Lukashenka stages New attacks on our language!

[Alina Israeli]

>>Whether Belarusan is a different language from Russian or not is a purely
>>political matter. Linguists may find similarities/differences between
>
>As a person who has deep respect for languages per se, I just can not
>accept the above statement, and hence I wrote the previous message... BUT,
>but in principle you are right -- governments/authorities use language
>issues for their political ends (just like they do with many other issues).
>You can, similarly, announce to Bulgarians that they use Old Russian,
>and they should switch to the contemporary Russian and implement appropriate
>language reform, right?
>
> Uladzimir Katkouski

In Iceland they speak Old Norse and nobody's switching. On the other hand,
it is accepted that the differences between Swedish and Norwegian are not
substantial enough to constitute a "linguistic" language. So everybody is
happy to accept "political" languages. A similar situation seems to be
between Roumanian and Moldavian (plus the alphabet). As you can see, I am
carefully staying away from Slavic (on SEELangs).