Greetings from Europe

[Mike Cleven]

Josep Carles Lainez wrote:

> Hi everybody,    Some time ago I subscribed this list, but for many
> reasons I left the debate and I dedicated to other questions. Now,
> from a new perspective and with renewal aims, I would like to be more
> implicated in the promotion and defense of Chinook.    My name is
> Josep Carles Lainez, Linguist (Catalan and Spanish languages &
> literatures), I live in Valencia, a Mediterranean city in Spain, where
> I was born and raised, and since eighteen years I am involved in the
> defense of European minority languages such as Catalan, Aragonese or
> Occitanian, all of them belonging to a same linguistic community.    I
> am going to read the article on "diffusionism" that Linda (?) suggest.
> It is a very atractive subject and in Europe, mainly in France, there
> has been archaeological discoveries very impressive; for instance, a
> writing from 8.000 b. C (!!!). I will join the discussion next
> Sunday.    A last thing: forgive my English!
>
> Disgolpe mi Catalan......(I know, I know, I put it in Castellano.....)
>
> It's very true that archaeological discoveries in the last few years
> all over the world have been challenging our former doctrines about
> history and prehistory.  This has been as much true of Europe or East
> Asia as it has been of the New World.  Maybe it's that there's more
> funding, or that there's more archaeologists; by definition I guess it
> must be both.  And with better technology and broader ways of
> thinking, they're finding lots they didn't expect to find, sometimes
> in places they hadn't looked before.  Greater knowledge of
> paleogeography - the ancient landscape - and of the
> more-advanced-than-previously-thought human social and technological
> condition in antiquity and prehistory - has challenged all the old
> nostrums of anthropology and culture-history; Clovis and the Bering
> Strait, the "closure" of the New World from the Old, the idea that
> Asians and Africans (and ancient Americans) did not have the ability
> to cross the oceans until Europeans came along, etc. etc. etc.  The
> most exciting part, I think, are the discoveries that show a high
> level of human culture through the Ice Age and afterwards, unlike the
> primitive grunting caveman image we've all been raised with.  The
> basic textbooks on pre-Columbian history, and especially the
> pre-Contact Northwest, are going to have to be substantially written,
> it appears.
>
> It's all kind of exciting; even the history of paleo-Europe is being
> rewritten, as our new friend in Valencia indicates.  Who knows what
> might eventually get found in North America?  Just because we don't
> know where to look for human history here doesn't mean it's not
> there.  Xa:ytem (Hatzic Rock) serves to show that what looks like a
> boulder to someone turns out to be the last relic of an ancient
> village to another; beneath the surface of legend generally lies very
> hard truth, as was shown in Xa:ytem's case.
>
> I'm not a big fan of diffusionism, which is often too warm-and-fuzzy
> in a Sitchin-von Daniken way (while still being very sincere, no
> doubt).  But I do support the idea that humanity, well, got
> everywhere, and that nowhere was ever really cut off from everywhere
> else; "people got around".  There's no reason why ancient Europeans or
> ancient Africans _couldn't_ have found their way from one continent to
> another (in either direction), given the circumstances and perhaps the
> individuals.  Academia and professional history have often dismissed
> the legitimacy of the fabled
> Phoenician/Egyptian/Nordic/Basque/whatever inscriptions in eastern
> North America and the claims of people such as the Melungeons (a
> pre-Columbian people of the Carolina mountains who claim to be
> pre-Columbus Turkish-Iberian exiles); yet many of the new finds lend
> credence to the idea that there was contact and migration between
> Europe/Africa and the New World [btw if this is "diffusionism" then I
> guess I am a fan of it ;-)].  But the revelations of late do not go so
> far as to _prove_ the validity of _all_ the claims and finds that have
> been made; they do lend them believability, however.
>
> Bienvenido to the List, Josep Carles; again I'm not sure how to say
> that in Catalan; my best rendering in Chinook would be Kloshe [maika]
> Chako.  BTW There's a discussion concerning Occitan and Catalan going
> on at the moment in sci.lang, by the way (look for "Romanova" in the
> subject headers; for Chinook people unfamiliar with Josep Carles'
> languages, Occitan is very similar to Catalan), that today included an
> item of interest to the language-revival people amid our Chinook
> people.
>
> Another person in the dicsussion told a story about his wife's
> great-grandfather, who was fluent in Occitan and learned French as a
> second language at the age of 20, but is burdened by too much shame of
> his (ancient and very beautiful) mother tongue to use it with anyone
> but family.  French linguistic oppression against Occitan (a
> definition which includes Provencal and Gascon)  and other "regional
> dialects" such as Euzkara/Basque and Brezhoneg/Breton was in its time
> every bit as vicious and repressive as the anti-native-language
> policies found in the Canadian education system (I'm only speaking of
> the linguistic aspect of these policies, of course), and the results
> are often similar, as the case of this Occitan elder serves to
> demonstrate.  Official northern French oppression against Occitan also
> continued for much, much longer, but like its Canadian parallel
> actually worsened during the twentieth century, and was at its peak in
> the de Gaulle years (curious that Vichy France was entirely in
> Occitan-speaking territory; a longer partition of France might
> actually have resulted in a linguistic revival) but has its roots much
> before that, in the Counter-Reformation and before.  Since the death
> of Generalissimo Franco, Catalan has returned from a once
> near-forbidden status in Spain to be one of Europe's most dynamic
> linguistic communities and regional cultures; France's policies
> towards Catalan's regional twin, Occitan, have continued to be
> repressive and dismissive, however, and while Catalan's surival seems
> assured, Occitan's future is doubtful because of ongoing
> discrimination and lack of official support or recognition.  Time to
> burn the Academie Francaise, IMHO, but that's something far off-topic
> for this group......
>
> Mike
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