Wait, are we talking about nationalities, languages, or cultures? Or are we talking how to relate those WITH the Discovery universe?
It's not that hard to go a little out of the standard cannon and add an little exotic flavor to a house or so.
There was a sort of squadron/battlegroup in bretonian that claimed that it was composed of descendants of Portuguese and lusophone members who were "aligned" with the British navy in the Sol war.
There is/was that native american group in the Taus, (aligned with the french/gauls?).
I made a secondary KNF pilot with a korean surname, for some variation. (although he doesn't diverge from other kusarians more than that).
There was a for a period of time a group of chinese named GMG players active, even though the Coalition claims that they retain all the humans with Chinese ancestry in their ranks.
Lots of kusarians in LIberty and Gallia ranks. Zoners of every kind. The list goes on.
Not all Libertonians are yankees, not all Bretonians need to be from either England or Ireland (where are the welsh?)
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P.S. from the wiki on dead language
"In linguistics, language death (also language extinction, linguistic extinction or linguicide,[1] and rarely also glottophagy[2]) is a process that affects speech communities where the level of linguistic competence that speakers possess of a given language variety is decreased, eventually resulting in no native or fluent speakers of the variety. Language death may affect any language idiom, including dialects and languages.
Language death should not be confused with language attrition (also called language loss), which describes the loss of proficiency in a language at the individual level.[3]"
Dead langages are those that have no native speakers, or speakers who have that language as it's mother tongue. Sure there are a lot of Latin learners, but none of them are raised and educated with Latin as their mother tongue.
(08-21-2014, 11:25 AM)Toji-Haku Wrote: Wrong. Latin as a language is used in Rome and Italy (not only in Church) on daily basis and is even used in newspapers and TV (whole channel or two)
I haven't ever heard anybody speaking Latin while I was in Rome, they all spoke either Italian (locals among themselves) or some foreign language (mostly English; tourists to locals, locals to tourists, tourists among themselves).
Latin is part of professional vocabularies, but not used in everyday's life (either as a primary language or at all), that's why it's called a dead language.
(08-21-2014, 11:56 AM)WPeregrine Wrote: Wait, are we talking about nationalities, languages, or cultures? Or are we talking how to relate those WITH the Discovery universe?
I think we should be talking about cultures. This way we can talk about differing languages, diet, beliefs and so on, without getting into the complications of belonging to a nation.
Eg: Let's say you have a Bretonian character who speaks Welsh. This character also has their own culture which differs with the typical Bretonian one. This character is not of a different nationality to other Bretonians, but is a cultural minority. They are not of a separate nationality because they are part of the Bretonian state and their cultural identity is similar also.
We can think of this character as being from a particular region, still a full part of the Bretonian nation-state.
Oh, and that's the idea I was talking about! However, Koreans aren't Japanese minority... Well... I think I wouldn't come back from Korea if I said like that that Koreans and Japanese have something in common... O_o;
(08-21-2014, 12:23 PM)Toji-Haku Wrote: Oh, and that's the idea I was talking about! However, Koreans aren't Japanese minority... Well... I think I wouldn't come back from Korea if I said like that that Koreans and Japanese have something in common... O_o;
So.
This is true, but obviously in Disco Kusari simply equals Oriental Asia , Liberty = North America, Rheinland = Germanic Europe etc.
Disco Wiki Wrote:They are presumed to be named in reference to the countries that were in the Alliance but this has not been confirmed.
This doesn't have to mean that the Kusari was made up entirely of Japanese citizens. But hey ho, I dunno.
(08-21-2014, 10:18 AM)Toji-Haku Wrote: Well, I believe it would go like this in some ways:
"Hey, our name is Kowalsky, Nowicky or Zwrotny, isn't that strange?"
"Our old archives says that we belonged to the old nationality that was names -Polish-."
"Cool, so, why not to revive this back? There's about 10.000 of us! We may revive that culture and so on..."
