confident with so few details, but perhaps it could be A Dream in Polar Fog by Chukchi author Yuri Rytkheu, which Hat discussed here?
Beat me to it! Yup, it’s certainly the Rytkheu book, which I recommend. And no need to apologize: being relevant to the topic is not a requirement here at the Hattery.
Obviously different people have different levels of historical knowledge v. ignorance, and/or disagree about labeling (calling most of the Christian population of Israel “Arabs” is not unlike calling Irish people “English,” except of course for the key fact that most-but-not-all of them have embraced the self-identifier – things may be otherwise with e.g. the Maronites).
The Turkic-speaking historically-Christian groups east of the Urals are the result of a fairly obvious historical process, namely the eastward expansion of Muscovite rule over areas inhabited by Turkic-speakers. If anything the question is why there aren’t more such groups who adopted the religion of the newly dominant ruling group, to which the answer seems to be that somewhere along the way the Czars decided that appearing to be promoting any sort of systematic conversion of their new Muslim subjects would lead to backlash and revolts and that political stability would be better served by positioning themselves as protectors/benefactors of the religious status quo.
The Gagauz case is more mysterious, because we typically think of Turkic-speakers arriving in Anatolia and the Balkans simultaneously with the westward expansion of Turkic-speaking Muslim invaders/conquerors, and living under Muslim rule was not a propitious circumstance for any group to convert en masse out of Islam. So the possibilities generally fall into two categories:
(1) because the “front line” between Muslim rulers and Christian rulers shifted back and forth a bit for a while before final Ottoman victory, some newly-arrived group of Turkic speakers found themselves “offsides” in the Balkans for a while, ahead of the line of actual Turkic-Muslim rule, creating a context in which conversion to Christianity (without incidental language shift) was possible.
(2) some group of Christians “behind the lines” in Anatolia experienced language shift to Turkic without converting to Islam and then subsequently moved to the Balkans for a few centuries before then moving on to Bessarabia.
There seem to be rival theories about the Urums that mutatis mutandis resemble the same two basic options.
By the mid/late Middle Ages there was no remaining trace (outside of Mesopotamia and Kerala) of the extensive Nestorian missionary efforts that had led to conversions all the way through Sassanid Persia along the Silk Road into China, presumably with various Turkic-speaking converts along the way. Why those communities disappeared entirely under subsequent Muslim rule whereas the same did not happen in the Levant (see also the Maghreb v. Egypt …) is just one of those mysteries that may well have resulted from contingency and chance.
Well, I simply use “Arabs” in the sense “Arabic speakers”.
More than once I heard from Tunisians (urban educated Tunisians) “we are not Arabs!” – I mentioned it here, Ryan asked for details but I know too little.
Part of the answer is that some are, say, Moriscos and that’s when there are actual bedouins who speak their own dialect. You don’t expect a Russian Jew to call herself “a Russian”. Part of that must be because Tunisians are historically are a mixture of ethnicities, mostly are not “descendants of Arabs”, so they have a choise. Part of that because when someone conquers you, you too have a choice (Carthage is popular in Tunisia). In other words, I don’t know what of this [not only for them, but for other people, including those who call themselves “Arabs”] is modern romantic ideas and what is old, and what is just their traditional use of the word “Arab”. Maybe they just never called themselves and were referred to so and see no reason to change that?
Lameen must understand this all much better, for Algeria.
P.S. and to the comments by Lameen and LH below:
The fact is, some of Arabic speakers who I met (neither of whom is exactly a nomad) confidently say they are Arabs, and come indignantly said “we are not”.
I can’t insist on anything, all I can do is just note that.
calling most of the Christian population of Israel “Arabs” is not unlike calling Irish people “English,” except of course for the key fact that most-but-not-all of them have embraced the self-identifier
Insisting that only people who trace their patrilineal ancestry back to some Bedouin tribe count as Arab makes about as much sense as insisting that only Sons and Daughters of the American Revolution count as American.
Exactly. I’ve always found that a ridiculous idea.
The obvious (but still perhaps incorrect) explanation is that there was no institutional support from popes or patriarchs who could make a fuss about mistreatment of their coreligionists. It’s been a long, long time since there was any: I make it to be the Muslim conquest of Persia in the year 633.
There is considerable variation among Arabic-speaking Middle Eastern Christian communities in how likely their members are to self-identify as “Arab” in an ethnic sense. Maronites and some groups in Iraq (who want to self-identify as “Assyrian” or “Chaldean” in an ethnic or quasi-ethnic sense) are at the “less likely” end of the spectrum – I think some Copts would like to be there but have been in a dicier political context (although the availability of “Egyptian” as an alternative self-identifier to “Arab” may help side-step the problem?). Most but not all non-Armenian Christians in Israel are as I understand it toward the other end of the spectrum. I don’t know that differences in actual genetic ancestry explain these variations, nor do I know that cultural differences (in terms of observable-in-context cultural differences from their Arab-identifying immediate Muslim neighbors) explain it either. And obviously whether someone is or isn’t Arab-in-an-ethnic-sense became salient in the formerly-Ottoman-ruled territories in the 20th century in a way that it was perhaps not so salient previously (where your religion assigned you to a millet regardless of your ethnicity-as-such), which may have created pressures on groups that had historically been strategically vague.
Obviously ethnic identity can spread by assimilation as well as descent (and do so w/o intermarriage being necessary). Sometimes it does; other times it doesn’t. Language shift often facilitates ethnic-identity assimilation; but sometimes it doesn’t. The world is a complex and unpredictable place.
In Russia you usually are a “Hebrew-[f]”, a “Tatar-[m/f]SGV”, etc. if your ancestors underwent cultural assimilation after the revolution.
With Jews it is particularly complicated, because from our perspective you are clearly a Jew [the word literally means “Hebrew”], if you have Jewish nose, hair, accent, name, occupation and ancestors even if you go to church.
If you are an adherent of Judaism, you are iudej. (iu with hiatus, three sillables).
It is different from the perspecive of Judaism, of course.
“where your religion assigned you to a millet regardless of your ethnicity-as-such”
I still wonder how the word “arabs” was applied back then. Did urban North Africans refer to themselves/were referred to so? What about many other arabic-speaking peoples?
Actually, 30 years ago many were shocked that Ukrianians are referred to as “Russians” in English. There were jokes that maybe even Chukchi are called so.
This scheme has undergone an idiotic reversal.
(and generally – I’ll add it here to avoid having a streak of 5 comments – we are aware of Arab Christians in Israel, because of massive im/emigration from Russia to there.
Massive Russian Christian tourism in both Israel and the West Bank (I saw on the Internet a girl from Bethlehem who was learning Russian because she is selling souvenirs to tourists way too many of whom speak Russian) and appearance of local Christian temples on TV every Easter are somewhat less informative for some reason.)
“Why those communities disappeared entirely under subsequent Muslim rule whereas the same did not happen in the Levant (see also the Maghreb v. Egypt …) is just one of those mysteries that may well have resulted from contingency and chance.”
I personally find this question interesting.
Why Nestorians disappeared (not only in Muslim lands)?
Why there are still Jews in Arabia but not Christians – that’s when both religions and many others were prominently present in pre-Islamic times. Same for Africa.
Why it was different in Lebanon?
>More than once I heard from Tunisians (urban educated Tunisians) “we are not Arabs!” – I mentioned it here, Ryan asked for details but I know too little.
This is possible, Drasvi, but I don’t remember it. And you had mentioned me in another thread today or last night, and I didn’t remember that either. I wonder whether you’re confusing me with another commenter.
>Part of the answer is that some are, say, Moriscos and that’s when there are actual bedouins who speak their own dialect. You don’t expect a Russian Jew to call herself “a Russian”.
