Check Out Siculo Gallo-Italic

These are fascinating Romance dialects spoken in Sicily. The are called the Gallo-Italic dialects of Sicily. Some of them are also found in other parts of Italy, mostly in the far south in Basilicata.

Gallo-Italic languages are spoken in far north of Italy and are so called because there is heavy French influence on these Italian varieties. They include Venetian, East and West Lombard, Piedmontese, Ligurian, Emilian and Romagnolo.

In the 1100′s and 1200′s, Sicily was ruled by Norman rulers from the north of France. They had conquered much of Italy, and were in control of parts of the north also. In order perhaps to consolidate their rule in Sicily, which they had just conquered, they sent some Norman soldiers to Sicily to help populate the region and set up Norman outposts there.

These were mostly soldiers from the southern Piedmont (Monferrate)  and Ligurian (Oltregiogo) regions of Italy and from the Provencal area in the south of France. There were also a few from the Lombard region and other parts of northern Italy. They went down there with their families and formed a number of settlements in Sicily and a few other places in Italy.

Over the next 800 years, their Gallo-Italic language came under heavy influence of varieties of Sicilian in Sicily, Basilicatan in Basilicata and other languages in other parts of Italy. Yet the heavy Gallo-Italic nature of their lects remains to this day and Sicilian speakers of surrounding villages find Gallo-Italic speakers impossible to understand.

The dialects have tended to die out somewhat in the past 100 years. Villagers were tired of speaking a language that could not be understood outside the village and increasingly shifted to the Sicilian language. A situation of bilingualism in Gallo-Italic and Sicilian developed. Over time, this became trilingualism as children learned Standard Italian in school. Gallo-Italic was used inside the village itself, and Sicilian was used for communication with outsiders.

Whether or not Gallo-Italic lects in different parts of Sicily can understand each other is not known, but they have all undergone independent paths of development over 800 years or so. The same is also an up in the air question about Basilicatan Gallo-Italic and Gallo-Italic settlements in other parts of the country. This is an interesting question in need of linguistic research.

In this 1 1/2 minute video, I am not sure if I understood a single word he said. The language he is speaking sounds like a mixture of Provencal Piedmontese with a heavy dose of Sicilian. Sicilian itself is so odd that a Sicilian speaker can barely be understood at all outside of Sicily. It has at least 250,000 words, 25% of which have no equivalent in Standard Italian. It underwent heavy French, Spanish and especially Greek and Arabic influences.

The “Nation”: The Invention of a Concept

From the comments by the excellent and apparently new commenter Daniel:

I think I see the reason for our disagreement, Mr. Jaipal.

Lloyd Cox in “nation-state and nationalism” (The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology, 2007, Volume VII) discussed five approaches to the nature of “nations.”

The first or “objectivist” view conceptualizes the nation in terms of essential features, like a common language, shared culture, contiguous territory, etc.

The second approach argues that nations can only be conceived with reference to people’s subjective states, exemplified by Hugh Seton-Watson’s statement that a nation exists “when a significant number of people in a community consider themselves to form a nation, or behave as if they formed one.”

The third approach sees nations as invented categories rather than real collectivities (Ernst Gellner argued that nations are invented by nationalism, instead of being the source of nationalism.)

The fourth approach views nations not as fictional entities, but as “imagined communities” in the minds of the people.

The fifth and most recent approach is to conceive of nations as “symbolic frames” or “discursive formations” defined by the claims made in evoking and promoting nations.

The so-called primordialist and perennialist views of the nation (Athena S. Leoussi, “Nationalism,” The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology, 2007, Volume VII) fall under the first approach.

The belief that the Indian nation has existed for thousands of years because it has a millennia-old cultural heritage (including Vedic literature and Sanskrit language, among other elements) is a perennialist view, and since you consider the perennialist view to be “correct,” I assume that you subscribe to such a view, or at least do not oppose it.

I used to have a similar perennialist view of nations, until I encountered the ideas of Benedict Anderson. I now favor the second, third, and fourth approaches to the concept of nation, but most especially the fourth.

You cited the example of China. China is indeed comparable to India. China also has a long history, and the Chinese have also been keenly aware of their culture and of “barbarians” who did not share their culture. However, this sentiment of Chinese prior to the 19th century has been termed “culturalism” instead of nationalism (John K. Fairbank, Edwin O. Reischauer, and Albert M. Craig, East Asia: Tradition & Transformation, 1978).

Although China and India have gone through periods of unity and disunity, and both have had rulers who periodically reunited their respective countries, this does not indicate the presence of nationalism, since when we look at “the big picture” as you would say, the people (meaning the masses in general) were not lamenting their “national disunity” or clamoring for “reunification,” and even the “unifiers” undertook their military campaigns not to rebuild the “nation,” but to establish their personal empires.

