Language in Russia and Ukraine - political implications (derail from Russia-Gate in US Poli forum)

[Copernicus]

Well, you did suggest construction workers to learn english.

Not really. I said that, in the hypothetical case that they couldn't use Russian for any reason, they should use English rather than Estonian. It has been my consistent position that an Estonian requirement makes sense only for residents of Estonia and should not be imposed on short term guest workers. That said, Estonia has as much right as any sovereign nation to set its own language policies for people who fall under the jurisdiction of their laws.

No, it's you. I am not going to search for it but there is a map and in the past Baltic subbranch covered a lot of present day Russia.

Yet you did search for it, and you did find a map that supported your original claim. I am impressed, but you neglected to cite any link to your source information. Can you please do that? I find this claim interesting.

yep, covers present day Moscow

Hydronymic evidence suggests that Baltic languages were once spoken in much wider territory than the one they cover today, all the way to Moscow, and were later replaced by Slavic.

Based on what looks like a quote from your source, it looks like they are basing the claim solely on the names of rivers ("hydronymic evidence"), yet that would strike me as extremely shaky evidence for such a claim. River names can be imported by travelers such as the Vikings who created routes between Scandinavia and the Islamic empire. They used rivers as highways to reach the Black Sea area and would likely have used Baltic language conventions for them. What I would like to see is corroborating names from other kinds of data--e.g. mountains or other geological features, not to mention human settlements, flora and fauna names in Slavic languages, etc. The hypothesis is intriguing, but there are other possibilities that could explain those names besides my Viking speculation. However, I'm glad that you were finally able to provide a little substance to your claim.

 

[barbos]

Not really. I said that, in the hypothetical case that they couldn't use Russian for any reason,

Any reason? You mean like their desire to get rid of russian?

they should use English rather than Estonian.
It has been my consistent position that an Estonian requirement makes sense only for residents of Estonia and should not be imposed on short term guest workers. That said, Estonia has as much right as any sovereign nation to set its own language policies for people who fall under the jurisdiction of their laws.

Estonia is not really a sovereign nation. They are in EU and EU warned them (Baltic states) about some of their language requirements being illegal.

Yet you did search for it, and you did find a map that supported your original claim. I am impressed, but you neglected to cite any link to your source information.

I think i did prior to that. You just don't have a habit of reading links.

Can you please do that? I find this claim interesting.

You can do it yourself with any piece of text, just select it and google it. You're welcome.

yep, covers present day Moscow

Hydronymic evidence suggests that Baltic languages were once spoken in much wider territory than the one they cover today, all the way to Moscow, and were later replaced by Slavic.

Based on what looks like a quote from your source, it looks like they are basing the claim solely on the names of rivers ("hydronymic evidence"), yet that would strike me as extremely shaky evidence for such a claim.

You are moving goalposts here. I merely claimed what was an accepted state of the affairs. You claimed that I made it up. I have proven you wrong.

You have an unfortunate habit of contradicting everything, and since I don't have a habit of making shit up you get into troubles all the time.

 

[Copernicus]

Barbos, I no longer have a need for you to provide a link. I found the Wikipedia page where you got that from ( Balto-Slavic languages). So far, it does appear that the strongest evidence in favor of Baltic languages as far away as Moscow comes from hydronymic references. Given that rivers were major trade routes, that kind of data alone is a poor basis to argue for a historical language community. Just to give you an idea of why it is bad, consider the Mississippi River in the US, which came from an Ojibwe name. The homeland of the Ojibwes did not extend the entire length of the river. They were located mainly in the area of the Great Lakes. It wouldn't necessarily have to be Vikings that spread the apparent Baltic naming conventions. Baltic tribes could have conducted trade along those routes, as well.

The best alternative possibility I can find for any Balts living close to the Moscow area would be the  Galindians. Balts did likely did extend as far south as the Pripyat at one time.

 

[barbos]

Barbos, I no longer have a need for you to provide a link. I found the Wikipedia page where you got that from ( Balto-Slavic languages). So far, it does appear that the strongest evidence in favor of Baltic languages as far away as Moscow comes from hydronymic references. Given that rivers were major trade routes, that kind of data alone is a poor basis to argue for a historical language community. Just to give you an idea of why it is bad, consider the Mississippi River in the US, which came from an Ojibwe name. The homeland of the Ojibwes did not extend the entire length of the river. They were located mainly in the area of the Great Lakes. It wouldn't necessarily have to be Vikings that spread the apparent Baltic naming conventions. Baltic tribes could have conducted trade along those routes, as well.

