Bulgaria: Between [a], [u], or Maybe [ı]?

Transliteration from one script to another is always fraught with the danger of ambiguity. Oftentimes a reader knowing both scripts and languages written in them is unable on the basis of a transliterated text alone to faithfully reproduce a word, title or sentence in the original script. It is so because the equivalence between graphemes (letters) in different scripts is usually established on the basis of the same or similar phoneme which a letter designates in the source language written script A and another in the target language written in script B.

A Terminological Conundrum: Nation, State, Nationality, Citizenship

Any analysis of the concept of nation – of so much import for the late modern period – is often complicated in English or French by the fact that in these two languages this term commonly functions as a synonym for the word ‘state.’ Hence, the academic and juridical neologism ‘nation-state’ tends to sound to the uninitiated English-speaker’s ear quite superfluous as some confusing ‘state-state.’ This difficulty does not arise, for instance, in German or Polish. In the former language ‘state’ is Staat and ‘nation’ is Volk (or in some specialized meanings Nation), while in the latter – państwo and naród, respectively. Neither in German nor in Polish these languages’ terms for ‘nation’ understood as a group of people (that is, Volk and naród, respectively) could be normally used to mean ‘state.’ In Polish the term nation-state is rendered as państwo narodowe and in German as Nationalstaat, so speakers of these languages are not flabbergasted by the term, and find it rather meaningful.

The Central European distinction between state and nation at work in today’s Spain

Communist Bulgaria and the Azeri Connection

In interwar Bulgaria, Turkish intellectuals began using the Latin alphabet for writing and publishing in Turkish about two years earlier than in Turkey itself, where the Latin alphabet replaced the Arabic script in 1928. Afterward only few religious and pro-Ottoman Turkish-language periodicals were brought out in Bulgaria with the use of the Arabic script. The country was a short hop from Konstantiniyya (officially renamed Istanbul in 1935). Besides, until 1908, Bulgaria officially was an autonomous principality of the Ottoman Empire. What is more, Konstantiniyya remained the seat of the Bulgarian Exarchate (or semi-autonomous Orthodox Church) until 1913. Hence, Bulgaria did not appear to be a foreign land to pro-Ottoman refugees from Mustafa Kemal’s radically republican and anti-religious Turkey.

Czech Spelling and Slavic Languages

Slavic and Germanic languages have considerably more sounds (phonemes) than Latin. It caused technical problems when at the beginning of the second millennium the Latin alphabet was employed for writing these vernaculars. The initial makeshift strategy was to use two or three letters (diagraphs and trigraphs) for the extra sounds. Czech was the first written language among Catholic and Protestant Slavs. Not surprisingly in the 14^th century the diagraph [cz] was employed for writing the phoneme /tʃ/, the diagraph [rz] for /r̝/, or the diagraph [ſſ] for /ʃ/. With his 1406 work De orthographia Bohemica, Jan Hus changed this system by introducing diacritical letters for the extra Slavic phonemes. As a result, in today’s Czech orthography each phoneme is reflected by a single letter, for instance, /tʃ/ is written as [č], /r̝/ as [ř], or /ʃ/ as [š]. The sole exception to this rule is the grapheme [ch] retained to denote the sound /x/.

A page from the Czech-language Kronika trojánská [Chronicle of Troja] published in c 1478

Nationalism and Human Rights

The particularist nature of nationalism is inherently opposed to the universalist character of human rights. In other words, any loyalty to a group (be it a town, village, nation, state, religion, or economic bloc) is directly opposed to loyalty for all Humankind. It is difficult to love all thy neighbors. One tends to love more those who belong to one’s own group.

