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System Metternich posted:That said, your map was pretty clearly made by one of the expellee associations or another organisation lobbying for a return of the eastern areas. Is this still a common desire in modern Germany, or has it died out? Seems like something the far right would have as a goal
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Apr 5, 2018 14:40
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At this point it would be like the fringe Korean irredentist claim on Gando (parts of Manchuria and the Liaoning peninsula), except even worse, because at least Gando still has ethnic Koreans in it.
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Apr 5, 2018 15:20
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Even 70+ years after the war most non-German people's instinctive reaction would be 'gently caress off, you had it coming', whether that's deserved or not. I don't see it happening.
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Apr 5, 2018 16:10
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Grape posted:And why exactly do you think water resource areas make good first level administrative areas. It'd be even better to have national borders match them tbh. River basins correlate much better with ethnic and cultural borders* than the rivers themselves do. Having borders on rivers is basically guaranteed to introduce huge minory-majority zones in border regions. * not applicable after genocides
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Apr 5, 2018 16:25
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System Metternich posted:Until the ratification of the Warsaw Treaty in 1972, virtually every map made in Germany showed it in the borders of 1937 (normally the areas east of the Oder-Neiße line were marked with "under Polish/Soviet administration"), and even then this change came only after heavy resistance by the powerful expellee associations (whose maps continued to show the 1937 borders anyway). IIRC my school still used some old maps with the old borders shown when I went there during the late 90s/early 00s. Did they claim the 1914 borders too? That map seems to do so Dreddout posted:Is this still a common desire in modern Germany, or has it died out? Not really, Poland and the Czechs are basically German colonies again under the EU and they became so willingly. There’s no need for irredentism anymore The German far right seems to have moved on to a pan-European white supremacist/Islamophobe stance, they’re not really nationalists anymore icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 16:58 on Apr 5, 2018 |
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Apr 5, 2018 16:53
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Directly related to the previous irredentist German map: I've always thought it poetic justice that the regions that had the highest numbers of votes for the Nazis were the ones that got de-Germanified in 1945.
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Apr 5, 2018 16:59
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What is the origin of these Germanic tribes anyway? Are germanic asian in origin?
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Apr 5, 2018 17:00
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Phlegmish posted:Even 70+ years after the war most non-German people's instinctive reaction would be 'gently caress off, you had it coming', whether that's deserved or not. I don't see it happening. Tei posted:What is the origin of these Germanic tribes anyway? Are germanic asian in origin? A Buttery Pastry fucked around with this message at 17:03 on Apr 5, 2018 |
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Apr 5, 2018 17:00
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Tei posted:What is the origin of these Germanic tribes anyway? Are germanic asian in origin? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurgan_hypothesis 
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Apr 5, 2018 17:04
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Tei posted:What is the origin of these Germanic tribes anyway? Are germanic asian in origin? 
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Apr 5, 2018 17:34
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It hasn't been a political talking point for 30 years. >70 year old conservatives (and Nazis obviously) still care about it a lot though. If you say East Germany when talking about the former GDR they'll say "East Germany? You mean Central Germany  "
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Apr 5, 2018 17:42
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An organization of Sudetenland expellees is still active, and they even have a friendly little logo to remind you that they aren't the baddies. Also their leader really sells the idea of poor Germans suffering in exile: 
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Apr 5, 2018 19:13
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steinrokkan posted:Also their leader really sells the idea of poor Germans suffering in exile:
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Apr 5, 2018 19:34
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Whiz Palace posted:At this point it would be like the fringe Korean irredentist claim on Gando (parts of Manchuria and the Liaoning peninsula), except even worse, because at least Gando still has ethnic Koreans in it. Gando's just some tiny chunk of territory between Korea and Manchuria that's claimed because of esoteric treaty inconsistencies from back in the early Qing dynasty when the modern borders were first being formally drawn up, it's not the same as the other irredentist claims on Manchuria/Liaoning that broadly stem from Goguryeo. And the Goguryeo irredentist claim is actually really not legitimate at all from a "still has Koreans in it" standpoint either--the ethnic Koreans living there today emigrated after Joseon was opened up in the late 19th century, they're descended from people who had been living in the Korean peninsula until just a century or so ago, not from people who had been living outside it but in the same cultural zone as it since antiquity or anything. The Goguryeo-derived (and some set up by later Goryeo and the Yuan too) Koreanic communities that had been there from ancient times had all been relocated back to Korea / absorbed into the Jurchen/Han populations since shortly after the establishment of the Ming, about six hundred years ago, and for the most part (far more than had been the case before) Koreans stayed in the peninsula thereafter. What minor communities there might have been definitely didn't have any significant presence in the Liaoning peninsula, in any case. Koramei fucked around with this message at 20:09 on Apr 5, 2018 |
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Apr 5, 2018 20:05
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Tei posted:What is the origin of these Germanic tribes anyway? Are germanic asian in origin? Scandinavia always seems to be the origin point of any given Rome era Germanic tribe you look into . Indo-Europeans =/= Germanic Tribes The Germanic languages are just one of like a dozen plus that owe their origin to the Indo-European tribes, there's no special connection as far as I'm aware.