Several years ago, I read Alexander Hemon’s acclaimed Lazarus Project, a sort of historical novel which juxtaposed a modern Balkan situation and a historical event in Chicago – a murder that took place a hundred years ago. In its narrative of the murder, the novel used wildly acerbic anti-Semitic headlines from the Chicago Tribune. I was surprised that the Tribune would have been that anti-Semitic, but startled and even dubious that it would have used the vulgar tone Hemon was seemingly quoting, which was enough to prompt me to check the Trib online archives.
Not only were all these headlines and articles invented by Hemon, the Trib didn’t even mention that the murderers were Jewish, instead describing them as Russian.
Not that this changes what you (Drasvi) have written about Russians and Jews today, but I suspect it reflected at least in part the self-conception of Jewish Russian immigrants of the day, so I thought it was interesting.
I felt it was dishonest of Hemon to give the impression that the Trib of the day would have published such vile screeds, making it seem like mainstream opinion. This simply isn’t true, but it fits with efforts today to retcon aspects of American history and make them much worse than they were. (And also other attempts to make history suit partisan ideology, like the textbooks describing slavery as a benefit to slaves. GAHH!!)
Artistic license for me doesn’t extend this far.
I do have a lingering curiosity about whether some other Chicago paper may have handled the murders this way. But they’re not available in online archives I have access to. Even if so, they were not the Tribune, and such distinctions do matter. If Hemon believes Chicago was that anti-Semitic, it should have been interesting to him that the Trib, the city’s paper of record, was not; and important to him to ascribe that voice to a publication that used it.
Genetically, the Gagauz have indications of both Turkic and Bulgarian origin. Their Christianity makes it tempting to look for their roots in Bulgaria in the years prior to the Ottoman conquest in late 1300s, but there is no hard data. However, in the 1500s the Turkic-speaking Christians are reported to have been the biggest ethno-linguistic group in then-Turkish Varna on Bulgarian sea coast.
Non-Muslim Arabic speakers are somewhat genetically distinct from their Muslim neighbors, but the difference stem from the population flows in the Islamic era which affected only Muslims. Most notably, Sub-Saharan African DNA appears only in the Muslims, but the flows were considerably wider than just that.
@Ryan, perhaps I confused the content of the question, not the asker. I’m not sure. I found: “As a related question, is Algerian a stronger identity today than Amazigh, Arab, or North African/Maghrebi?” (your question) – but here you are not requesting clarification for any of my earlier comments…. Perhaps I began typing an answer about Tunisia (I know Tunisians and Moroccans better: I talked to some Algerians, mostly online, but I only discussed Arabic/Berber and literary/vernacular with them, not things like “what is “Algerian”. But I still hope to visit the country) and then gave up and misrememebered your question. Or more likely I mentioned what I wrote above elsewhere, and you asked some other quesiton (I remmember that feeling as if I made a false impression of knowing something I don’t really know).
I can potentially confuse you with Rodger C. – you both begin with R- and that’s how my memory works. But I think usually it is you who would write about the steppe….
Not only were all these headlines and articles invented by Hemon, the Trib didn’t even mention that the murderers were Jewish, instead describing them as Russian.
Like you, I find this disappointing, and it makes me lose respect for Hemon. Yes, of course a historical novelist has to make things up, but those things should in some sense correspond to the reality of the time. Otherwise you’re playing tennis without a net (as Frost said of writing free verse).
. You don’t expect a Russian Jew to call herself “a Russian”.
I must correct myself here: you expect a Russian Jew to contrast herself to “Russians” when you ask her about her ethnicity. Willingness to say (in Russian) “I’m Russian” or “she’s Russian” (about a Jew) in other contexts – as below – may depend. But of course, in some contexts (e.g. recognising Pushkin as her poet) she understands “Russian” as a reference to her culture.
____
I generally follow this ethical principle: By ascribing an evil (which is not there) to someone, you bring more evil into the world.
More than once I heard from Tunisians (urban educated Tunisians) “we are not Arabs!”
In Algeria, when a mother-tongue Arabic speaker says that sort of thing, they usually mean “I don’t like the cultural/political vibes of claiming to be Arab”. It’s maybe a little like American Arabs or Jews insisting that they’re not white, but not quite the same. “Arab” sounds kind of sha3bi, kind of populist and lower-class – poshlost, I guess you guys would say? Not an identity that really feels right on upper-middle-class French speakers.
(In Tunisia, I think there’s also a dimension of “we are not Libyans!” going on there. But Tunisia is a bit uncanny valley for me; everything feels so familiar at first glance that I generally take a while to realise how much I don’t actually get.)
PS: Tunisia just got its first Nobel Prize winner, I gather – Mounji Bawendi. Wonder if he considers himself Arab or not?
AFAIK, Christian Palestinians refer to themselves as Palestinians or Arabs. Assyrian Christians in Palestine refer to themselves as Assyrian.
(ed. I know the latter from talking to an Assyrian Palestinian storekeeper [q.v.] in San Francisco. He spoke Arabic and also some variety of Aramaic, but I don’t know if as a day-to-day language, or just as a liturgical language.)
I simply use “Arabs” in the sense “Arabic speakers”.
The Druze speak Arabic, but I believe they identify foremost as Druze, secondarily as Lebanese/Syrian/Israeli/etc., and never as Arabs.
Dateline, not byline!
A dumb mistake, now fixed — thanks!
To circle back to the state of things in Comrat, the percentage of the Moldovan population that is currently Gagauz is pretty similar (subject to the uncertain accuracy of numbers both places …) to the percentage of the Lebanese population that is currently Druze, yet I suspect the smart way to bet is that the Druze have significantly better odds of still being around as an identifiable community a century from now than the Gagauz do.
I still wonder how the word “arabs” was applied back then. Did urban North Africans refer to themselves/were referred to so?
A Turkish poem by a member of the Ottoman garrison in Algiers from 1752, praising the soldiers’ efforts against invaders (and in particular the efforts of those firing cannons from small craft, lanchons), says: بلحدار اولسون توركى عربى * دين مبين اوغرينه قليج صلنر, which I am led to understand means “Good fortune to Turk and Arab; they fought for the true religion”. Presumably “Arab” there refers to locally recruited soldiers.
It’s often the case that when Jews move from Russia (or the S.U.) to the U.S., they instantly become Russians to the non-russophones who are already there. “You speak Russian, you must be Russian!” is the thinking, or rather the unconscious assumption. I think that accounts for the Trib headlines. This assumption is probably being undermined now by the Ukrainians who speak Russian, either over there or over here.
I was once told by a Nepali who had been here for many years that Nepal is the Canada of India: a small country (Canada is small only in population, of course) to the north of a big one which is most often assumed to be part of it but which in fact defines itself against it (by which I do not mean “in opposition to it” necessarily). I was sympathetic.
Searching Hanoteau’s (1867) collection of Kabyle poetry (most of it about the damage that he and his comrades did), I find two occurrences of aɛrab “Arab”, both referring to soldiers recruited locally by the French to facilitate the conquest of the Kabyle region.
“Si Tlemsan ar Mɛaskeṛ
Yewwi-d tarayul lewṣif
d bni Aɛṛab ay-d iketteṛ”
“From Tlemcen as far as Muaskar
He has brought in slave tirailleurs
And sons of the Arab, even more numerous”.
“Kull aɛṛab la-d yettizif
Ṛwan aɛebbi n letmaṛ”
“Every Arab is shouting war-cries;
They’ve gorged themselves collecting our fruit”
@Lameen, thank you!
