I'll admit to missing one line, I read their post an additional two times after being told that and I missed the line both times before finally catching it. I blame wordwrap and a lack of capitalization, but it was my mistake.
Doesn't change anything I said, it just means I guessed based on a German immigrating to land "never touched by slavery" unnecessarily.
It's so odd to be a Washingtonian from Snohomish, and hear about what a shithole Seattle is. Everett has a lot of the same problems but nowhere NEAR as bad as I hear things get down there.
Broadly speaking I love Washington. I think the people are nice, I think the state is beautiful, I think the towns are generally clean. The experience that I hear Seattleites talk about is not in any way representative of what I see in the rest of the state. And that's crazy to me. It's like Seattle is its own little world, completely insulated from the outside.
It's probably not as bad as you hear. I think there are two fallacies one can draw: 1. Everything is rosy in the Emerald City 2. Everything is Mad Max in the Emerald City.
The corner by McDonalds on 3rd has always been bad, and truly these days it is worse. I was recently down that way and was pretty shocked. But that also isn't most of Seattle these days.
WA is beautiful. Every city has its good and bad areas.
Seattle may not be quite as bad as “dead”, but many of the descriptions are accurate *for a given neighborhood* — there far more crappy areas these days than there used to be.
I have hope it’ll get better one day. It’s a lovely place most of the time.
I think you and I are solidly in agreement on all points. When it’s good, it’s really good. But the bad is heartbreaking and does rather seem to have increased of late.
People that have a vested interest in the suppression of the indigenous Goidelic language of Scotland - on both sides of the England-Scotland border - will always insist upon the full-fledged distinctive language status of Scottish English.
Unless I misunderstood your point, that is a strange take that isn't close to being true. There is a large overlap of Scottish language enthusiasts who are advocates of both Scots as a distinct language and Gaelic, the demographic of the recent surge of popularity of Gaelic on duolingo are clear.
The overlap between political commentators who both insist that Scots is "just a dialect" and that Gaelic is a dying language that we should discourage is also very apparent.
The subtext is pro indy people are generally pro Scots and Gaelic, and unionists are against both of course.
Scottish English != Scots. The former is just English with a Scottish accent; the latter is a closely related (to English) but distinct language with its own vocabulary and grammar, not dissimilar to the relationship between Norwegian and Danish, or Czech and Slovak.
Scots being a language has nothing to do with suppressing Gaelic. Generally people who hate Gaelic hate Scots equally.
The fact that you and other anglophones call the indigenous Scottish variety of Gaelic simply "Gaelic" is a pretty good example of why I continue to be very, very suspicious of those who insist upon "Scots" being a language fully distinct from English, and not a dialect - and insist upon calling it by that name.
The Irish and Scottish varieties of the Goidelic language family have far less mutual intelligibility than the English and Scottish varieties of English. Scottish English forms a pretty smooth continuum between "English with a Scottish accent", and what you'd call "Scots" or "Lallans".
But Scottish Gaelic is the tongue that gets the downgrade to "Gaelic", despite it being simply called Scottish for the vast majority of Scotland's history. Despite it literally being the reason for the country's name.
Scottish English was literally only called "Scottis" instead of "Inglis" as the Lowlanders gained a greater sense of national identity and distinctiveness from the English further south. At that point, funnily enough, the Goidelic spoken in Scotland ceased to be called "Scottis", and became "Erse" instead.
It is quite impossible to separate this insistence on distinguishing "Scots" from English, from suppressive efforts towards the indigenous Gaelic language of Scotland. You can see the exact same dynamic in Northern Ireland, where unionists play up the supposed variety of "Scots" spoken by the Ulster planters and their descendants as a fully distinctive language equal to Irish, as a means to delegitimize Irish as the primary indigenous language of the land.
I don't say all of this from a place of antipathy towards the speakers of "Scots". One need only read some Burns to see that the variety of English spoken in Scotland diverged heavily from the varieties spoken further south, and that diversity is beautiful. But the label is politically charged, and fundamentally it is a weapon - and always has been - pointed in the direction of Gaelic-speakers.