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Apr 5, 2018 20:39
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boner confessor posted:atlanta exists where it does because it's at the intersection of a north-south railroad from chattanooga to savannah, and an east-west railroad following the eastern continental divide. originally the rail infrastructure was going to be in the town of decatur, georgia but the residents there rejected the plan as rail hubs were full of people of loose morals, so the hub was moved a few miles west and welp That's interesting! I always assume the borders between watersheds are big rugged mountains because that's how it works where I live, not exactly ideal spots for railways. Railways/highways are generally all built along the rivers and passes between the mountains here.
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Apr 5, 2018 21:00
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Proto-Germanic was spoken in Southern Scandinavia around 500BC, and from there the Germanic tribes expanded south. It's curious that Northern Germany looks "empty" at that point in time in terms of IE history, since the Celtic languages were spoken further to the west and south and Balto-Slavic further to the east, though I'm sure I'm just misunderstanding some aspect of the chronology
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Apr 5, 2018 21:01
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Baronjutter posted:That's interesting! I always assume the borders between watersheds are big rugged mountains because that's how it works where I live, not exactly ideal spots for railways. Railways/highways are generally all built along the rivers and passes between the mountains here. technically every high point is a watershed divide for something, even if it's just some nameless tiny stream but yeah in any sort of mildly rugged terrain you'll see watershed divides that are more like gentle hills than snowy peaks the geography can be pretty gentle in fact, and easily modified by human activity - google street view at 1740 DeKalb Ave NE Atlanta, Georgia boner confessor fucked around with this message at 21:08 on Apr 5, 2018 |
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Apr 5, 2018 21:03
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steinrokkan posted:An organization of Sudetenland expellees is still active, and they even have a friendly little logo to remind you that they aren't the baddies. A while ago I was listening to a Radio Prague piece on this subject, or at least the post-war expulsion of germans from northern CZ. It wasn't really talked about much at the time as the general consensus was that any german living in CZ more than had it coming. But apparently a ton of innocent non-nazi german speaking czechs were tossed out of their homes. There was an official act but also just citizen mobs that would descend on German-majority towns and just start looting and beating and sometimes killing and records of this were mostly swept under the rug. In some cases active anti-nazi resistance members were still kicked out of the country just because of their mother tongue. When the government got to you you had better options to prove your loyalty and prove you were not a collaborator, but if one of the mobs got to you, no chance, you were lucky to be allowed to grab some personal items and run out the door. All that said, gently caress any fat old nazi demanding restoration or reparations for this. Mass force ethnic relocations are never a great thing but its pretty drat understandable why the czechs did what they did to their german enclaves post war. boner confessor posted:technically every high point is a watershed divide for something, even if it's just some nameless tiny stream Yeah watersheds are interesting in that it's a bit like that whole "its impossible to measure a coastline" thing. You can always sub-divide a watershed into smaller and smaller chunks. That low point in the cracked concrete in my parking lot is the centre of a tiny watershed. Baronjutter fucked around with this message at 21:14 on Apr 5, 2018 |
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Apr 5, 2018 21:11
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steinrokkan posted:Also their leader really sells the idea of poor Germans suffering in exile: I'm the painfully obvious desire coupled with lack of courage to sport a toothbrush moustache.
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Apr 5, 2018 21:17
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How does he manage to look so Hitleresque while not having any of Hitler’s demeanor or general shape? 
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Apr 5, 2018 21:22
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boner confessor posted:technically every high point is a watershed divide for something, even if it's just some nameless tiny stream The Valdai hills in Russia are a good example. They're just gently rolling hills, but they are the source of the Narva, Daugava, Dnipro, Neva and Volga rivers. They are also part of the speculated Urheimat of the Balto-Slavic peoples. 
