Search results for "Latin alphabet"
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The Polish Case: From Natio to Nation
2009
The reader may ask why I chose to deal first with the Poles and their language politics. In Chapter 2, I focused first on Czech out from the four Central European languages to which this book is devoted. I took as a guideline the fact that the initial documents written in Czech predate those jotted down in Hungarian (Magyar), Polish, or Slovak. Here, however, I decided that continuity of literary tradition and the use of an idiom as an official language allows me to concentrate on Polish first. With this approach I do not wish to rank these four languages along some imaginary scale of importance or quality; not at all. Simply, I stress the use of a language in public and political sphere as…
Language in Central Europe: An Overview
2009
The linguistic picture of Central Europe, as we know it, started forming in the 6th to 9th centuries. The coming of the Slavs (or rather the spread of their language and way of life to unrelated various ethnic groups) marks the beginning of this caesura that largely closed in 896 AD when the Magyars crossed the Carpathians into Pannonia. This event gradually divided the hypothetically continuous area of Slavic settlement into a southern section, extending from contemporary Slovenia to Bulgaria, and into a northern section, which coincided with the areas from the Elbe in today’s eastern Germany to the upper Volga in northeastern Russia. In the west, the Magyar-speakers skirted the East and …