On both sides of the Irish Sea, too. Hard-line unionists in the north of Ireland have been pushing "Ulster Scots" in the last ten years or so. Not out of any real cultural association with the language or with Scotland - they overwhelmingly identify as "British" - but as a tool to diminish Irish-language initiatives. Every time there's a measure proposed to support Irish, they can propose an equal amount of funds for Ulster Scots.
It actually helps them to make the language seem as ridiculous as possible, since the real goal isn't to promote their language but to mock another.
In fact, literally the only reason it's called "Scots" and not "Inglis", as it originally was, is as the Lowlander Scots gradually developed a sense of national identity separate from the English, they decided that they wanted a national label of their own. But of course, they still didn't want to share a national label or identity with the hated native Celtic-speaking population.
And so "Inglis" became "Scots", while "Scottis" - the native Goidelic language - became "Erse", or Irish.
It is not unique to this case that how we divide and understand langauges is tied up with politics of nationalism. Have been since the start of modern nationalism. What we call "Italian" could be called "Florentine", it wasn't spoken in all of "Italy" until it became a political project to make it so...
And...
> Until about 1800, Standard German was almost entirely a written language. People in Northern Germany who spoke mainly Low Saxon languages very different from Standard German then learned it more or less as a foreign language. However, later the Northern pronunciation (of Standard German) was considered standard[4][5] and spread southward; in some regions (such as around Hanover), the local dialect has completely died out with the exception of small communities of Low German speakers.
> It is thus the spread of Standard German as a language taught at school that defines the German Sprachraum, which was thus a political decision rather than a direct consequence of dialect geography. That allowed areas with dialects with very little mutual comprehensibility to participate in the same cultural sphere. Currently, local dialects are used mainly in informal situations or at home and also in dialect literature, but more recently, a resurgence of German dialects has appeared in mass media
What is the thing you think needs to be "resolved"? If it's dispute over the names of languages, I'm not sure that was the nature of any dispute in these 19th century examples, or if it did, if it was ever "resolved" by anything except power to impose it.
I'd suggest not, it is a peer / sibling of Modern English, and descended in parallel. Northumbrian Old English eventually became Scots, due to the 'English of the Lothians' using it (and eventually 'Inglis').
Go read some older Scots from around 1600, you'll probably have a harder time of it than the same age English because they were and are distinct. Modern media, a lack of formalised spelling, and simple economics post union has probably been the major factor in its slow decline towards death.
So Scots (in its various dialects) and Geordie/Mackem/Northumbrian are I'd suggest dialects of the same language, not being English. Speakers code switch between them.
You've also missed out the other language, which was spoken in the 'Old North' and the Kingdom of Strathclyde - i.e. the Brythonic speakers.
London was never Gaelic. The populations living in Southern England would have spoken Brythonic languages, not Goidelic.
And at any rate... it's pretty obvious he was referring to Wuxi today. I don't think anybody's about to have an issue referring to the Sparta of today as insignificant, its historical significance being whatever it might be.
Sure. I probably wouldn't call Wuxi insignificant myself.
My main issue was just citing Wuxi's historical importance and background to defend its significance, in comparison to pre-Anglo Saxon Britain. I see Chinese people do this a lot in regards to China, often to shut down criticism of the country from "lesser" countries, ie ones that were tribalistic or uncentralized during Imperial China's heyday. "We were the center of civilization while you were backwards tribals", that sort of rhetoric.
Sure, some Greek people do that too. FWIW I'm neither Chinese, nor a fan of centralization, and I know too well that neither virtue nor wisdom follows bloodlines. It's kind of despicable to see people attempt to defend their tribalism by claiming blood descent from non-tribalist people...
I started with Wuxi's history mostly because I find it fascinating but partly because, without that paragraph, I thought someone might respond, "Well, sure, Wuxi is a big city now, but it doesn't have the depth of culture and tradition of a place like London—it's just a soulless consumerist metropolis!" or argue, "Sure, London's population is only twice Wuxi's, but it's a very high profile city because for centuries it ruled an Empire on which the Sun Never Set!", maybe mixed with some deniably racist remarks about "imitation" or "IP theft" or "sweatshops" (of which I think the Guardian's "Australian smarts and Chinese industrial might" is a mild version).
I didn't want to leave an opening for that kind of silly nonsense. It misinforms people.
He explicitly stated in his comment that they settled in the Midwest.
Might be everybody on all sides of this conversation needs to calm down a bit.