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Apr 5, 2018 22:22
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All jokes aside, Bernd Posselt (the fat guy in the photo) has actually done a great deal in moving the Sudetenland German association away from being a bunch of old dudes singing songs from their lost home and young dudes getting weird ideas about reannexation into being an association more concerned with Bavarian-Czech cultural and political contact and mutual understanding (they also removed all demands for restitution from their charter a couple of years ago). Afaik, most other expellee associations in Germany have either gone full Nazi and/or their members have an average age of like 85.
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Apr 5, 2018 22:59
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System Metternich posted:All jokes aside, Bernd Posselt (the fat guy in the photo) has actually done a great deal in moving the Sudetenland German association away from being a bunch of old dudes singing songs from their lost home and young dudes getting weird ideas about reannexation into being an association more concerned with Bavarian-Czech cultural and political contact and mutual understanding (they also removed all demands for restitution from their charter a couple of years ago). Afaik, most other expellee associations in Germany have either gone full Nazi and/or their members have an average age of like 85. Huh. I wish to apologize for the snide thoughts I had about him earlier in the page, then. also what do you know about Danzig/Baltic expellee organizations, and exactly how sad would it make me?
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Apr 5, 2018 23:06
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A friend of mine is actually a member of the board of the West Prussian association and regularly sends me the magazine they published (simply titled "The West Prussian", which they should imo think about changing because the name alone is enough to conjure not very comfortable associations in Germany). It's actually an interesting and well-made magazine full of stuff about local West Prussian history, reports about the association activities and what is happening in the corresponding parts of Poland nowadays. My friend is both in his 30s and a social democrat, which makes him something of an exotic figure amongst his colleagues  There is also an East Prussian association which is something of a mixed bag. On the one hand they make no demands for restitution or anything and actually did a lot of charity and relief work in the former territories of East Prussia after 1990, but on the other hand their official newspaper is judged by many experts to skirt the line between "conservative" and "far right", and they even had to throw out their own youth organisation after it had gone full nazi. Finally there's an association of Baltic Germans, but I don't know anything about them. A quick look at their homepage suggest that they're pretty harmless and probably a good stop for when you're in Germany and want to learn Estonian for some reason.
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Apr 5, 2018 23:30
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Despite his looks and being a conservative catholic, Bernd Posselt is fiercely pro-european and has been working hard for reconciliation between Czechs and Germans, judging by the Czech(and German) wikipedia articles about him. While the Vertriebenverbände (expellee organisations) in the decades after the war for sure wanted some kind of restitution for what their ancestors had built up over the previous centuries, this hasn't really been a topic since the late seventies, simply because living in (western) Germany was much better than in the "old countries" on the opposite side of the iron curtain. Those that were expelled as adults have long died off, the ones that had to flee as children may still have some nostalgia(my brothers grandma-in-law loves to speak Czech with my Slovakian wife), but in general no hard feelings and my (2nd) generation already didn't give a poo poo anymore (except for being annoyed when being asked about their slavic/hungarian last names). A good third of Germans has "Volksdeutsche" heritage (between 12-14 million people were expelled), if anyone(except for the extreme right) still cared about it, you would have noticed. But, even if it was a completely understandable reaction of the majority populations, probably helped prevent further ethnic conflict in the eastern half of Europe and worked out (mostly) well for those expellees that survived the first postwar decade, it hurt a lot of innocent people just because of their ethnicity. Two wrongs don't make a right and seeing (especially western) european posters born half a century after the war cheering for ethnic cleansing kind of leaves a bad aftertaste. edit:Beaten like Germany in WWII (and WWI) goethe42 fucked around with this message at 23:44 on Apr 5, 2018 |
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Apr 5, 2018 23:40
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The Germans are an Indo-European branch but, hilariously, they're a group with much more evidence of linguistic mixing with the pre-PIE peoples than the more Aryan Greeks and Iranians. The Germans are among the least Aryan of the European peoples with Aryan languages.
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Apr 6, 2018 04:12
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Arglebargle III posted:The Germans are an Indo-European branch but, hilariously, they're a group with much more evidence of linguistic mixing with the pre-PIE peoples than the more Aryan Greeks and Iranians. The Germans are among the least Aryan of the European peoples with Aryan languages. I thought Greek was supposed to have heavy influence from pre IE languages though.
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Apr 6, 2018 04:47
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Yeah I dunno. I'm remembering an episode of BBC in our time on the Indo-European. It mentioned that the Germans spent much more time in sites with mixed artifacts so they guess that they spent a lot of time living with other cultures. While the southern branch of the European Aryans seemed much more focused on Conquest.
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Apr 6, 2018 05:58
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Grape posted:I thought Greek was supposed to have heavy influence from pre IE languages though. It does and that sounds like an extremely bad documentary, Arglebargle.
