[ShadowsOfEurope] France, each nation may as well have it's review Options

[shadd4d]

True. Yet the border between dialect and true language is a slippery one. Does Swiss German qualify? Does Austrian, or swabian or bavarian or the other German dialects? This is what I meant by the linguistic and cultural patchwork. Case in point: last weekend, I had dinner at a friend of mine's house. His wife made 2 types of sauerbraten (German roast beef with spices), one from Swabanland, where I am now, and from Franken (look in SoE to see where it is). They are totally different dishes that only share one common trait that they involve beef. Culinary and by extention cultural differences. And these places are in the "same nation" and maybe divided by about 400 km tops.

In America, accent is usually confused with dialect. Perhaps comparing British English to American English more illustrates dialectic differences than comparing, oh...south Georgian English with Midwestern English.

The control without conquering is an important point to bring up. Sometimes I think the SoE sourcebook is lost on some who have never been to Europe.

Don

[Snow_Fox]

Language doesn't always mean nationality. Swtizerland has, I think, three languages and none of them are "swiss. " Another example is eastern France, the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, that have been traded back and forth between France and Germany for centuries. Napoleon took them. Then in 1870 Germany took them. After WW1 France took them back, In WW2 Germany reclaimed them, after Germany was defeated they were again made a part of France.

During the occupaition of WW2, several families accused of doing resistance work, were let off by displaying records of how fathers or grand fathers had served in the German army in WW1, "How could we betray Germany?" (But they didn't consider it Bertrayal because they thought of themselves as Franch in 1940)

[Snow_Fox]

[Sepherim]

Hmm. Could be a nice force to add to the country indeed.

[Nath]

[Sepherim]

I said the three, the Vasq would be the forth. :P As for it's origins, it dates well before latin, indeed, question is: how much older is it? But I guess this isn't the thread to discuss that. ;)

[Nath]

My point was, by saying Galician was "the oldest language in all the peninsula after Latin" you seemed to imply latin was the actual oldest, which is not true since there's Euskadi/Vasq/Basque and also Greek (after Massalia, aka Marseille, itself a colony of Phocea, established colonies of Tarraco and Ampurias)...

[Sepherim]

I guess that being a Galician made me express wrong, pride took over, :grinbig: . I wanted to say, "after latin was made the common languaje for all the Peninsula". It's still debated the discussion if Mozarabe was older, but I've heard that recent papers have been found written in Galicia that date before the jarchas mozárabes.

[Namergon]

[Namergon]

Another remark about european borders quite stable compared to other regions of the Sixth World: many border shifts in SR history took their origin in a resource dispute or rush (would the Native American have danced the GGD if they hadn't been deported due to a resource rush?). Western Europe is not really renown for its natural resources AFAIK, so I guess taking land to the neighbor was less interesting.