In China, for example, the scholar class lamented the chaos and disorder and the incessant wars during times of disunity, but not the “disunity of the nation.” Such sentiments would only surface in the 19th century, and would become widespread only in the 20th century.

The case of India is similar. The Marathas for example had to fight many battles in the long process of consolidating their rule over much of India, and the people in the territories of their opponents certainly did not just surrender their lands to the Marathas because they wanted to be part of a “united Indian nation.”

I cannot remember now who it was who said that China and India are better described as “civilization states” rather than nation-states.

You also cited the Poles and the Germans. The Poles may have had a “broad sense” that they were Poles, and it may have been the same for the Germans, but ethnic or ethnocultural identity should not be confused with nationalism.

I have only encountered the term “culturalism” applied to China, but I wonder if it can equally apply to the peoples of India, Poland, Germany, and other ethnic groups before the advent of nationalism.

This is an excellent comment by Daniel, and I agree with it. This just shows what complete and utter idiots most modern nationalists really are, especially the primordialist variety, which is what just about all nationalists are anyway, at least outside of Europe, where the entire concept of nationalism has fallen away after the nationalistic disasters of the World Wars, especially the last ones.

The primordialist holds that the nation, as we know it today, has always existed in the minds of the people who are living there today. What complete, utter, total and puerile nonsense that is!

As Daniel immaculately shows, before 1900 and especially before 1800, the vast majority of the humans living in what are now known as China and India gave precisely fuck all about the concepts of “China” and “India.”

What exactly were they nationalistic about? Perhaps about their particular regions, tribes, linguistic or cultural communities or even caste communities.

When India and China became disunited, which was often, precisely no one in the disunited communities clamored for the reunification of the nation. They were perfectly happy to be under the jurisdiction of this or that warlord or princely state.

Variously power hungry sociopaths periodically tried to wage wars of reunification which were actually just attempts by sociopaths to increase their power and money by conquering enemy regions. The regions being attacked by these phony “reunifiers” had no interest in being reunified with anything, and the people waging the reunifying wars were seen as enemies attacking the homeland.

I differ with Daniel in that I believe in the 3rd explanation of nationalism. What is modern nationalism? It’s no primordial entity that has forever beaten in the hearts of all men, unless we conflate tribalism with nationalism.

Instead it’s a completely artificial construct that was invented by modern nationalists in the last 200 years and then implanted into people’s minds as something as real to them as their very own blood and soil.

The modern Indian or Chinese feels that the nation is as much a part of him as his appendages. He’d sooner hack off a limb that give up Tibet or Kashmir or whatever bullshit territory the fascist Chinese and Indian states lay false claim to.

Why does he feel this way? Because he has been trained to; trained like a dog. You can train a dog to do just about any idiotic thing you want it to do, and it seems that humans are not much different when you get down to brass tacks.

Modern nationalists, especially the ethnic nationalists, the most fake and dishonest of them all, are peddling a lie. They draw some lines on a map, tell you it’s as real to you as your arm or your leg, and like a dipshit, you believe it.

As Leftists, we believe that the modern nationalistic concept has caused untold pain, suffering and death. It also causes a shocking amount of sheer stupidity, and the injection of nationalism into the veins of a good man will turn him into a vicious, lying and murdering scoundrel of the worst sort in no time.

Mutual Intelligiblility in the Romance Family (Reading)

Just a personal anecdote. I have been reading a lot of Italian lately (with the help of Google Translate). I already read Spanish fairly well. I have studied French, Portuguese and Italian, and I can read Portuguese and French to some extent, Portuguese better than French.

But I confess that I am quite lost with Italian. This is worse than French and worse than Portuguese. A couple weeks of wading through this stuff hasn’t made me understand it any better.

Portuguese and Galician are said to be so close that they are a single language. I don’t agree with that at all, but they are very close, much closer to Spanish and Portuguese. Intelligibility may be on the order of 80-90%.

Nevertheless, the other day I tried to read a journal article on Galician. It looked like it was written in Portuguese, and who would write in Galician anyway? I copied the whole thing into Google Translate and let it ride. I waded through the whole article, and I must say it was a disaster. I had a very hard time understanding many of the main points of the article.

Then I remembered that Translate works on Galician now, so I decided on an off chance that the guy may have written the piece in Galician for some nutty reason. I ran it through Translate using Galician as target. The article went through perfectly. You could understand the whole thing. It was then that I realized how far apart Portuguese and Galician really are.

You can try some other experiments.

