Support for Rusyn language

[Elena Gapova]

Patrick SERIOT wrote:
>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.


The following quote from Gellner's discussion of modernization as the
main force in legitimation of  languages and states "based on them",
might be useful in the context of this discussion (Gellner's writes
about inequal development of different parts of "the Empire" and how
emerging elites become interested in their speak being recognized as
a language):

"The Ruritanians were a peasant population speaking a group of related
and more or less mutually intelligible dialects and inhabiting. pockets
within the land of the Empire of Megalomania. The Ruritanian language,
or rather the dialects which could be held to compose it, was not really
spoken by anyone other than these peasants. The aristocracy and
officialdom spoke the language of the Megalomanian court, which
happened to belong to a language group different from the one of which
the Ruritanian dialects were an offshoot. Most, but not all Ruritanian
peasants belonged to a church whose liturgy was taken from another
inguistic group again. . The petty traders of the small towns serving
the Ruritanian countryside were drawn from a different ethnic
group again  and religion still, and one heartily detested by the
Ruritanian peasantry. (Ernest Gellner. Nations and Nationalism).

Thus, there is a small thing "left to do": to find a way to determine "human
groups". Democratically, of course.

e.g.

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