On Lukashenka: some tangents

[Robert Orr]

I haven't been following the current situation in Belarus as closely as i
should, but I spent some time in Minsk esce pri Brezneve (stareju) and the
impression I had was that the locals didn't really care about Belorussian
(as it was). Also, the bilingual signs in Russian/Belorussian seemed to be
doctored so that the Belorussian read as a sort of orthogrpahic variant of
Russian.

It might also be noted that in those days British universities thought
nothing of sending students of RUSSIAN to MINSK (capital of a polity
speaking a different language) to learn what seemed like a very clear,
standard variant of Russian.

This was in great contrast to attitudes to language in the Baltic states,
etc.

And, from another angle, despite all the recent hype about Scotland
finally taking the plunge, most of the people there don't actually
speak Scots (let alone Gaelic!) the phonology's there, but nearly all the
disticnt lexicon is gone, see a footnote on (I think) around p. 38 of
Lunt's recent article in IJSLP, which deals with the importance of the
lexicon in comprehension, delimiting "language" and "dialect", etc.

None of the above is meant as an excuse for Lukashenka
.

Robert Orr