May 2017

The Fallacy of National Studies

The studies of national specificity, usually focused on this or that national language originated in the 19^th-century central Europe. They grew out from two kinds of pursuits. On the one hand, philologists discovered languages, that is, national languages, or speech communities that were quickly equated with nations. While on the other hand, folklorists (ethnographers) discovered peasantry, seen as the forgotten soul and the true body of the nation. Philologists put themselves to the task of endowing their (usually native) languages with ‘scientific’ dictionaries and grammars, while folklorists were collecting a given peasantry’s songs and customs which they saw as equal in quality or even transcending the ancient Homeric tradition. Both groups of scholars soon propounded that the language of an elite (nobility) was ‘impure,’ due to ‘foreign’ influences, usually from Latin, French or German. But an ethnically correlated peasantry’s speech extolled as an epitome of the ‘pure’ national language posed a problem of easily observed spatial variability. The ‘peasant language’ differed from village to village, from region to region, and not at all was free of ‘foreign impurities,’ either. These problems was ‘explained away’ by nobles’ long-century oppression of peasants through the system of serfdom. As a result, the supposedly pristine culture and language of peasantry were corrupted, and the putative early medieval or even ancient nation was fragmented, as serfs were not allowed to leave their villages or parishes. Simultaneously nobility ‘unjustifiably’ separated themselves from their ethnically kin ‘peasant brethren’ (‘betrayed the people’), by allowing a succession of (nationally) foreign monarchs to assume the throne of the (national) kingdom, and by marrying foreign nobles.

The Anti-Soros Campaign, or New Anti-Semitism

From Communism to Open Society

In April 2017 the Hungarian government led by Prime Minister Viktor Orbán adopted a legislation tailored with an eye to closing down the English-medium Central European University (CEU). This liberal institution – established in 1991, in the year of the breakup of the Soviet Union and two years after the demise of the Soviet bloc – has been a thorn in the side of Orbán’s program of ‘illiberal democracy.’ The CEU’s founder, the US financier George Soros, comes from Hungary, where he was born to an assimilated family of non-observant Hungarian Jews who, apart from Hungarian and German, after the Great War, chose to speak Esperanto as neutral language of potentially universal communication for a future more peaceful world. This was not to be. The two totalitarianisms of national socialism and Soviet communism steamrolled over Hungary and most of central Europe. Tens of millions died in the Holocaust of Jews and Roma, in the course of World War II, in the wake of the establishment of Moscow’s communist regimes across the region, and in both nazi and communist concentration camps. Furthermore, between 1933 and 1950, about 60 million people were expelled from their homes in central Europe, or a third of region’s entire population. In the 1930s Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin also made sure to incarcerate and kill most of Esperantists both in Germany and the Soviet Union. In the former case they were seen as ‘traitors of the nation’ led by a ‘cabala of international Jewry,’ while in the Soviet Union Esperantists were denounced as ‘rootless cosmopolitans’ that was a code phrase for ‘insufficiently Soviet’ Jews.

Integration

In October 2016 I visited the Serbian capital, Belgrade, picturesquely located at the confluence of the River Drava and the Danube. The city developed in line with the 18^th-century Austro-Habsburg and Russian imperial model of bulldozing Ottoman buildings and mosques, which were either adapted or built over in ‘European style of progress and enlightenment.’ The four monuments of distinctly Ottoman architecture that survive to this day are all within the walking distance of each other in Belgrade’s, Stari Grad, or Old Town. Two are religious, namely the capital’s sole mosque, together with the turbe (tomb) of dervish Mustafa Bagdađanin. The two other monuments are konaks, or Ottoman-style residences. One built in the 1730s escaped being razed because it used to house Serbia’s first Serbian-language secular secondary school founded in 1808. The other konak, was actually constructed a century later, in 1830, already in autonomous Serbia. This was the official residence for Princess Ljubica, consort of the first Prince of modern Serbia, Miloš Obrenović.

 

Belgrade looks like any other Russian, Romanian or Bulgarian city, memories of the Ottoman past consigned to dusty tomes. The broad alleys are ill adapted to the Balkans’ snowy winters and hot summers. Unlike Ottoman narrow winding alleys and overhanging roofs, the modern architecture does not offer the coziness of self-contained neighborhoods (mahallas) or protection from elements. The point is to be imposing, hesitatingly imperial, decisively Orthodox and undecided whether to follow the direction leading to St Petersburg or Paris.

