I think we misunderstood each other. I did not mean that thing would be back in a pre-1948 state as in the state which experienced two World War, I meant that the current peace in Europe depend largely on not questioning the post-1948 statu quo. If you go back a couple hundred years (as you're willing to do with Crimea), almost every nation lost land or was displaced in one way or another. Trying to revert back to an "ancestral state" is opening a Pandora box.
I know this, but I've been thinking about it a lot. Though the definition of "nations" can be pretty arbitrary and borders get incredibly fuzzy it's actually not as difficult as you think to revert things back to a "natural state". The lines are there, fuzzy though they may seem. It may be a Pandora's box but it's a box that I want to open because I think in the long run it will be to our benefit as a species.
Yeah, or they were born there, from parents that were born there and grandparents that were born there.
That doesn't make any difference to me. I'm not saying we should ask them to leave, I'm just saying their government should go out of its way to preserve Crimean Tatar as the national language of Crimea. The Russian population would never be compelled to speak it either; that's just linguistic suicide and generally immoral. They should instead be positively encouraged.
BTW, the Crimean Tatar also invaded Crimea and imposed their languages a few hundred years earlier. Why do they deserve to have their language spoken there while the Russians do not?
It's the same question for why I advocate the preservation of Gaelic in Scotland despite the fact that Gaelic replaced the Pictish language, which also replaced the Old European language spoken in Scotland that would probably have been close to Basque.
The thing is though I heard a story a long time ago about sheep. I am from a rural part of Scotland where sheep make up most of the livestock, rather than cattle. Every now and then flocks of sheep suffer from the disease known as scrapie and the entire flock needs to be killed. Not only is this devastating for the farmer financially, but it's devastating in another way. If you are in an area where sheep are farmed, have you ever noticed that the sheep don't always need fencing? Sometimes you don't need to bother with the fences, the sheep stay in the same place with or without them. That's because the sheep "heft" to the land. I don't know if "heft" is a Scots word but when sheep stay in an area long enough they learn it and don't need to leave it. They become one with the land, the land belongs to them and they don't want to run away anymore like they used to when you first put them in the field. If you have the sheep long enough the only reason why you even have the fence is for yourself; to remind yourself of where the fields are so you can keep track of livestock etc, and for other farmers and folk etc.
"Hefting" is an interesting thing because I think people heft to land too. Given enough time in a place you will eventually call it home and you will become one with it, native to it or whatever you want to call it. Not only do I think people heft, but so do languages. All of our languages came from other places at some time or another; our ancient cradle is Africa, not Scotland or France or Tibet or Ukraine or North America. All of our languages came originally from Africa too; the earliest ones. Yet if you read into the languages of the world you will find that, not only are they unique to their homelands, they are almost "designed" for them. Idioms, accents, etymologies - there's always something in the language that reflects the land it once came from. The languages, despite having come from many places, in effect have hefted to the land they are now present in. In order for this to happen it takes many hundreds of years.
Gaelic in Scotland has acted like a snowball rolling down a hill and has picked up lots of things on its way through history; for one thing it's absorbed Pictish/Cumbric verbal conjugation to an extent and it's got loads of words of Brythonic, Latin, Germanic/Scots and Norse origin. Though the languages spoken in the South and East and North and North West of Scotland are all dead now, too dead to be resurrected, they almost "live on" in Gaelic, which is not native to most of Scotland but it's the best we've got now. It has "hefted" to the land - you will find idioms, dialects, etymologies, accents, ways of seeing things (I can't really describe it well) that can't be seen or found anywhere else - things that could not have come from anywhere else.
Another example would be Orkney and Shetland; those islands were all Pictish and Celtic once, then the Vikings invaded, wiped out the Picts/assimilated them and the folk there spoke Norn for hundreds of years until the Scots language came when the islands were acquired by Scotland. The Scots language there became unique to the islands, "native" in a way, hefting etc. It's the closest thing they have to a native language now anyway, despite the fact that it's just another conquerer's tongue. Given that I see the Northern Isles as a nation in themselves, or sub-nation of the wider Scottish nation, and I think the choice of official language is almost paramount in defining a nation from just another administrative unit, it makes sense to preserve their national language.
Crimean Tatar is the "native language" fortunate enough to remain, taking words and characteristics from many of the languages that came before it including Cuman and Gothic. The language has effectively "hefted" to the land of Crimea and it is now effectively the language of the Crimean nation, just as Gaelic and Scots belong to us in Scotland, even our kin in the Northern Isles. Russian in Crimea, as far as I know, has no unique characteristics. It's another colonial tongue like Gaelic and Scots once were in my country. Perhaps, given time, it could separate and take on characteristics that tie it to the land of Crimea but that doesn't seem to be happening. Instead the Crimean nation is in a state of decay and is being absorbed into the wider Russian one.
It's very strange; I've never been able to work out why Russian (of all the colonial languages in the world) is so resistant to change to reflect the area it is spoken in - if you look at English in Australia it's full of various Aboriginal words and neologisms, you can't imagine it being spoken anywhere else - or English in America which is full of expressions and words and idioms and all sorts that reflect virtually every group of people that have gone to the country, varying from region to region. Russian seems almost uniquely resistant to that. I have no idea why, and it's unfortunate because it's a beautiful language. Wherever it has become dominant, national decay has led to integration into the wider Russian nation or attempts thereof: see Belarus (now Little Russia in all but name) and Ukraine. In the end keeping Russian around as the official language of the Crimean nation is actually detrimental to the nation in the long run because it just leads to the integration of one nation into another; something the world doesn't need. We've already lost enough nations; the more nations there are in the world and the more broken up we are the better off we are in the long run I believe.
Honestly Owlbread, I like you as a civil nationalist, but when you turn into an ethnic nationalist like this, your position seems either borderline evil or very poorly thought out. I know you're still trying to solve that gap between you ethnic nationalism and civic nationalism positions, so I'm going to go for the second one.
It all depends on how you define ethnic nationalist. Genetics and blood play no part in this - the nationalism is about language, something the Russians in Crimea seceded largely on the basis on. What can be more civic than the language people speak? It's funny, all I'm asking is for the Russian population of Crimea to be integrated into the Crimean nation. Guys like Putin seem very focused on integrating the Crimean Tatars and people like the Chechens and North Caucasians and even Ukrainians into the Russian nation. The only thing different here is that I'm saying the colonists should be integrated with the natives, as they are in South Africa for instance.
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