4 ms·

Wow this reminds me so much of a novel I read a few months ago: > Loss of identity and loss of the ability to foresee and aspire to a better future are rarely

Wow this reminds me so much of a novel I read a few months ago: > Loss of identity and loss of the ability to foresee and aspire to a better future are rarely identified as issues that need special attention. It is to these faces of poverty that the discipline of linguistics has particular relevance. > Identity poverty and aspirational poverty are inextricably connected with the role of language and its uses as a creator and marker of identity. The Duncan reference they give is from 2008, but the novel I'm thinking of is Ismael Kadare's "The Traitor's Niche" from 1978. It's a parable for the Albanian-Soviet split. In it there's a harrowing description of the techniques used by the Ottoman empire to suppress rebellion in their provinces. They aim exactly to extinguish the peoples' language first and foremost, introducing a sort of primitive language, in order to preclude the very possibility of formulating a thought that can distinguish future from present or past. In this "eternal moment", the idea that tomorrow could be different from today, or that yesterday might have been different, doesn't even enter people's mind. Of course it bears strong resemblance to Orwell, but for some reason (maybe Kadare's amazing prose) it really gave me shivers and stuck with me. I've been meaning to write an English language review of the book because I didn't find one so far that really does it justice. Highly recommended in any case! Side note: I did a cursory web search to see whether the techniques Kadare ascribes to the Ottomans have any grounding in reality but came up empty. If anyone has sources to substantiate them or knows for sure that this was not the case, I'd be super interested. :)

OfSanguineFire 3y ago
Trained linguist here, with a great deal of time spent in the Western Balkans, proficiency in Albanian, BCMS, and Aromanian, and familiarity with the specialist literature on the diachrony and sociolinguistics of the region. The only Kadade work I’ve read was Kronikë në gur, so I’m not entirely sure what he wrote in your story. However, what you describe sounds like total fantasy. There is a literary genre where the author takes some actual historical regime and ascribes completely fantastical traits to it. A prominent example is Milorad Pavić’s The Dictionary of the Khazars. So, I can only assume Kadare was doing the same. The Ottoman Empire actually had very little detrimental impact on Balkan languages. There was language shift to Turkish among a few urban elites, but most of the Albanian population was rural and so continued speaking Albanian, Greek, South Slavic, or Aromanian just like they always had. Both Turkish and the languages of the Balkan Sprachbund have rich tense systems (richer than that of English), and no one has ever had any difficulty expressing past versus present versus future.
- black_puppydog 3y ago
  I love HN! Thanks for the explanation. I'm very glad this isn't real, it really gave me the creeps. :) I'm actually just halfway through "A concise history of Albania" by Fischer and Schmitt, so I just got past the Ottoman Empire in that. Most definitely not a historian of course. :D But indeed none of this shows up there. Although for the record, in the book I mentioned Kadare describes the areas between Arnavutluk and the capital of the empire (a lot of the book happens on this trajectory). And yeah, none of the Albanians, in Albania or outside, that I've talked to ever had any such problems. Although a lot of them do suffer from what looks a lot like "aspirational poverty" to me...
  - OfSanguineFire 3y ago
    > Kadare describes the areas between Arnavutluk and the capital of the empire Still fantasy. The tense system of Bulgarian[0] and Macedonian is one of the most complex within the Slavic family, and contact with Turkish, if anything, only made it more complex by introducing an evidential distinction to the past tense. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulgarian_verbs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulgarian_verbs

OfSanguineFire 3y ago

Trained linguist here, with a great deal of time spent in the Western Balkans, proficiency in Albanian, BCMS, and Aromanian, and familiarity with the specialist literature on the diachrony and sociolinguistics of the region. The only Kadade work I’ve read was Kronikë në gur, so I’m not entirely sure what he wrote in your story. However, what you describe sounds like total fantasy. There is a literary genre where the author takes some actual historical regime and ascribes completely fantastical traits to it. A prominent example is Milorad Pavić’s The Dictionary of the Khazars. So, I can only assume Kadare was doing the same. The Ottoman Empire actually had very little detrimental impact on Balkan languages. There was language shift to Turkish among a few urban elites, but most of the Albanian population was rural and so continued speaking Albanian, Greek, South Slavic, or Aromanian just like they always had. Both Turkish and the languages of the Balkan Sprachbund have rich tense systems (richer than that of English), and no one has ever had any difficulty expressing past versus present versus future.

black_puppydog 3y ago
I love HN! Thanks for the explanation. I'm very glad this isn't real, it really gave me the creeps. :) I'm actually just halfway through "A concise history of Albania" by Fischer and Schmitt, so I just got past the Ottoman Empire in that. Most definitely not a historian of course. :D But indeed none of this shows up there. Although for the record, in the book I mentioned Kadare describes the areas between Arnavutluk and the capital of the empire (a lot of the book happens on this trajectory). And yeah, none of the Albanians, in Albania or outside, that I've talked to ever had any such problems. Although a lot of them do suffer from what looks a lot like "aspirational poverty" to me...
- OfSanguineFire 3y ago
  > Kadare describes the areas between Arnavutluk and the capital of the empire Still fantasy. The tense system of Bulgarian[0] and Macedonian is one of the most complex within the Slavic family, and contact with Turkish, if anything, only made it more complex by introducing an evidential distinction to the past tense. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulgarian_verbs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulgarian_verbs