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fellmama

I wrote this paper on nationalism. Giving its bearing on a thread in

rootlesscosmo's journal, I thought I would post a link to it: Nationalism and philology.
By the way, what font do you usually write in? I'm sick of Times New Roman.

Current Mood: headachy
Current Music: Los Angeles, I'm Yours--The Decemberists

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

parksdh.livejournal.com

I now do most of my writing in LaTeX, becuase it looks pretty. I think the default font is called CM Roman, which looks a lot like Times New Roman but more compact. Here is a pdf I have lying around in my webspace:

http://students.whitman.edu/~parksdh/files/gyrators.pdf

I also like Palatino for a serif font. I'm not very adventurous. Garamond is OK if you manually set it to be a little more condensed.

From:

urbanwhittie.livejournal.com

Garamond, or if I'm feeling super adventuresome, Hoefler Text.

From:

ravenmanifesto.livejournal.com

Windings!

No, I'm sick of TNR too. In fact, I'm sick of writing papers in general.

From:

rootlesscosmo.livejournal.com

Nice paper--thanks. A couple of comments: The English-speaking Jesus quote is usually attributed to "Ma" Ferguson, (http://womenshistory.about.com/library/qu/blqufer2.htm) first woman governor of Texas. This doesn't prove it isn't apocryphal, of course--I'd like to see a citation to a contemporaneous newspaper, say.

I really like your account of how German, in particular, began to become an official language as part of the process by which "Germany" as a national polity was being constructed.

At one point you speak of a geographically discontinuous group of people united by a common ideal. But later it seems that what philologists imputed to language communities was less an ideal than a body of linguistic practices--folk tales, literature, etc. Are these the same?

Finally I think there's a lot to examine in the way particular texts became definitive in the process you describe. The obvious one in English is the Bible; for Italian, I gather that the adoption of Tuscan as "Standard Italian" had a lot to do with the elevation of Dante to the status of National Poet. (Hobsbawm quotes one of the founders of the unified Italian State in the 1970's as having said "We have made Italy; now we must make Italians," in connection with the evidence that, at that time, most Friulians couldn't understand most Neapolitans, etc.) And nationalities struggling to assert their identity as against rule by "outsiders"--Norwegians, Poles et al.--often adopted "national writers" like Bjornstjerne or Mickiewicz, along with their versions of the language, to support the claim that they had as good right to sovereignty as any other "people" (another contentious term.)

From:

colvincd.livejournal.com

Since I've been studying German lately, so I understand much of what you're talking about (although it is only 10AM on a Sunday). When you talk about German (or "German") you're really talking about a language family of related dialects some of which are more intelligible to each other than others. The Grimm Brothers, who did a lot of this research, probably already knew they were "German" because they could travel to various parts of Europe and have their language be at least partly understood. That said, the German people had trouble understanding each other even to 1945. Thankfully religion helped standardize the language because everyone spoke Luther's German in church.

Luther is now generally credited with establishing the modern German language. Their may be historical precedents, but their importance to language is overshadowed by him. This isn’t very surprising concerned some of the theories you cite.

This is unnecessary but I think it's interesting and related to your paper. A note from my own studies: Masaryk, before he was the first president of Czechoslovakia, by supporting the debunkers when some supposedly ancient Czech texts were proved forgeries, rubbished the idea that the Czech language needed "historical legitimacy" and stated that a Czech identity shouldn't be built on lies. He was still working on developing a Czech identity, but seemed to believe it ought to be done in the present day.

From:

rootlesscosmo.livejournal.com

Yup. I suspect (

fellmama, do you know?) that what Brahms meant by "Ein Deutsches Requiem" was that it was in German, not "German" in some national sense.

From:

fellmama.livejournal.com

The geographically discontinuous etc. comment was an abortive lead-in to some ideas that got junked for space reasons. I was going to tie religion and nationalism more closely together and bring in stuff about anti-western-religious movements, etc.
You're right that most philologists had absolutely no intention of providing historical legitimacy to a nationalist ideal, but that's what they essentially did. Smith is dead on in saying that a large part of nationalism is cultural mythos, but he's incorrect (in my oh-so-humble opinion) in attributing that mythos to some ur-culture intrinsic to a "people." Culture is a construct just as much as nationalism--the difference being that nationalism is modern--and it changes from generation to generation, if not decade to decade. Smith makes the mistake of assuming that someone who says she believes the same thing as her ancestors actually does.
The philologists inadverently created a linguistic mythos that allowed European nations to trace their origins to a "prime moment of acquisition;" i.e., modern French rights to a particular geographical location dated from the moment someone speaking "French" appeared on the historical scene. The Geary book talks extensively about this--I thought it was really interesting.