Being this a touristical subject, here are some fresh news concerning the tragical death of six Jewish tourists these days.

Please notice that, AFAIK :
- these exercises were top secret (and even semi-clandestine), till the disaster.
- Turkey excludes Israel from taking part into any air exercise over Turkish territory. Then the US pressure under [the obedient] Romania followed, in order to replace Turkey with us.
- during these exercises, the Southern Carpathians  were resembled to the Zagros Mountains.
[Most probably in order to study the northern relatives of the Calomyscus bailwardi , I suppose.]

Just quoting Buddha, “Thus I have heard.”

P.S. Ironically enough, Romania launched its new tourism brand, under the slogan Explore the Carpathian Garden , in the presence of Tourism and Regional Development minister Elena Udrea in Shanghai on Thursday.

Aleksejs wrote:

For the record, street signs in the city of Strasbourg, which often changed hands between Germany and France, are bilingual.

In French and Alsatian, not French and German.

After the political shifts of the last 150 years, Alsatians themselves have become insecure about their identity; they identified strongly with France, but felt that other French (‘les gens de l’intérieur’) could regard them and their loyalty to the French Republic as suspect. A crucial stage in this has been that the official attitude is that the minority language is alsacien rather than German, and the reluctant moves by the French state to accept use of the minority language have often been in favour of these varieties rather than for standard German; the French state has been very reluctant to accept that German is a minority language within France, and there has been much resistance to teaching German in schools, except as a foreign language without any recognition that it might be related to some of the children’s first language. Even in 1993 a French politician expressed fears that a newly united, economically powerful Germany might look again to increase its influence on Alsace, and ‘teaching German to small children in Alsatian schools will finish the job’. What has happened in effect since 1945 is that Alsatian has been largely uncoupled from standard German in popular perception, and official support has tended to be for the ‘dialect’ rather than for standard German – the few bilingual street signs in central Strasbourg are in Alsatian, and the names of the stops are called out in dialect and French on the Strasbourg trams. But Alsatian is a cover term for a set of regionally differentiated non-standardised low status varieties – even if the locals refer to it as le dialecte it is in French terminology a patois, with all that that discriminatory term implies. If French is a ‘language’, nobody would consider Alsatian to be a language; limited use of it on, say, street signs is folklorique and antiquarian – and it can be permitted because it presents no real challenge to the dominant language of the state. Attitudes to the dialect are conflicting and contradictory. Although there is a very strong sense of regional identity in Alsace, the population of what is actually one of the most prosperous parts of France in no way considers itself to be a linguistic minority and certainly not an oppressed one, and this regional identity is no longer necessarily associated with the dialect to any extent – except, as with regionalisms in many other regions of Europe, for a few token words which have acquired symbolic significance. In practice, many Alsatians have at least tacitly accepted the ideology of the language of state – that loyal French citizens speak French and this is essential part of that identity. The long border with Germany has not assisted maintenance of the dialect, since no German government could be seen to support the use of German for fear of being accused of revanchist intentions, and the mutually comprehensible contiguous German dialects themselves are in regression (except possibly on the northern border).

“Linguistic minorities and national identity,” Martin Durrell (.doc)

(Emphases [bold] mine.)

I have no problem at all with introducing bilingual signs here—in Latvian and Latgalian, not Russian.

Vysu lobu,
/P

Vidas, there is a vast difference between the US and Latvia!

Ya think ?

Totally off topic and off point erratum snipped.

Peteris writes:

In French and Alsatian, not French and German.

Should I understand that Low Alemannic German is not German ? Maybe I’m wrong, but, IMO, Alsatian is just a German dialect, and not a distinct language.

BTW, Peteris, I am really interested in your opinion. Namely, are the Romanian and the Aromanian distinct languages? [Please notice that I’m able to understand the Aromanian without any specific preparation.]
Thx in advance.

Alsatian language

Alsatian is closely related to other nearby Alemannic dialects, such as Swiss German, Swabian, and Badisch.

Is Swiss German a different language?

“a shprakh iz a dialekt mit an armey un flot”—commonly attributed to Max Weinreich

Yes, Alsatian is essentially a German dialect. Though there are differences between Russian as spoken in the Baltics and in Russia, there is no local dialect per se, much less a “Latvian Russian” language. Aromanian is considered a language. So, for example, is Frisian, given status in the Netherlands. Latgalian, though considered a variant of Latvian, has been standardized and has a literature. According to Toporov, the degree of distinction made between the Slavic languages would make Latgalian distinct from the other Baltic languages.

By the way, it is rather interesting to note that the far right National Front (quite popular in Alsace, comparatively) does not object to bilingualism (see The National Front in France: ideology, discourse, and power). Also interestingly, the candidate from the far right Visu Latvijai! listed first in Latgalia (which is heavily russified and tends to vote for the left) is Mareks Gabrišs.

But as far as the reason we got into this—the history and situation of the russophones in Latvia and the Alsatians is completely different (for so many reasons I won’t list them unless someone insists). All Alsatians know French (after prolonged periods of francization), French is not under any threat in the world, in France or in Alsace, Alsace is merely a small region, Germany is not irredentist, etc. See what I posted with regard to the Alsatians, especially the phrases I made bold, and compare that to Russian in Latvia.

But I still want to know what it was a great sorrow to learn that you are acting now like the South-African Republic into the eighties is supposed to mean, Ady. Do you always parrot Stalinists like Zhdanok for no conceivable reason?

Vysu lobu,
/P

My dearest PC,

I think your wiki-relying hypocritical “erudition” deserves some wiki-relying answer, to the same “high” level.
While yours envy deserves absolutely nothing.

And another non-answer from Ady!

/P

Nonetheless, since the death of Franco in 1975 a great deal has been gained and consolidated in Catalonia. The language, which Franco had banned the public use of, has now become, to a large extent, the normal first language. The street names in Barcelona, for example, are in Catalan only. There are radio and television stations in Catalan. Education is conducted through Catalan. The survival of the language has been helped by the fact that it is spoken by the middle classes in the towns and cities as a first language. Although Catalans are fiercely proud of their identity and their heritage, anyone who comes to live in Catalonia can more or less be included in the nation by learning the language.

[...]

One of the reasons why it has been easy to ban bullfighting is that tourists who come to Barcelona no longer want to see a bull being massacred. In a way, since the early 1990s a new sort of tourism in Spain has been invented by the Catalans. Tourists who come to Barcelona now don’t go home with a bad sangria hangover, a fluency in roaring “olé!”  and vicious sunburn. Instead, they visit the city’s Gaudí buildings, they go to the Picasso museum and the Miro Foundation; they love the cool nightclubs and the wonderful restaurants. They walk the city and get to know its streets.

If you come from Madrid or Seville to the city, however, you feel sightly different. You notice that the Catalans, even though they are bilingual, don’t like speaking Spanish to you. You watch how they have made it impossible to get a state job without fluency in Catalan. You watch with deep irritation their resentment against Madrid, their insistence that they are a nation rather than a region, their emphasising that they feel culturally closer to France, or Switzerland, or northern Italy than to Spain.

I have yet to meet someone from Madrid who does not shake their head in dislike, mild to wild, at the way in which Catalans conduct themselves.

“Bullfighting ban is sweet revenge for Catalonia”

/P