I did not know that the word has this specific vibe:/
I expected some “political” vibes (especially when it is said emotionally), but then I don’t even know the answer to “was the word applied to their ancestors 200 years ago?* **” and then this guy is from Morisco family and even looks so, and that girl’s surname is a Turkish title and there is a region where everyone has this surname and they still perpform Turkish wedding songs (and have been doing so since the founder held the title), and that town is populated by descendants of a certain Tunisian and an Italian woman, and Lofti Boushnak, a singer…. FYLOSC “Bosniak”, eh? And then Berber roots too (now Tunisia is much more Arabised linguistically, but that is now): I quickly learned to look at North Africa as a patchwork. So why I would expect them to call themselves Arabs?:-/
As result, I don’t even know what question to ask. Presumably “what does ‘Arab’ means to you?”.
*Two examples from a different context (minority groups rather than nations):
1. My Uzbek/Uyghur friend defines his ethnicity as “Kashgari”. Officially “Kashgari” have been renamed here to “Uyghurs” a century ago, but apparently in his family they have always been “Kashgari”.
As another my freind noted, “I’m Kashgari” prevents any further questions, because no one knows what it means (I do). When they began calling themselves so, likely it was the easiest way of explaining who they are and where they are from. I don’t know if they ever followed changes in official nomenclature as applied to other Kashgari – or whether my freind can confidently explain the relationship between “Kashgari” and “Uyghur”.
2. ethnicity of the PE teacher in my school is known as “Persian”. No one else is so, Iranians are called “Iranians” (irantsy) in Russian. I suspect he began introducing himself as “Persian” when it was the main Russian word for Iranians, and then kept doing so later.
** just noticed your second comment, with a quote. Thanks! Yes, this is exactly what I don’t know (thought things are complicated by presence of Arabs in a more narrow sense: members of Arab tribes)
Drasvi, I guess that was me! I don’t think you’ve misunderstood. It was an offhand comment I made a while ago that I’ve forgotten, but I do find the question interesting.
>Otherwise you’re playing tennis without a net
I like that. Alas I’ll have to update it to pickleball for anyone around me to understand.
Eh? Where is it that (lawn) tennis is unheard-of?
Dort, wo du nicht bist.
Cymro “Welshman” has (or had) a similar ambiguity about it. It once meant, pretty specifically, “Welsh speaker” (an English-speaking resident of Cymru being but a Sais), but that is extremely politically incorrect nowadays, especially as opponents of Plaid Cymru have long been playing pretty effectively upon the fears of the di-Gymraeg that Welsh independence is all just a plot to make them into second-class citizens.*
It works the other way round in Oti-Volta-land: language names are all based on ethnonyms, and in the few cases where a whole ethnic group has shifted language, the name just gets carried over to the new language. (The Yanga seem to have originally spoken Dyula, but now speak Mooré, so “Yaane” now basically means “Mooré spoken by a Yanga person.”) In Kusaal, all Europeans speak Nasaal, even if the speaker knows perfectly well that there are some minor differences between the Nasaal of Burkina Faso and the Nasaal of Ghana (enough to impair mutual comprehension to some degree, even.)
Farther afield: insofar as “Hausa” works as an ethnonym at all, it seems to have been reverse-engineered (in Hausa too) from the language name.
* Bwahahahaha!
Gagauz is unfortunately one of the hardest language names for me to read entirely seriously, on account of Comedic Graphical Voicing in Finnish online slang + kakaus being the action noun of kakaista ‘spit out (an utterance), speak awkwardly’.
(Other top contenders include latina which parses as a part of the same ideophonic series as lätinä ‘splatter, blather’, lotina ‘splashing’, litinä ‘squelching’ and with /a/ to indicate some degree of seriousness, adding up to something like “dry blather”.)
Anyway this post got me to look up what is the deal with the name “Bessarabia” (obviously cannot be any kind of a “the Arabia of Bess” but that conclusion has been where my knowledge has ended for decades). Turns out it’s already of Turkic derivation except already from the Cumans!: after Basarab I from the early 14th century, basar ‘ruling, Ruling One’ + aba ‘father’.
I spent a moment appreciating the diphthongs there before realizing that, oh wait no, that must be ‹ɛ› for /ʕ/.
“(enough to impair mutual comprehension to some degree, even.)”
As a person who learned to read French (or rather some* French) using French-to French dictionary from the start (and I needed it for Brassens, not scientific publications), I can confirm that English speakers can read French.
* until I could just look up a word in a dictionary, instead of deciphering everything by looking up words from the dictionary entry, then looking up words from the next entry … sometimes the depth reached 5. It was difficult.
Since then I allow myself any dictionary.
Also it was le Petit Larousse illustré – with some pictures.
“I spent a moment appreciating the diphthongs there before realizing that, oh wait no, that must be ‹ɛ› for /ʕ/.”
Yes, I told that the chat alphabet is better!!!:) (but ɛ is common in Berber context and is much, much better than just an apostrophe)
“I spent a moment appreciating the diphthongs there before realizing that, oh wait no, that must be ‹ɛ› for /ʕ/.”
____
About the range of “Arab”, Retsö (The Arabs in Antiquity: Their history from the Assyrians to the Umayyads) quotes exmaples like And my mood wasn’t exactly a good one either but I thought to myself: what about my children and my ʕarab? (Negev or Sinai bedouin) where it apparently means “kin”. Haven’t seen it in the wild.
@drasvi: It shouldn’t have been a joke. Of course Americans and lots of other Westerners did and still do refer to Chukchi as “Russian.” That is partly ignorance, but primarily just consequence of the way that we typically think about nationality.
Oh, and don’t refer to Samaritans as Jews.
That’s… like Coca Cola meaning “taste and enjoy™” in Chinese.
…and partly just the lack of separate words for “ethnic Russian” vs. “citizen of Russia”. As it happens, Russian has those: in the masculine singular русский vs. россиянин.
@DM, россиянин (accordingly, самаритянин [male] Samaritan.).
Same singulative -in in Rusyn. Cf. also
– collective Litva (Lithuania, but also a dated collective) and dated litvin
– dated (perhaps jokular?) collective tatarva (modern tatare) and tatarin
– trava “grass”, travinka “a blade of grass”.
(sorry, you have fixed it already…)
@Brett, no one could eb sure, so it was “a joke, or if true then hilarious enough and a joke anyway”
(actually when I was young and less asocial, I particularly liked – and thus was good at making – true statements which everyone considered jokes, funny and untrue)
Tim May, Languagehat, a huge, huge thank you!
but that is extremely politically incorrect nowadays
And a Good Thing Too. Ethnic nationalism is tolerable, perhaps, in Japan, where almost everyone is an ethnic Japaneser. “But for Wales???”
“(most of it about the damage that he and his comrades did),”
Wow, didn’t know that Péllisier was such an enthusiast of massacring Algerians.
He led the French in one of the most celebrated (despite the failure) events in Russian military history (the defence of Sevastopol) which contributes greatly in symbolic importance of Crimea for Russia.
I read the whole article, surprisingly it is about language.
Almost no politics.
And my mood wasn’t exactly a good one either but I thought to myself: what about my children and my ʕarab?
An Egyptian Bedouin friend of mine used to ask me “What news of Siwa and the ʕarab of Siwa?” when I ran into him. He didn’t mean “‘ethnic’ Arabs”; he meant “the people of Siwa”. Basically, ʕarab as a synonym for ʔahl.