The best alternative possibility I can find for any Balts living close to the Moscow area would be the  Galindians. Balts did likely did extend as far south as the Pripyat at one time.

Your habit of contradicting everything strikes again. You learned you were wrong just few hours ago. Yet, here you are, contradicting renown linguists cited in the wikipedia. You are The Contradictor.

 

[Copernicus]

...
You are moving goalposts here. I merely claimed what was an accepted state of the affairs. You claimed that I made it up. I have proven you wrong.

You have an unfortunate habit of contradicting everything, and since I don't have a habit of making shit up you get into troubles all the time.

There are a lot of things you say that you don't make up out of whole cloth, but you very seldom provide links as references to back up your claims. So it is really hard to distinguish the things you make up from those for which you have some basis. In this case, I only got a clue as to what you were referring to after pulling some teeth over several posts, but I am happy now to see that it wasn't pure bullshit.

It really bugs you when I tell you that you are ignorant when it comes to language issues, but so are the vast majority of people who have never studied linguistics. So you shouldn't feel so insulted. You can learn a lot of things from Wikipedia, but you don't have the knowledge to evaluate claims about the history of languages. In this particular case, you looked at a map on a Wikipedia page Balto-Slavic languages that was essentially based on a single-source footnote. Go to a different page-- Baltic languages. The second paragraph contains the following sentence:

The range of the Eastern Baltic linguistic influence once possibly reached as far as the Ural Mountains, but this hypothesis has been questioned.[1][2][3]

There are three references cited that question the hypothesis you thought was widely accepted and proved me wrong. Frankly, I'm not an expert in the history of the Balto-Slavic languages, so I don't know the current status of the hypothesis within that subfield of linguistics, but I am familiar enough with the field not to be surprised. Many such claims are speculative and based on very scant evidence. The problem with you is that you don't know when to be skeptical about such claims.

 

[Jokodo]

Dunning-Kruger is all yours, in fact Dunning-Kruger is uniquely american effect.
You keep lecturing me about russian language. It's a textbook example of Dunning-Kruger.

What the fuck did I just read? A linguist with a specification on Slavic languages is telling you something, and you claim you obviously know more about the topic because you're Russian and he isn't?

You know that's pretty much like an American truck driver telling a Russian programmer that he knows more about Java or C because the keywords are all English based?

 

[barbos]

Dunning-Kruger is all yours, in fact Dunning-Kruger is uniquely american effect.
You keep lecturing me about russian language. It's a textbook example of Dunning-Kruger.

What the fuck did I just read? A linguist with a specification on Slavic languages is telling you something, and you claim you obviously know more about the topic because you're Russian and he isn't?

Self-proclaimed linguist, and the one who was shown to be wrong. And besides, linguist is very wide specialty, random "linguist" is unlikely to be engaged in linguistic "archaeology". They usually study and classify languages, and I doubt that we even have that here.

And yes, read about Dunning-Kruger, it is not universal and less pronounced outside of US. In Eastern Asia it's actually opposite: Dumb people think they are too dumb and smart people think they are smarter than they actually are.

 

[barbos]

...
You are moving goalposts here. I merely claimed what was an accepted state of the affairs. You claimed that I made it up. I have proven you wrong.

You have an unfortunate habit of contradicting everything, and since I don't have a habit of making shit up you get into troubles all the time.

There are a lot of things you say that you don't make up out of whole cloth,

That's a lie.

but you very seldom provide links as references to back up your claims. So it is really hard to distinguish the things you make up from those for which you have some basis.

Dude, asking for links to something which can be found in just 1 second is a bad taste. And I gave you the fucking link, you just ignored it.

In this case, I only got a clue as to what you were referring to after pulling some teeth over several posts, but I am happy now to see that it wasn't pure bullshit.

Normal people apologize in your situation.

It really bugs you when I tell you that you are ignorant when it comes to language issues,

It bugs me when people try to bullshit me from authority. You are ignorant here, not me.

but so are the vast majority of people who have never studied linguistics. So you shouldn't feel so insulted. You can learn a lot of things from Wikipedia, but you don't have the knowledge to evaluate claims about the history of languages.

But you are talking bullshit.

In this particular case, you looked at a map on a Wikipedia page Balto-Slavic languages that was essentially based on a single-source footnote.

Yeah, I did, and I did that very long time ago, And you did not even do that.

