Support for Rusyn language

[Patrick.Seriot at SLAV.UNIL.CH]

Bob Rothstein wrote:

>The Macedonians were the last Slavs to go
>through such a process, and nowadays almost all Slavists would grant
>them the right to say that what they speak is not a Bulgarian dialect.
>Similarly hardly anyone would now claim that Ukrainian is merely a
>dialect of Russian.  In the new Europe the existence of regional
>languages does not have to be a political question, although there are
>those who would make it such.
>
If the difference between a language and a dialect was a scientific
question, it would be impossible to write sentences like "almost all
Slavists would grant them the right to say that what they speak is
not a Bulgarian dialect." Science has nothing to do with granting
rights, except for the Romantics of the beginning of the 19th Century
(Fichte, following Herder).
The difference between a language and a dialect IS precisely a
typical politic question : who is going to have political power on a
certain territory, imaginarily made homogeneous by a discourse on a
homogeneous "literary" or "standard" language, which is constructed,
and not registered.
Remember that Chancellor Bismarck was very wise in saying that "a
language is a dialect with an army and a diplomacy". (It was still
before Weinrich...)
Every human group has the right to decide what sort of political
independence it wants to have, but it has nothing to do with
linguistics, which, unfortunately, in Eastern Europe, is used as an
instrument to prove that some groups have a "right" to be independent
or not (see the delicious problem of Moldavian vs Rumanian).
Democracy is more important than isoglosses. We should not fall into
the old trap of naturalistic discourse, which in the 19th Century
provoked so many wars.
Patrick SERIOT
--
  ___Patrick SERIOT_________________________
___Faculte des Lettres_______________________
___Langues slaves-BFSH2-UNIL________________
___CH-1015_LAUSANNE_____________________
___Tel_+41_21_692_30_01_________________
___Fax_+41_21_692_29_35_________________
___e-mail_Patrick.Seriot at slav.unil.ch__________
___http://www.unil.ch/slav/ling______________

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