It would be interesting to have a study a bit like Retsö’s, only looking soberly at the meaning of “Arab” in texts from the past 1400 years, instead of building vast theories about the word’s semantic trajectory based solely on the scattered scraps that survive from antiquity.
thought things are complicated by presence of Arabs in a more narrow sense: members of Arab tribes
Rural folks typically had a tribe, and could certainly find or make up an Arab genealogy for it if so inclined. The interesting question for North Africa, and the one I’m least sure about, is what precolonial urbanites – who generally did not belong to “tribes” – considered themselves. I don’t have nearly enough evidence, but the impression I get is that they identified more strongly with their hometown, or even with urbanity in general, than with any “ethnic” group; a real townie might be Arab, but only in the same sense that a fourth-generation American might be Norwegian or Irish. I found it striking that Thomas Shaw, who spent years in Algeria in the mid-18th c., thought of the primary ethnic groups as Arabs, Kabyles, and “Moors”, by which he seems to have meant city-dwellers in general (along with Turks of course).
the impression I get is that they identified more strongly with their hometown, or even with urbanity in general, than with any “ethnic” group; a real townie might be Arab, but only in the same sense that a fourth-generation American might be Norwegian or Irish.
That makes sense to me; my understanding is that that was the traditional situation in the Levant (to use a good old term now musty with disuse) — a Beiruti, Shami, or Halabi would not want to be called an Arab, which to town dwellers meant a hick from the sticks (on a camel).
Maybe the 64-dirham question is whether the sort of “Arab” ethnic identity we think we’re familiar with really existed prior to the 20th-century rise of Arab nationalism as an ideology. The rhetoric of that ideology presupposes a pre-existing Arab identity and “nation” that simply needs to take political control of its own destiny rather than be pushed around by Turks and Franks etc., but that is common and the notion that a nationalism itself may cause the ethnogenesis of the nation it purports to represent is I think out there in the literature.
And maybe the same is true for any sort of “Pan-Turkic” identity. I doubt the Gagauz back in the 19th-century felt a greater sense of kinship to Uzbeks than to Slavs. Although I’d be interested to know if any Gagauz intelligentsia got excited about Pan-Turanism back when it was a thing – which in the context of interwar Roumania would have implied some sort of cosmic coalition with the Magyars in Transylvania.
Oh, fascinating in more ways than one.
the notion that a nationalism itself may cause the ethnogenesis of the nation it purports to represent is I think out there in the literature.
I would have thought that was received wisdom by now.
An English ethnic-vs-citizen nomenclature clash is Hawaiian
@Lameen: So why does no one have the surname or nisba al-ʼArabi?
Well, there’s Ibn ‘Arabî.
Dunno about as a last name, but plenty of Algerians have the first name al-ʕArabi > lʕəṛbi (usually transcribed “Larbi”), including one of my cousins. It’s often preceded by the name Muḥammad, for obvious reasons. Somewhat ironically, one of the founders of Berber nationalism bore the name Mohand Aarav Bessaoud (Muḥend Aɛṛab Bessaɛud); his first name is the Kabyle version of Muḥammad al-ʕArabī.
Edit: And a quick search reveals some geologist named Youcef Larbi, i.e. يوسف العربي.
>An English ethnic-vs-citizen nomenclature clash is Hawaiian
Maybe I don’t have the opportunity often enough, but I don’t think I’d call someone who grew up in Hawaii a Hawaiian. I don’t know how often state-origin words are really even used. The iconic term is “Florida man” not Floridian. Not sure I’ve ever spoken the words I’m an Illinoisan. Is there even a word for people from Massachusetts or Connecticut?
Discussed here in 2004. And as I said in a comment there, “in fact everyone (outside of Hawaii) calls people from Hawaii Hawaiians regardless of ethnicity.”
The only context I can think of for these terms are political speeches and ads: “Ensuring that every Californian has access to…”
A list of US state demonyms here, including “Hawaii Resident”, “Massachusettsan”, and “Connecticuter” (which is cute).
You said it. But you didn’t get any support for it. Y’s link is backed by the AP Stylebook. Not saying that’s everything, but it’s one more data point than I’m seeing in support of broad use of Hawaiian. Googling for football players from Hawaii to see how they’re handled, I see a lot of instances of constructing around – I do see Hawaii player, Hawaiian roots and “adding Hawaiian punch” but in a quick skim, no references to them as Hawaiian.
But the real bottom line is that there really aren’t that many times when you need a state demonym. With one like Hawaiian, where in many people’s minds, the ethnic reference is present and dominant, most people will just avoid it. I’d opt for “he’s from Hawaii” every time. One way of thinking about this question – there are 3 times as many g-hits for Iowan as for Illinoisan or Marylander. People only use state demonyms if they’re felicitous and present no dissonance. Otherwise, they just don’t bother.
The only context I can think of for these terms are political speeches and ads: “Ensuring that every Californian has access to…”
From Cat’s Cradle.
You said it. But you didn’t get any support for it. Y’s link is backed by the AP Stylebook. Not saying that’s everything, but it’s one more data point than I’m seeing in support of broad use of Hawaiian.
Nonsense. You can bang the drum for what you perceive to be the superior usage all you like, just as people can insist on Mumbai and Myanmar and all the other supposedly righteous terms, but in this as in all other matters linguistic it’s usage that counts, and as Joel (who brought up the issue in that thread) said:
I guess you didn’t read far enough down the thread.
@Lameen, yes, I thought the same about Retsö’s study.
Yes, I was thinking about the urban population:)
Yes, when I said “member of Arab tribe”, I was thinking about rural population, though in this case I don’t know whether they were referred to as “Arabs”, how willing they were to find Arab genealogy – and were they right or not.
One context where such terms are used is after the word “native” when saying that someone was born in the state. Even here in DC people running for office often talk about being a “native Washingtonian” or “fourth-generation Washingtonian”. Of course the combination “native Hawaiian” raises even more difficulties than “Hawaiian” alone.
I would understand a “Hawaiian” to be a member of an ethnic group, as opposed to someone born in Hawaii. It would never have occurred to me to describe Barak Obama as a Hawaiian, for example.
This may be just my idiolect, mind.* For all I know, such a usage may be rampant elsewhere in the Anglosphere.
* Perhaps significantly, the very first thing that comes to my mind when free-associating “Hawaiian” is the language, something I probably share with numerous Hatters but perhaps not with all that many people in general.
It is in fact rampant. The word, like “American” and “Sabellian,” is multivalent.
J Pystynen: Gagauz is unfortunately one of the hardest language names for me to read entirely seriously, on account of Comedic Graphical Voicing in Finnish online slang + kakaus being the action noun of kakaista ‘spit out (an utterance), speak awkwardly’.
Except for the river names Vltava and Donau, the name Gagauz is the only trace left of the Pontic Finns.
I gave a couple examples of the fact that it’s not rampant. You’ve still given exactly none. It’s just an assertion.
Here’s another fact. Google for images of “Illinoisans”. You get all sorts of photos of groups of people, mixed or mostly white, in keeping with the population of the state. Google for images of “Hawaiians”. I get that the bulk of the population is Asian, and that pics of people in native garb aren’t relevant here — any more than pics of guys with beards and rolled up white linen shirts would be relevants to the usages of Illinoisan in the Land of Lincoln. They’re just tourist ads.
But looking for groups of “Hawaiians” in western dress, the phenotypes of people shown in groups are mostly noticeably Polynesian. Several pages of images in, I saw a photo that I thought might confound my assertion. But the two white women in the photo were assisting “Hawaiians” in saving “their” language. In another pic, a “Midwestern” family that look to be of European descent turn out to be the child and grandchildren of a Native Hawaiian.
Googling “my Hawaiian friend”, you get a series of references to people who are not merely former residents.
There may be a small subset of usages to refer to people were merely born or resident there, but the overwhelming usage to mean from an ancestrally Hawaiian background means that if you do use the term for people merely born or resident there, you are likely creating confusion for your interlocutors. The predominant way of dealing with it in the Anglosphere, I might even say the rampant way, is to avoid using a one-word demonym for residents of Hawaii.
