Greetings from Europe

[Mike Cleven]

janilta wrote:

> Hello, Mike,
>
> I do agree that France's governments always had a position rather
> negative towards regional cultures, at times even quite hostile (but the
> 'peak' of repression was much prior to the De Gaulle years as you put
> it) and it is still the case roughly speaking.
> But it was quite different from the attitude of the authorities in North
> America though. The attitude of erasing an 'inferior' culture of
> ethnically different people never existed in similar terms. This is
> inaccurate.

I don't think the Breizh (Bretons) have seen it so blandly.  Repression
against Occitan may not have been as bitter as in Brittany, but the methods
and tactics used in the Celtic province parallel those in North America -
beatings, separations of children from parents, etc. plus the actual
_forbidding_ of the native tongue legally (which rarely happened in North
America, other than in the school system).  FWIH the Gaullists _did_ regard
the Breizh and even the Provencal as "ethnically different people" and an
"inferior" culture, and treated them as could be expected in the temper of
the time.

> The situation is actually not so simple. For example, unlike Catalunya,
> the standard form of written Occitan is often disregarded by many Oc
> speakers, f ex in Provence and Gascogne, which obviously weakens the
> diffusion and survival of the language itself.

I know about this problem; I don't know why they don't just settle on on a
standard Gascon and Provencal, respectively.  Otherwise it'd be something
like insisting that Danish and Norwegian be written identically (which used
to be the case, in fact).

>
> And I would not discuss another point of your message, but even in the
> Catala world, things are not so 'perfect' and the attitude of some
> speakers of Valencian may not have helped much the diffusion of Catala
> at times (but, as often in linguistics, this is rather a political
> matter)...
> One more thing, to read that the Vichy government may have helped the
> survival of regional languages (more than 'dialects' as you put it,
> especially for Euskara and Brezhoneg that you mention) is quite
> puzzling, even embarrassing.

You misunderstand the context of my comment about Vichy; I was meaning that,
although the territory it governed matched that of the Langue d'Oc, it did
nothing to acknowledge this; I was musing on what might have happened if the
partition of France had been more permanent, say a hundred years or more;
Occitan might then have come to the fore in that jurisdiction; bad habits
picked up soc.history.what-if.


> Even if the wartime in France helped for
> some ideological reasons the diffusion of some regional languages
> shortly (especially in Bretagne, or for standard German but not
> Alsatian, in Alsace, which were both out of Vichy regime's control), the
> hazy ideology of Vichy was not really in favour of regional
> 'particularisms' I'm afraid... (by the way, parts of Occitan speaking
> regions were out of Vichy control as well as parts of Vichy controlled
> areas were in non-Oc regions as f ex its biggest city, Lyon, which used
> to be part of Franco-Provencal, which is not Occitan at all).

But it's still Provencal?  _Now_ I'm confused.... ;-)

>
> Why not burn l'Academie Francaise... but it may unfortunately not help
> much Occitan culture though... and even less Chinook Jargon ;-)

I know, I know, the whole thing's been off-topic.  Thanks for answering,
though.

Mike