"Cool, let's do it. "
Eh, it's really not that simple. How do you expect to create consensus among 10,000 individuals of what this new old nationality is supposed to contain? If you haven't noticed, even in this day and age that question is battled over every single day, the formation of a national identity, while often rooted in a specific shared cultural event, is an ongoing process. Not static at all. Furthermore, our notion of the nation and national identity (what is coined an "imagined community" by scholars in the field) is in large parts kept alive by shared cultural symbols, be it clothing, cuisine, flags, shared ethnic traits, but also things such as shared media and so on and so forth.
(08-21-2014, 10:27 AM)/// Drake /// Wrote: All the shared cultural, linguistic, culinary and historic values that created a national sentiment, and then the state which enabled the nationalism to come about, would be long extinct.
Any sort of nationality different from the 'main house nationality' would be watered down so much. It would be for all intents and purposes, dead.
Exactly. For real-life proof, there are some super-interesting anthropological accounts of afro-americans going on "heritage trips" to their motherland (in the specific case Ghana) and feeling so alienated to the African culture that they somehow perceive themselves as exponents for.
(08-21-2014, 11:25 AM)Toji-Haku Wrote: Wrong. Latin as a language is used in Rome and Italy (not only in Church) on daily basis and is even used in newspapers and TV (whole channel or two) - and even in one Swedish city (where there's a newspaper with that language used).
I'd certainly like to see where you get that from? I am a Dane, Sweden is our brother country, I spent a really long time there, I know a lot of Swedes. Never heard about this - I mean newspapers around the world are struggling with declining sales, who would publish a paper in a dead language that no one reads or speaks? I think your sources are incorrect.
(08-21-2014, 11:29 AM)/// Drake /// Wrote: Suggesting that older cultures contributed to current nationalities is a teleological way of looking at this.
I agree. And if you extend that thought, it is also worth noting that primordialism is totally dead within this field of study.
Oh my God, my bad. I thought about Finland, not Swedes. My bad then! :x And yes, it was a long time ago. I'm sure there's a Latin newspaper in Rome, but in Finland its a radio news service, I believe, Nuntii Latini.
Looks like all the info got mixed up, but when we had Latin on University, we were told that Latin isn't exacly a dead language, due to the fact that it receives a lot of new words, not only connected to Biology and Chemistry. Still, it's a living-dead language. :|
And the other fact. Silesians in Poland. There is a lot of them (almost 1 million) and part of them want to claim themselves a nationality. Not everyone agrees however about the Autonomous Region-State alike the Catalonia in Spain - and they (Silesians) are even said to be false Pro-German option and traitors to the Republic of Poland for even proposing that, threatening integrality of Poland. I am not into that matter much deeper but I know they share the language/dialect and regional culture.
Ah, I see. You are right. A weekly show aired on a taxpayer-funded station, fuelled by a professor in Latin who says the language isn't dead to him...
Now if you go to Scandinavia and you see the crap we air on taxpayer-funded stations, you wouldn't be surprised. In Norway they recently aired 134 hour long footage of a boat sailing in the arctic. Yes, they put a camera on a boat, set it to record, left it alone, then aired the result. Before that, they put a camera on a train, and aired the result too.
But it hardly constitutes proof that latin is in fact not a dead language.
One newspaper and one radio show in two different countries won't resurrect a dead language. Oh, and the only ties I know between Latin and Chemistry are that some of the names of the elements of the periodic table, and maybe some terms are derived from Latin words, but that's all.
Some sciences like Biology or Jurisdiction as well as Christianity uses Latin (with the former ones using it mosly as an auxiliary language), but that's all.
I wouldn't call Latin a dead language. Dormant, but not dead. I would call something which is not used by anyone at all, apart from in academic circles, a dead language.
Surely something that can be brought back to life is not truly dead? If a large group of people start using Latin as a lingua franca, then would it be an undead language? The zombie of languages.