In my mind, “Scottish” could refer to any resident of Scotland, but “a Scot” would be only someone with Gaelic ancestry. Is that the usual usage?
Could an English-assimilated person of Scottish ancestry, say Paul McCartney, still be referred to as Scottish?
Is that the usual usage?
By no means. But the matter is also complicated by the fact that many perfectly aboriginal Scots are not descended from Gaels anyway (or at least, not predominantly.)
Aneurin’s Gododdin refers to the (Brythonic) people of Lothian:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gododdin
The Lowlands were subsequently mostly conquered by the (ethnic) English rather than the Gaels, who became politically dominant for a while but did not drive out the existing inhabitants.
AHD:
Paul McCartney’s name is in fact Irish, not Scots (in the modern sense, anyhow.)
Ah, that makes sense. A Liverpool Irish, like Lennon.
Y : “In my mind, “Scottish” could refer to any resident of Scotland, but “a Scot” would be only someone with Gaelic ancestry. Is that the usual usage?”
Chalrie Stross is not a Scottish writer, although he resides in Scotland. He would not refer to himself as such and neither would Scottish SF writers refer to him as such (I’ve asked). Maybe honorary, but despite the influences his brand of science fiction is not fundamentally Scottish SF which is its own thing.
https://www.thescottishsun.co.uk/tvandshowbiz/8026167/gerard-butler-fans-spotted-scots-village/
A newspaper with which D.E. might be unfamiliar, but one which refers to Gerard Butler as a Scots star. Butler would be a Norman surname, but Normans especially seem to be susceptible to creeping Gaelicisation, becoming in many cases “more Irish than the Irish themselves”.
This is hardly Gaelicisation: it’s referring to people born in Scotland as Scots, which is not the same thing at all.
“Scots” stopped meaning “Gaelic” some centuries ago. (We were just talking about this the other day.)
As a language name, for example, it used to mean “Gaelic”; but now it means “the language formerly known as English” (as spoken in Scotland.)
Scotland has pretty much always been multiethnic. (And the elevation of the Gaelic-speaking Highlander into the archetypal Scot is quite a recent phenomenon, like the invention of clan tartans.)
(I’ve nothing at all against Gaelic as such: the language of a large chunk of my own ancestors, apart from anything else. Also, Old Irish is way cool. In a nerdy sort of way. It appeals to the inner conlanger greatly.)
Your arse is cool in a nerdy sort of way:(
Old Irish is cool!
Your arse is cool
It’s kind of you to say so, but this appears to be a somewhat niche opinion. My undoubted allure is largely a consequence of my other irresistible attributes. (I would particularise, but I have no wish to undermine the body confidence of less fortunate Hatters by doing so.)
Your arse is cool
Is this supposed to be a pun on Erse ? Perhaps a confusion of puns and buns ?
I have no wish to undermine the body confidence of less fortunate Hatters
I hear that “slim-hipped” is to be expunged from the next edition of Albee’s plays.
I felt that it was more likely to reflect drasvi’s somewhat idealised mental image of me. I get that a lot. (And it is true that the photographs don’t really do me justice.) I try to let fans down gently. One has a responsibility.
(I draw the line at “like a Greek god”, which smacks of cultural appropriation to me.)
I have a left shoulder-blade that is a miracle of loveliness. People come miles to see it. My right elbow has a fascination that few can resist.
According to Joanna Trollope, this was Margaret’s first reaction to Mr. Willoughby (“and everyone calls me Wills”):
#
Even in acute distress, with her vision partially obscured by her wet hair, Margaret could see that on the scale of hotness, he registered fairly close to a full ten.
#
I like the novels by Trollope I have read so far, but S&S is not panning out for me.
At least I have learned that Devon lies between Cornwall and Wales. I had very bad grades in geography.
Yes, Joanna’s romans à clef have caused me some embarrassment. But she won’t listen.
People actually write like that?
Yes, I suppose they do. And sell lots of books. It’s a fallen world.
Well, I suppose in Proper English it must be “your granny’s arse” or something like that…
The Gagauz başkan is Evghenia Guțul, 37. The previous başkan was İrina Vlah.
Guțul must be “Hutsul”, Vlah must be “Vlach”…
Oh, it seems they have renamed Moldovan language in the Constitution!
The article in WP
(“{{Short description|Outdated name for the Romanian language in Moldova}}
{{Hatnote|Not to be confused with [[Moldavian dialect]], one of several dialects of the Romanian language.}}”)
is…. well, there is politics, and very strange politics, but no linguistical information.
Strange politics is like: Romania is asking Ukraine to stop using the name, Ukraine refuses (citing census data). Or this exchange:
“This attracted criticism from Russia. Maria Zakharova, the spokeswoman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation, claimed that “the Romanian language should be renamed to Moldovan, and not the opposite”.[38] Romanian foreign minister Aurescu replied to this by saying, “This so-called Moldovan language does not exist, it is an artificial construct, which was created by the Soviet Union and has later been used by Russia for disinformation purposes”.[39] To this, Zakharova replied back by saying, “Sr. Bogdan Aurescu never existed either, but in the end he was created. Now it is possible to call him an artificial construct.”[40] “
Zakharova is learning to troll!
The subject is of course controversial in Moldova, too.
I read that Soviet Moldovan, while different from Romanian in name and writing system is based mostly on Romanian, though in MASSR there were attempts to teach in local dialect.
Charles King, The Ambivalence of Authenticity, or How the Moldovan Language Was Made, 1999 (sci-hub) says that these attempts were viewed negatively in the West, which surprises me: ”Much of the existing western and, now, post-Soviet literature has treated the period of the MASSR-with its heated debates over the relationship between the Moldovan and Romanian languages, its frequent alphabet changes, and its strange neologisms based on indigenous roots or Slavic calques-as an amusing though sinister episode in Moldovan and Romanian cultural history“
Zakharova is learning to troll! – surprisingly, Russian Ministry of Foreign Affair said something good, because this “X was created artificially” is tiresome (though, “artifically” implies control and deliberate creation, I don’t think it is how babies are made…).
As I understand there is a division among Moldovans (e.g. WP: In the 2004 census, 16.5% (558,508) of the 3,383,332 people living in Moldova declared Romanian as their native language, whereas 60% declared Moldovan.) so they could just consider “Moldovan” and “Romanian” synonymous.
The mid-20th-century politically-motivated attempt (although I guess there were Commies on both sides) to make “Macedonian” a different South-Slavic language from “Bulgarian” appears to have succeeded in the medium run (we’ll see about the long run). Were the Soviets, in their fabrication of “Moldov[i]an,” not as clever as the Titoites in coming up with strategems (other than the Cyrillic thing …) which maximized points of differentiation and were successfully inculcated into a couple generations of schoolchildren? But how come the Yugoslavs were never clever enough to convince the local linguistic minority in Kosovo/Macedonia that they didn’t speak “Albanian” but a different-if-related language of their own?
I guess I don’t like the change – it recembles the dynamics in Ukraine when pro-Russian and pro-Western governments find a half of population in opposition and… try to make their victory over that half permanent, instead of looking for a compromise.
I know almost nothing about Moldova. For Ukraine and Belarus I’m quite confident that what they needed is good relations with both East and West, but were caught in a situation where instead of benefiting from the competition between Russia and the West they are getting ruined by it (roughly speaking: it is not like two suitors give expensive gifts to a girl to win her disposal – instead they are beating her up). Of course, Putin harmed a lot (and in case of Ukraine made “good relations with both east and west” impossible). But apart of him, there is the dynamycs.
A language name hardly means much for, say, intergration with Romania (must be another controversial topic), it is a symbolic change. But no, I’m not glad when a politician “defeats” some of population. I don’t like the smell and I just hope we won’t ruin Moldova too.
