581–590 of 629 posts
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Hungarian too, although there’s a question about whether Hungary is Eastern or Central Europe.
Ah, yes, how could I forget! As a side note, though also Finno-Ugric then similarity in sound and appearance from Finnish or Estonian at least appears very far.
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Hungarian too, although there’s a question about whether Hungary is Eastern or Central Europe.
The Visegrad 4 (Poland, Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary)are generally taken to be "Central European". The strict East/West division is largely a product of the Cold War and the Iron Curtain.
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Hungarian too, although there’s a question about whether Hungary is Eastern or Central Europe.
“There’s a question” implies that there is a ground truth that might be discovered to resolve this rather than simply a clash of different purely arbitrary definitions of the same terms.
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To be fair to the Frisians, there are around 40,000-80,000 native Irish speakers and 500,000+ native Frisian speakers.
Irish is an official language of Ireland (there is signage and instructions in Irish up and down the Republic) , Frisian is not an official language of the Netherlands to the best of my knowledge Irish is certainly not a robust vigorous language but your 40,000-80,000 numbers downplay it I'd suggest. Here are some statistics from Deepseek Category Region Number of Speakers Source & Year Some Ability Republic of Irela…
Whereas Irish seems to be heavily promoted but for whatever reason precious few people learn it as their mother tongue, and those who do so are primarily in an area where it’s always been that way. For better or worse, people are preferring to use English at home and Irish is treated like a luxury good.
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> 'The same language' is usually just a desguised nationalistic claim It's the opposite: "it's a different language" is usually just a nationalistic desire for differentiation of what are essentially dialects/variants of a language. > Linguistically, it does not matter -- there is no objective definition of the difference between a language, a dialect, or whatever -lect. That's more because academic linguistics, as d…
> That's more because academic linguistics, as developed in the latter half of the 20th century, had to pay lip service into several ideologies, rather than there not actually being good practical ways to discern e.g. arabic as a single basic language with different variants. As someone who once studied General Linguistics, I don't understand this remark. I've learned that calling something a language is a political…
>As someone who once studied General Linguistics, I don't understand this remark. I've learned that calling something a language is a political act and often of great significance to the speakers, but is almost never well-defined from a purely linguistic perspective. That's a fact.
Yes, this ideologically motivated idea after enough repetitionbecame "a fact" of the field, as if describing some objective physical law, and even non-political students will be taught and stick to the same (and anybody with a dissenting opinion will be getting an earful if not committing career suicide).
This wasn't always the case, it's more so with liberalism prevailing, especially in the latter half of the 20th century.
Some cursory clicking about didn't reveal to me the actual corpus they used, only that it is several trillion tokens 'divided across the languages'. I'm curious mainly because Irish (among some other similarly endangered languages on the list) typically has any large corpus come from legal/governmental texts that are required to be translated. There must surely be only a relatively tiny amount of colloquial Irish in…
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Wouldn't go that far. EU policymakers have good intentions, I believe - but ultimately are products of their environment and cultural inclination. The EU is such a bizarre place because they treat capital and entrepreneurs with such massive distrust, but never really bothered getting rid of the quasi-static entrenched hierarchies from feudalism? Like I'll go to the UK or France and there will just be massive swathes…
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