New Greater Serbia, or Serbia, Kosovo and Bosnia’s Republika Srpska

The Social and Political History of the Polish Language in the Long 19th Century

The Polish language originated as the sociolect of the Polish-Lithuanian nobility, which meant that its standardization was not steeped in a regional dialect, like that of French in the Romance dialect of Paris, or German in the language of Martin Luther’s German translation of the Bible (in other words, the Germanic dialect of the Electorate of Saxony). In the pre-written period of this language, prior to the 16^th century, highly mobile nobles of various ethnic origins from all corners of the Commonwealth of the Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania either contributed to this sociolect from various Slavic dialects or just adopted this coalescing social koine when they happened to be non-Slavophone. Polish continued as the sociolect of the Polish-Lithuanian nobility well into the 19^th century, after the erasure of Poland-Lithuania from the political map of Europe in the late 18^th century. In the early 16^th century, Polish achieved the status of co-official language in the Commonwealth’s Kingdom of Poland, alongside Latin. At that time, Polish was modelled on the pre-Hussite (Catholic, ‘non-heretic’) Bohemian (Czech), both in terms of spelling and vocabulary. The Commonwealth’s political and economic might caused aspiring Orthodox boyars (nobles) from Moldavia and Wallachia (or today’s Romania and Moldova) to adopt it as a language of wider communication. In 1697 the Cyrillic-based Ruthenian (Ruski, seen today as the source of Belarusian and Ukrainian) was banned in the Commonwealth’s Grand Duchy of Lithuania, and replaced with Polish, which became the polity’s main official language, and thus consolidated the cultural Polonization of its nobility (who nevertheless persisted to identify themselves as ‘Lithuanians,’ or the Grand Duchy’s ruling elite). Specifically, the ban applied to the use of ‘Cyrillic letters’, which were ideologically associated with Orthodox Christianity (by the same token, in Muscovy – as Russia was known prior to 1721 – the Latin alphabet and language were disparaged as ‘Catholic’). Hence, Ruthenian written in ‘Polish’ or ‘Catholic’ Latin letters, with an addition of numerous Latin phrases, was perceived as Polish in Poland-Lithuania. As a result, the Polish language at that time straddled, what since the early 19^th century has been imagined as, an ‘impassable’ classificatory divide between the ‘West Slavic’ and ‘East Slavic’ languages. (In observed sociolinguistic reality on the ground, both groups of languages actually belong to the North Slavic dialect continuum.)

Samuel Linde. 1807. Słownik Języka Polskiego [Dictionary of the Polish Language] (Vol 1)

Does Israel Intend to Follow Central Europe’s Sad Example?

I have spent the last two decades studying the rise and implementation of the idea of ethnolinguistic nationalism across Central Europe, or the home region of the majority of the world’s Jews for over a millennium until the Holocaust. The gradual establishment of Serbia, Greece, Montenegro, Italy, Romania, Germany and Bulgaria as ethnolinguistic nation-states during the 19^th century was followed after World War I by the enshrining of the ethnolinguistic nation-state as the sole legitimate model of statehood in Central Europe. It meant the destruction of the polyglot, multiethnic and polyconfessional empires: Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire, and also the detaching of similarly multiethnic borderland areas from Germany and the Russian Empire (soon overhauled into the Soviet Union in 1922). In their place the brand-new ethnolinguistic nation-states were founded, namely Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia and Albania, together with only briefly independent Belarus and Ukraine that were soon annexed by Bolshevik Russia.

 

Ethnolinguistic nationalism defines all the speakers of a language as a ‘proper’ nation. In turn, the territory compactly inhabited by the speakers of this language should be made into such an ethnolinguistically defined nation’s nation-state. The language now dubbed as ‘national’ is elevated to the rank of the nation-state’s sole official language. Ideally, no other languages should be allowed in official use and education, and the national language should not be shared with any other state or nation. These onerous conditions of ‘proper’ ethnolinguistic national statehood were successfully implemented across interwar Central Europe, much to the exclusion of speakers of languages other than the national one, but especially to the exclusion of Jews, even if they happened to speak a given national language. Interwar anti-Semitism, hand in hand with ethnolinguistic nationalism, additionally precluded assimilation of Jews, due to their ‘foreign’ religion, which – in line with the ‘science of race’ (Rassenkunde) and its application in the form of ‘racial hygiene’ (Rassenhygiene) – was construed as the biologized marker of the ‘Jewish race,’ and as such the ‘undeniable proof’ of their ‘irreducible Semitic racial foreignness.’