I also suppose, “Moldovan” means very little to Russia (as opposed to some locals) – rather Russia does not like the idea of Moldova in EU and the name “Romanian” – or any project of this government – happened to be associated with this intent.
@JWB, attempts to create a literary Moldavian language based on peasant vernacular from 20s are entirely unremarkable for the time when there was, for example, a newspaper (and a theatre) of Persians in Bukhara (of local descendants of [mostly Shia] former slaves as distinct from Tajiks). I doubt foreign politics was behind this, though of course they were hostile to Romanian nationalism. And later I guess they simply did not care much. Romania was Soviet.
AFAIK, Standard Moldovan and Standard Romanian are practically identical. Standard Macedonian was instead created from scratch based on whichever dialects were least similar to both Standard Bulgarian and Standard Serbian; it is readily distinguishable from Bulgarian in more ways than the orthography (though of course I suspect mutual intelligibility is quite high).
That would probably have amounted to a Gheg-based standard, which would have been quite different from the existing central-but-rather-Tosk-based standard – and created a situation like Dutch vs. German, where the border that separates the countries and the standard languages runs at 90° to the isoglosses. An interesting idea. Maybe Tito didn’t want to piss off Hoxha that much, but I don’t know what would have been so bad about that…
though of course I suspect mutual intelligibility is quite high
The one Bulgarian (as opposed to zero North Macedonians) I have discussed this with told me he could understand 100% of Macedonian; on the other hand he is a linguist.
central-but-rather-Tosk-based standard
Make that “completely Tosk-based standard (because the founders of Communist Albania spoke Tosk) with some relics of the previous central standard plus some degree of post-Communist revival of it”.
Maybe Tito didn’t want to piss off Hoxha that much
I think so. Hoxha had the same reputation as the Kim dynasty in North Korea: weak, but crazy. Pissing them off might provoke a senselessly disproportionate response.
One bit of internet scholarship that’s not *obviously* wrong asserts that “Like Zog, Hoxha was uncomfortable with irredentism—with the concept of a Greater Albania—and the reasons behind their discomfort were similar as well: fear of Kosovar chieftains; fear of increasing the Gheg population (the communist movement was primarily Tosk); and because the very concept of nationalism was tainted by fascism.” Of course, that’s consistent with caution re avoiding provocations that might incentivize Hoxha to overcome his supposed discomfort with irredentism.
It would be interesting to see a linguistic treatment of Moldovan (and it is very, very weird that “Moldovan language” does not contain a single word about language as such).
The account of Charles King quoted above is perplexing, he discusses 20s and 30s in detail, he even says “There is ample evidence that the Moldovans, those in the MASSR as well as those who joined Greater Romania in the territorial changes after 1918, did not think of themselves as unambiguously Romanian in the period between the wars. Under both Romanians and Soviets, peasants referred to themselves and their language as “Moldovan” well into the 1930s, a practice that infuriated pan-Romanian nationalists in Greater Romania.5” and “language policy and linguistics were never mere by-products of Soviet foreign policy.” – but he describes the subsequent development in just a few words as (a) promotion of spoken language of educated people (b) drift towards Romanian, simultaneously with blah-blah-blah about distinct Moldovan language:
Of course, dialect levelling is going to reduce the distance between Romania and Moldavia, but what about “linguists” and what they “spoke at home”?
This is a tangent, but the Soviet-era vassal polity was standardly referred to in English as the “Moldavian SSR,” while the independent successor is “Moldova.” I’ve never quite understood the a->o shift. It looks like the Russian shifted (if you believe what you read on the internet) from Молдавская Советская Социалистическая Республика to “Молда́вия, также Молдо́ва.” On the other hand, the, um, local-Romance-topolect name went from Република Советикэ Сочиалистэ Молдовеняскэ to “Moldova.” So it looks like the Anglophone world mostly just shifted from adopting the Russian-version vowel to adopting to local-Romance-topolect vowel?
The rectification-of-language-names thing is evident in Kusaal: Nabit, the language of the Nabdema, the western neighbours of the Kusaasi, seems to resemble the western (Toende) dialect of Kusaal at least as closely as Toende Kusaal itself resembles the eastern (Agolle) dialect, and indeed possibly more so; but because the Toende Kusaasi identify as Kusaasi (obviously) and the Nabdema don’t, voilà, different languages.
(Ethnologue compounds the confusion by calling Nabit a dialect of Gurenne/Farefare, which is every bit as valid as calling Dutch a dlalect of Danish.)
there was little to separate Moldovan from Romanian except […] the residual discourse of linguistic difference
I take this to mean “They are different because we say they are different”.
@JWB, Moldavia is essentially the Latin name (of the medieval principality) adopted by Russian.
But I wonder why it is -a- everywhere but in Romanian.
“The rectification-of-language-names thing”
Few Gagauz people by this time spoke their own native tongue. It had been taught in local schools for a brief period starting in 1958, but was then dropped as Moscow accelerated a drive to impose Russian.
…TIL. I’ve heard of Gagauz with comments to the effect of “schoolkids in Gagauzia were forced to study Gagauz, Moldovan, and Russian”, but I don’t know to which extent this was ever actually true.
are largely unaware that the great majority of Christians in Israel are Arabs
AFAIK within Israel the Christian Arabs are usually referred to as “Druzes” (друзы, דְּרוּזִים). I’m not sure to what extent they actually embrace such a label.
…Wikipedia says that Druzes are actually a different religion entirely, and there are completely unrelated Arab Christian communities? TIL. It all mixed up for me I guess.
ethnicity of the PE teacher in my school is known as “Persian”. No one else is so, Iranians are called “Iranians” (irantsy) in Russian. I suspect he began introducing himself as “Persian” when it was the main Russian word for Iranians, and then kept doing so later
Indeed; Persia is/was the empire to the east of Ancient Greece that Herodotus wrote about, and to a lesser extent the land of 1001 Nights (incorrectly so, AFAIK), but now it’s Iran and Iranians (иранцы) – if I heard someone described as перс (which is probably the word that drasvi translates as “Persian”) I’d probably think they were either from ancient history or otherwise really really old.
Anna Korostelyova (September 2023) on the mutual (in)comprehensibility of Farsi and Tajik, on “Persian” Arabic script. Several other recent posts about her newest Iranian students…
even if the speaker knows perfectly well that there are some minor differences between the Nasaal of Burkina Faso and the Nasaal of Ghana (enough to impair mutual comprehension to some degree, even.)
It probably doesn’t help that the nearby-ish village of Gouloungoussi is unaccountably part of Togo.
(I’m sure there’s a good reason why exactly it’s in Togo, but my googling couldn’t find that reason, and indeed found very little on that village in general – aside from a document on child rights in Togo that indicated that the inhabitants of that village do, apparently, speak Kusaal.)
And as I said in a comment there, “in fact everyone (outside of Hawaii) calls people from Hawaii Hawaiians regardless of ethnicity.”
True in 2004, less true post-2008 on the account of the most famous person who grew up in Hawaii being a person of clearly non-Hawaiian origin who moved out in his teen years, such that aside from growing up there he has almost no connection to the place. (If it wasn’t important for his electoral eligibility, approximately nobody would even care where he grew up; his political career started in Illinois.)
Probably still true in cases where now-former President Obama isn’t involved, though.
At least I have learned that Devon lies between Cornwall and Wales.
Cornwall is the longbit and Devon is the thick bit immediately next to it. It’s probably a better description that Devon lies between Cornwall and England.
Ethnologue compounds the confusion by calling Nabit a dialect of Gurenne/Farefare, which is every bit as valid as calling Dutch a dlalect of Danish.
