What Catalan imperialists forget: all their dialects are simply dodgy Limousin, and all the territories they claim (Valencia, the Blearies, the gypsy quarter of Perpignan, several hamlets in Albania) are actually part of Greater Occitania. Quite what this adds to GNP is unclear, but ain’t it fun!
Struggling with weariness and reading bits of Ricardo Palma’s Tradiciones peruanas (1883). There was no sugar cane in Peru at the time of its conquest, he writes, and the first plantations were not established until 1570. The first Peruvian refiner suffered from the abundance and cheapness of Mexican sugar until he hit upon the smart…
There’s still no article on Chistabín in the Oiquipedià, the Occitan version of Wikipedia, believed to have around 1,832 legitimate pages (Arabic = 11,824).
Grec says that xarnego/charnego comes from the Castilian lucharniego, used for dogs trained to hunt at night, and that, used for a race of dogs, is passed from Catalonia to France. In Gascon it came to refer to those of mixed race, illegitimates, allochthons, the unassimilated, in which sense it passes to Catalonia. Vitruvio commenting…
I had an interesting chat (ie I listened) with someone the other night about the social position of musicians in the Middle Ages. I didn’t really buy his idea of the musician as The Other–at least not in Spain–but what he told me about Moorish and Jewish musicians in Christian society (as opposed to, for…
The Organització pel Multilingüisme wants the Spanish royals to start using Basque and various other lesser-used languages in official ceremonies. That seems fair enough to me, but what I found interesting is that they only seem interested in languages which are associated with racist or ethnicist nationalism (list is page right, halfway down). The figures…
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