A long way from Bautzen to Otago

[Loren A. BILLINGS]

Dear colleagues,

I'd like to inject some humor into the recent fired-up debate:

>study of russian (or polish, or bulgarian, or sorbian) for its own sake,
>and not as a gateway to a lucrative career (unless, of course, one can
>combine slavic/eeur language skills with good old american know-how and
>teach those benighted folk east of the oder how to live long and prosper
>as we do here in the west).

I have to quibble with Adam Cohen-Siegel's recent posting:  Sorbian is
spoken *west* of the River Oder (and its tributary, the Neisse).

By this definition, so is a part of Poland.  That is, all of (modern-day)
Poland is east of the Neisse (Nysa in Polish), but some of its territory is
(south)west of the Oder (Odra).

As to whether the Sorbian-speaking areas (located in Germany's Free State
of Saxony--where I, too, am located) are in "the West", that's a different
issue.

Best,  --LAB

P.S.:  No, I don't know these toponyms' variants in Sorbian; any takers?  --L


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Loren A. BILLINGS, Ph.D.  (e-mail:  billings at rz.uni-leipzig.de)

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