Do the Nabdema use the characteristic Farefare greeting? (Probably not…)
On independence, Belarus and Moldova switched their English exonyms from the Russian to the native-language name. By contrast, the Baltics, Armenia, and Georgia kept pre-Soviet exonyms. Kirghizia switched to Kyrgyzstan, either to seem more metal or to troll Herman Cain.
Do the Nabdema use the characteristic Farefare greeting?
No.
The misapprehension about the language affilliation comes from the fact that they are part of the Farefare chieftaincy system, so it’s politically driven.
Tony Naden actually went to the trouble of trying to get this corrected by Ethnologue (likewise for Talni) but was unsuccessful. It doesn’t inspire confidence in Ethnologue’s processes.
Gouloungoussi
Most Kusaasi are in Ghana: the plebiscite that merged the old British-mandate part of what was formerly (German) Togoland with Ghana mostly reunited them: there are only a few (Agolle) Kusaasi villages in Togo now.
However, there is a fairly substantial Toende Kusaasi population in Burkina Faso (that’s what Urs Niggli’s works treat.)
CInkassé, which straddles the Burkina/Togo border, is the only place that I know of outside Kusaasiland itself that has a Kusaal name, but AFAIK it is not actually a Kusaasi settlement.
Pusiga, across the border in Ghana, was the first capital of what became the Mossi-Dagomba states. The first king, Gbewa, is supposed to have been swallowed by the earth there. After his death, the Kusaasi and Bisa rebelled, and the capital was permanently moved to the south of the Gambaga escarpment.
Cinkassé Prefecture has a somewhat odd shape, which explains how it comes to include Kusaasi villages:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinkass%C3%A9_Prefecture
I’ve no idea how it got to be that way. Drunk surveyors?
Colonial or post-colonial officials agreeing on the river as a border and not looking very closely at the map? But looking at Google Earth around the narrowest point just west of Cinkassé/Cinkansé, the border between Togo and Burkina Faso goes straight through houses and gardens, so it seems to be of very little relevance in daily life.The border between Togo and Ghana follows the river and is more difficult to ignore, but as soon as it starts following straight lines south of Cinkassé, it’s the same there.
It’s not a very heavily policed border.
On occasions when I crossed at an official place, helpful functionaries would ask if I wanted my passport stamped or not (a non-trivial decision, because it can lead to problems if officials in Accra or Ouagadougou or Lomé notice that you’ve left the country more often than you’ve entered it. They tend to be laudibly concerned with maintaining den logischen Aufbau der Welt.)
AFAIK within Israel the Christian Arabs are usually referred to as “Druzes” (друзы, דְּרוּזִים). I’m not sure to what extent they actually embrace such a label.
No, that is a mistake. The Druze are neither Christian nor considered Arab, and that is reflected in the usage in Hebrew and English (and I imagine, Russian).
The Druze are neither Christian nor considered Arab
The idea that Druze are “not Arab” seems to be strictly an Israel-internal outgrowth of their anomalous political position there. Lebanese and Syrian Druze describe themselves as Arab, and are accepted as such by everyone else.
Thanks, Lameen. That totally makes sense.
mollymolly, or else they switched their English exonyms from the English to the native-language name.
For there is nothing particularly Russian about “Moldavia” or “Belorussia” or even “Россия” – or un-Russian about “Belarus”.
Except that the Russians say “Belorussia,” not “Belarus.”
@LH, true.
But that’s because when Belarus switched its Russian and English endonyms to “Belarus”, Russia kept using “Belorussia”.
It is difficult to say to what extent the form “Belorussia” was “Russian” initially, when the word entered Russian and English languages.
For many decades in the late 20th century, the Crimean Astrophysical Observatory, Nauchnij was one of the world’s most prolific discoverer, and thus namer, of asteroids. The official internationally-recognized astronomical names of such celestial objects are apparently immune from updating as the fickle winds of political fashion shift. So e.g. the asteroids 2170 Byelorussia and 2419 Moldavia still bear those names, and ditto 2046 Leningrad and 2171 Kiev. The brief “detente” fad of the mid-Seventies is commemorated by 2228 Soyuz-Apollo.
It is difficult to say to what extent the form “Belorussia” was “Russian” initially, when the word entered Russian and English languages.
Doesn’t matter. At the current time, the time in which we are all living, it is Russian, and that’s what matters.
@LH, no, it does. They became somewhat Russian in very recent years.
And why I say “somewhat”: it is NOT the same as balyk (“belonged” to Turkic in the sense “fish” and was “borrowed” into Russian in the sense “smoked sturgeon”) and not even as nemtsy “Germans, previously Germanic speakers and Europeans in general” (eventually Arabic النمسا “Austria”).
mollymolly wrote:
On independence, Belarus and Moldova switched their English exonyms from the Russian to the native-language name.
Which means, before the independence the English names were (a) exonyms (b) “Russian”.
“it is NOT the same as balyk” –
Whose name is “Mohammed”? I’m Russian, I must be transliterating from Russian, eh? Or am I transcribing Arabic?
Or am I just copying what various Mohammeds write when they need to write their names in Latin letters?
It does not matter at all in this context that those name WOULD become “Russian” for you later.
Also what about other languages? They are
Moldavija (alongside Moldova) in Russian, Moldavie, Moldavia etc. in French and Spanish etc.
Bielorrusia in Spanish.
Also Belorusija is the Russian name used in Russia, in Belarus they use the Russian name Belarus’ – or at least these two names are “Russian” if you are only interested in the current situation.
As often happens, the Anglophone world may be a bit of an outlier in terms of having been guilt-tripped to adopt the current government’s preferred spelling – a quick scan of wikipedia suggests the endurance of “Moldabya” in Tagalog, “Moldavi” in Haitian Kreyol, and “Moldavija” in Slovenian. For the same three languages it’s “Biyelorusya,” “Byelorisi,” and “Belorusija.”
In German, uncertainty reigns: Moldau ~ Moldawien, Belarus ~ Weißrussland. I don’t think they line up very well with political attitudes, but I haven’t investigated.
(With an article, die Moldau is the river that runs through Prague, in the original Vltava…)
@LH, sorry for this long sequence of comments, but see what I wrote about Mohammed – my main interest is not as much politics as finding a way to discuss such words.
And I still don’t have such a way. All I know is that possibly I can describe transition from Ivan to John as “transposition”. At least some people do.
The view “Belorussija – Russian, Belarus’ – Belarusian” makes sense if you limit your consideration with only two lnaguages and only the period of USSR.
When you do, you can’t discuss English (it does not exist if you limit your consideration with R. and B.). Add English – and the only solid fact you have is that the English and Russian names are more similar to each other than either is to the Belarusian name.
To establish any hierarchy between E. and R. you need to learn how exactly they entered English and Russian respectively and whether Belorussi[j]a was specifically associted with the Russian language.
Perhaps it was, I don’t know.
It’s legally quite important that the Israeli Druze are considered their own separate ethnic group. It means that they are eligible to be drafted into the IDF.
Perhaps the Druze analogy is like the difference between “Austrians are a specific subset of Germans, sort of like Bavarians are” to “Austrians are non-Germans, even if they share a language, and a culture, etc etc.” Although that was more of a shift over time than a synchronic regional variation, I suspect?
Given the legal option as of approximately a decade ago to self-identify as ethnically “Aramean” rather than “Arab,” a whopping 1.5% of Israel’s Christian population (according to wikipedia) has thus far done so. Presumably a slightly-higher percentage if you took Armenians and other miscellaneous not-Arab Christians out of the denominator. They may disproportionately come from the churches whose Arabic liturgy is translated from an earlier Syriac than those whose Arabic liturgy is translated from an earlier Greek, but not as I understand it exclusively so. I assume the reclassified are mostly those with a strong political belief that identifying their particular community’s destiny with anything resembling “Arab nationalism” is a bad idea. But still a very small minority of a minority.