Go to a different page-- Baltic languages. The second paragraph contains the following sentence:

The range of the Eastern Baltic linguistic influence once possibly reached as far as the Ural Mountains, but this hypothesis has been questioned.[1][2][3]

I never claimed Ural Mountains for Latvia/Lithuania, only Moscow

There are three references cited that question the hypothesis you thought was widely accepted and proved me wrong. Frankly, I'm not an expert in the history of the Balto-Slavic languages, so I don't know the current status of the hypothesis within that subfield of linguistics, but I am familiar enough with the field not to be surprised. Many such claims are speculative and based on very scant evidence. The problem with you is that you don't know when to be skeptical about such claims.

Problem with you, that you did not even know about such "hypothesis". And you claim I am ignorant one here.

 

[Jayjay]

Any reason? You mean like their desire to get rid of russian?

Estonia is not really a sovereign nation. They are in EU and EU warned them (Baltic states) about some of their language requirements being illegal.

Got a link for that? I tried to google it, but came up with nothing.

Besides, EU is usually whining almost every member country doing something wrong and there are hardly ever any actual consequences.

 

[Copernicus]

...There are a lot of things you say that you don't make up out of whole cloth,

That's a lie.

I sincerely felt that you sometimes have said things that aren't made up out of whole cloth, but who am I to contradict you? Would you at least admit that you sometimes don't read very carefully?

There are three references cited that question the hypothesis you thought was widely accepted and proved me wrong. Frankly, I'm not an expert in the history of the Balto-Slavic languages, so I don't know the current status of the hypothesis within that subfield of linguistics, but I am familiar enough with the field not to be surprised. Many such claims are speculative and based on very scant evidence. The problem with you is that you don't know when to be skeptical about such claims.

Problem with you, that you did not even know about such "hypothesis". And you claim I am ignorant one here.

I still claim that. Of course, we are all ignorant to some extent, but you don't even understand the extent of your ignorance. You read something on a Wikipedia page and took that to be the consensus of a field of expertise that you are entirely ignorant of. If you looked into it further, you would see that the claim is controversial, and I laid out the reasons for you that it is controversial. Hydronymic data is a rather flimsy foundation to support the speculative map that you posted, but it is an interesting enough claim to merit publication. Not being a specialist in the Baltic languages or the literature that debates such claims, I am far more skeptical than you about the merits of the claim. But you have no training in the subject matter at all, so you don't know how to evaluate its merits.

This pretty much sums up my experience of discussing language issues with barbos:

 

[barbos]

Any reason? You mean like their desire to get rid of russian?

Estonia is not really a sovereign nation. They are in EU and EU warned them (Baltic states) about some of their language requirements being illegal.

Got a link for that? I tried to google it, but came up with nothing.

No link, it was long time ago, but If remember correctly it was about Baltic states demanding language tests for citizenship for people who were born there after soviet "occupation". That requirement was so outrageous that EU had to intervene.

Besides, EU is usually whining almost every member country doing something wrong and there are hardly ever any actual consequences.

Well, I think in that case whining was justified.

 

[barbos]

I still claim that. Of course, we are all ignorant to some extent, but you don't even understand the extent of your ignorance.

You are full of sh...yourself.

 

[Copernicus]

I still claim that. Of course, we are all ignorant to some extent, but you don't even understand the extent of your ignorance.

You are full of sh...yourself.

I admit that that can be a problem at my age, but I do make an effort to get a lot of fiber in my diet. Arguing with you over language issues also helps. It can bring out the worst in me.

To summarize this sidetrack, your original point that the Baltic  urheimat extended to the area of Moscow and even possibly to the Urals was reasonable, if all we had to go on was hydronymic (river name) data. The problem with that is that we have very little else to go on, and river names are fairly weak evidence, as my example of the Mississippi river name was intended to illustrate. The name of that river adopted by European settlers was based on an Ojibwa (aka Chippewa) name, even though the Ojibwas were never indigenous along the entire length of the river. That's pretty much how all of these urheimat controversies go. The best (and most hotly contested) debate over urheimats is the longest one--the homeland of the original Proto-Indo-European speakers. People still spill blood over that one even today.

Anyway, don't get too wrapped up in this argument. Nothing regarding the political implications of language use hangs on the areas in which an earlier version was spoken. All of this was triggered by my remark that it would be easier for speakers of an Indo-European language to learn a Baltic language than Estonian, and that is still the case.