Occitan is said to be nearly intelligible with Spanish or maybe even French, better if you know both. There’s no Google Translate for Occitan yet, but I had to deal with a lot of Occitan texts recently. I couldn’t make heads or tails of them despite by Romance reading background. So I tried using Translate to turn them into Spanish or French. French was a total wreck, and there was no point even bothering with that. Spanish was much better, but even that was a serious mess.

Now we come to the crux. Catalan and Occitan are said to be so close that they are nearly one language. Translate now works in Catalan. So I ran the Occitan texts through Translate using Catalan. The result was a serious mess, but you could at least understand some of what the Occitan texts were about. But no way on Earth were those the same languages.

People keep saying that if you can read Spanish, you can read Portuguese. It’s not true, but you can see why people say it. Try this. Take a Spanish text and run it through Translate using the Portuguese filter. Now take a Portuguese text and run it through Translate using the Spanish filter. See what a mess you end up with!

Despite the fact that I can read Spanish pretty well, I have tried to read texts in Aragonese, Asturian, Extremaduran, Leonese and Mirandese. These are so close that some even say that they are dialects of Spanish. But even if you read Spanish, you can’t really read any of those languages, and they are all separate languages, I assure you. Sure, you get some of it, but not enough, and it’s a very frustrating experience.

There are texts on the Net in something called Churro or Xurro. It’s a Valencian-Aragonese transitional dialect spoken around Teruel in Aragon in Spain. It also has a lot of Old Castillian and a ton of regular Castillian in it. Wikipedia will tell you it’s a Spanish dialect. Running it through both the Spanish and Catalan filters didn’t work and ended up with train wrecks. I doubt if Xurro is a dialect of either Catalan or Spanish. It’s probably a separate language.

There is another odd lect spoken in the same region called Chappurriau. It is spoken in Aguaviva in Teruel in the Franca Strip. The Catalans say these people speak Catalan, but the speakers say that their language is not Catalan. Intelligibility with Catalan is said to be good. So effectively this is a Catalan dialect.

I found some Chappurriau texts on the Net and ran them through Translate using Catalan as the output. The result was an unreadable disaster, and I couldn’t really figure out what they were saying. Then I tried the Spanish filter, and that was even worse. I am starting to think that maybe Chappurriau is a separate language as its speakers say and not a Catalan dialect after all.

I conclude that the ability to cross read across the Romance languages is much exaggerated.

Not only that, but many Romance microlanguages, transitional dialects and lects that are supposedly dialects of larger languages may actually be separate languages.

Massive Flynn Gains in Kenya

Occidental Ascent is a fascinating blogger, apparently part of the Alt Right and HBD scene, who nevertheless is not a race realist as far as IQ goes. He has written many posts showing huge IQ gains for Blacks, especially in the UK in recent times. I am not sure exactly where he is coming from at all. Looking at his blogroll, it looks like it was made up at American Renaissance, and yet he’s not a race realist.

A recent post quotes a post of mine discussing massive Flynn IQ gains in Kenya. He describes me as a liberal race realist blogger suffering a bout of race skepticism, which isn’t completely accurate, but oh well.

My post showed a 26 point IQ gain over a 14 year period from 1984-1998 in Kenya, raising their IQ’s from 68 to 89 and resulting in a 21 point IQ gain over British Whites. Gains were particularly massive in math and vocabulary. Researchers proposed that recent massive expansion of schooling in Kenya had been responsible for the gains.

A recent study confirms the previous one and shows that Flynn gains may be rising still.

A study by a Kenyan academic who is strongly opposed to race realism as far as IQ goes – she particularly takes issue with Rushton and Lynn arguing that the African IQ is ~70 – gave Raven’s tests to Kenyans of three social classes – slum dwellers, middle classes and the upper classes. Subjects were 17 year old high school students. The results were 89 for the slum kids, 93 for the middle classes and 106 for the upper classes. Averaging them together, we get an IQ of 96.

However, how many Kenyans are middle to upper class? Probably most Kenyans are very poor, akin to the slum dwellers. So the real Kenyan IQ is probably lower than 96, closer to 89. Further, how many Kenyan 17 year olds even make it to their senior year in high school? Most are probably long dropped out by then. These must be the brightest of the bunch.

Compared to US 17 year old Blacks, US Blacks at that age have an IQ of  ~90. It later drops to ~87 at age 24, at which point it levels off. But those 90 and 87 figures are controversial. Others say the real Black IQ is 87 at age 18 and 84-85 at age 24.

Anyway, things are looking good for the Kenyan IQ and for Flynn gains in general, which are still going like gangbusters in the 3rd World.

Teenage Idiot Olympics: Cliff Jumping

Excellent technique. Nine judges gave a 9, and one gave a 10. This guy’s obviously been practicing a long time.

Winner of the first round. He now moves to the second round to challenge some other dipshits.