Brett: Furthermore, the Druze of the Israeli Golan/Jawlān have different political alliances. All have the option of taking Israeli citizenship, but few choose to do so, unlike those west of the Green Line.
The infobox in WP “Arab Christians” excludes Maronites (perhaps because, as WP says, “a significant proportion of Maronites claim descent from the Phoenicians”) and classifies Algerians (including Berberophones) as Arab-Berbers.
@drasvi: Presumably a number of now-living non-Maronite Arabic-speaking denizens of the Levant are also as to some material percentage of their ancestry distant descendants of the Phoenicians, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenicianism as a modern -ism seems to appeal disproportionately to Maronites.
Хоть горшком назови, только в печку не ставь.
even pot-INSTR call-IMP, just in oven-ACC not put-IMP.
(The word for “even” actually means “want” so it is “if you want you can even”)
Anyway, in Tunisia they are proud with the Carthage, so maybe they could form a Punic-Phoenician alliance.
in my (yiddish cultural) worlds, “moldova|n” refers to the current state and its residents (most often, musicians in kishinev) and “bessarabia|n” to the land it sits on and its residents (more or less regardless of time period), while “moldavia|n” refers to the territory (and, much less often, the polity) of the principality that comprised bessarabia, bukovina, and the areas southwest of them into the mountains beyond the siret, and its residents (again, more or less regardless of time period).
In Bulgarian the term is Bessarabian Bulgarians, whether they be in the current territory of current Moldova, Romania, or Ukraine. It predates the SU. Same with Banat Bulgarians. I admit I don’t know the term for Bulgarians around Bolgrad; a friend of mine was a teacher in a Bulgarian school closer to the center of Ukraine over there, but I think they call themselves just Bulgarians. I mean all three groups call themselves just “Bulgarians”, but I mean in academic literture. Banat Bulgarians have their own literary standard, at least.
John Cowan : “The one Bulgarian (as opposed to zero North Macedonians) I have discussed this with told me he could understand 100% of Macedonian; on the other hand he is a linguist.”
I’m not a linguist and I can understand 95% of Macedonian, with the 5% being loans from Serbian. And you rapidly get used to them with exposure; furthermore, most people that have gone thought their educational system don’t use actually use the obscure features, which are actually shared among Bulgarian dialects all over, not confined to tTFKaM — the aim was to be different to STANDARD Bulgarian. There are no isoglosses that even remotely coincide with the current border.
You probably meant Ivan Derzhanski?
Is Bulgarian-Macedonian more dialectally compact than Serbian-Croatian-Bosnian?
Not when judging from the maps in Wikipedia…
An analogy would be Riksmål and Bokmål, but closer to each other — in normal conversation you can’t tell if someone is talking in “Bulgarian” or “Macedonian”, especially if you are speaking the same dialect, only the Serbian loans stand out.
You probably meant Ivan Derzhanski?
The same.
Is Bulgarian-Macedonian more dialectally compact than Serbian-Croatian-Bosnian?
It depends on if you mean the standard languages and their mesolects, or the entire “naš jazik” dialect continuum, from what I can make out.
AFAIK standard FYLOSC, in all four varieties, is one sub-dialect mostly distinguished by script and/or (acceptance of) loans. Other varieties of just Shtokavian alone are much more divergent, and Chakavian/Kajkavian are almost whole different languages.
Bulgarian is a dialect continuum; Standard Macedonian is plucked from the southwest corner of it, and Standard Bulgarian is picked together from all over but mostly excluding that particular corner.
AFAIK this means that they’re closer together than Shtokavian and Chakavian (or Kajkavian), but it’s not like they’re both based on (nearly) the exact same dialect the way FYLOSC is.
And then there’s Torlakian…
January First-of-May : Bulgarian was plucked from everywhere, including tTFKaM. It was after the Soviet occupation that it was deleted, when Stalin was still cooperating with Tito.
Torlakian is east-south-slavic. The line goes roughly from Vidin to Prishtina.
…Wikipedia says that Druzes are actually a different religion entirely, and there are completely unrelated Arab Christian communities?
Druze are often considered neither Christian nor Muslim by their neighbors, and they themselves keep them guessing by not talking about their tenets – AFAIK, they don’t proselytize and to be a Druze, you have to get born a Druze. But I read a couple of years ago that some scholars managed to have a look at Druze religious books, and it turned out that their religion is a peculiar branch of Shia Islam.
And why I say “somewhat”: it is NOT the same as balyk (“belonged” to Turkic in the sense “fish” and was “borrowed” into Russian in the sense “smoked sturgeon”) and not even as nemtsy “Germans, previously Germanic speakers and Europeans in general” (eventually Arabic النمسا “Austria”).
I’m not sure whether you’re implying that nemtsy is a loan from Arabic????
I’m not sure whether you’re implying that nemtsy is a loan from Arabic????
No: that Arabic النمسا an-nimsā “Austria” is a loan from Slavic (apparently via Ottoman Turkish).
A couple of years ago?
Wow.
@Hans, well, I mean, النمسا can be considered an “Arabic (and not Slavic) word” at least in the sense: Slavs don’t say so and likely did not say so in this exact form. Though I doubt Arabs would consider it very Arabic.
I should have written “not the same as النمسا”…
Belorussia is just a form which is not used in Russian in Belorussia and English, but is used in Russian in Russia and in Romance languages.
And why the difference? Because Belarusian government began using Belarus’ (and people agreed), while the Russian government (and I assume the Spanish government, but I doubt Belarus ever insisted on changing Spanish usage) ignored this change and refused to satisfy the request to change the usage in Russia.
PS oups, sorry. You read a couple of years ago! I thought that were the scholars who only saw Druze books two years ago:)
Yes, I read that about the Druze decades ago.
their religion is a peculiar branch of Shia Islam.
In the same sense that Christianity is a peculiar branch of Judaism.
TIL it’s productive: израильтянин “Israeli”.
Or was so recently: 1948 is not the first time we heard about “Israel*”:)
ostrov-ityan-in – “islander” (was this -ityan- borrowed from Samaritan?)
The collective is
ostrov-ityan-e
which behaves as plural. Same without -ityan- : tatarin-tatare
Litva, in turn, is singular.
___
*A nation old and relatively famous in our palestines (a Russian idiom)
Cf. Veltman (I chose to quote it because of all those Moldavian words):
Катерина Юрьевна, судя по молдавским капитанам, никак не воображала, чтоб у русского капитана не было какой-нибудь мошии с курте бояреск, с огромной градиной, с толпой служитров, со всем хозяйством, со всеми принадлежностями. Мысленно представляла она себе, что за отсутствием хозяина управляет этой мошией какой-нибудь ватаман, что все в беспорядке, и она приведет в порядок. Желая подарить себя внезапностью исполнения своих ожиданий, кукона Катинька не расспрашивала своего мужа о его именье, ни как велико оно, ни в каких палестинах обретается.
TIL it’s productive: израильтянин “Israeli”.
That’s an example of -янин, which might historically include -ин but synchronically appears to be a unit (and is treated as such by Wiktionary).
This particular word happens to be fairly old (it originally translated the Biblical term usually rendered in English as “Israelite”, and the Russian national corpus gives examples right back to the early 18th century), but the suffix was indeed productive at least as recently as 19th century (таитянин “Tahitian”), and is still productive enough to be understood in nonce coinages (e.g. Vysotsky’s таукитянин “Tau-Ceti-an”), though offhand I can’t think of any non-nonce 20th or 21st century formations.
Ah, that explains what the -т- is doing in the word!