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Apr 6, 2018 08:31
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Grape posted:I thought Greek was supposed to have heavy influence from pre IE languages though. The language/proto-Germanic seems to have been considerably more simplified than ancient Greek, which makes people think it’s hybridized/pidginized with an earlier non-PIE language. There’s also a big chunk of basic vocabulary concerning sailing and North Sea area natural features that doesn’t seem to be from PIE
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Apr 6, 2018 08:41
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The Germanic substrate hypothesis isn't really set in stone. It's not bad science either, but there's legitimate potential etymologies for many of the supposedly non-IE words in Germanic
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Apr 6, 2018 09:00
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This BBC episode was probably referring to the "Germanic substrate hypothesis". A 'substrate' or 'substratum' is a linguistic term for a language that noticeably influenced another language, even though the substrate language was lower in prestige and might even have eventually been replaced by the other one. The theory goes that the Germanic languages (i.e. what is today English, Scots, Dutch, Afrikaans, Frisian, German, Low German, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Faroese and Icelandic, but also Yiddish and a number of other, mostly very small languages) underwent intensive linguistic contact with a pre-Indo-European language and culture back when they were at the stage in their development what we call "proto-Germanic". The speakers of proto-Germanic (probably) settled in what is today southern Sweden and Norway, Denmark and northern Germany; their language initially formed part of a larger Indo-European dialect continuum, but continued to develop independently and probably lost mutual intelligibility with other IE languages sometime during the early 2nd millennium BC. What followed were about 2,000 years of linguistic development we don't know a whole lot about. The Germanic substrate hypothesis now claims that there are a whole lot of words and syntax patterns found throughout the Germanic languages that have no equivalent in the rest of the Indo-European family; consequently, these changes would have to be attributed to the influence of a non-Indo-European substrate, probably by a language initially spoken around northern Germany/southern Scandinavia and that was eventually replaced by proto-Germanic. The theory (first published in 1932, so there also might have been a political background in that Sigmund Feist, the linguist with whom the hypothesis originated, was a German Jew who would have had an interest in countering Nazi theories of Aryan racial "purity") posits that up to a third of proto-Germanic vocabulary might actually come from this unknown substrate; later supporters of it claimed that most of these adopted words concerned areas of seafaring, warfare, animals (and especially fish) and the names of social institutions. There are several problems with the theory, though. The first one is that while its supporters have managed to find plenty of possible hintes, evidence is as scarce as it was back when Feist first formulated his ideas 86 years ago, if not even more so: Many of the words originally identified as non-Indo-European in origin have now been found to have been Indo-European after all; their singular position within the wider Indo-European linguistic framework is probably more due to these words dying out in other IE languages, while proto-Germanic preserved them. Other things that used to be considered evidence for the hypothesis are now thought to have been independent mutations within proto-Germanic or maybe the result of linguistic contact to a neighbouring language instead, like several profound changes in phonology found in proto-Germanic or the switch to placing word stress on the root syllable, which might have been effected by contact to proto-Finnic speakers via the Baltic. Finally, some of the supposed peculiarities of the Germanic languages within the IE family might be more due to researchers' bias: Other IE languages like Avestan, Sanskrit, Mykenian Greek, Old Latin and especially Hittite are first attested in writing much, much earlier than proto-Germanic which makes it correspondingly easier to properly trace linguistic changes and processes for those languages. All of that is not to say that the hypothesis must necessarily be wrong, just that it has lost a lot of its initial support amongst the linguistic community. There are still some linguists who subscribe to it, notable those belonging to the Leiden school of historical linguistics, but by now it is mostly a fringe theory within the field.  Map of the Germanic languages in Europe today. The red line connotes the border between West Germanic and North Germanic languages; all East Germanic languages are by now extinct, with their last representative being Crimean Gothic which was spoken in Crimea until the late 18th/early 19th century. e: It should probably also be noted that historical linguistics can be a pretty difficult discipline, especially when it comes to tracing linguistic development over a long period of time without a stable written corpus to fall back on then. The linguistic mainstream is probably a bit too quick to scoff at some of the ideas produced here, but there are also a lot of crackpots going around, and even those serious linguists who claim that they have developed methods to reconstruct languages going thousands of years back without any written basis are probably just a little bit too ambitious, so I think some healthy degree of mistrust can be forgiven here. System Metternich fucked around with this message at 09:17 on Apr 6, 2018 |
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Apr 6, 2018 09:02
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^^^ So I don't really know much about this subject and maybe someone does: Sorbians in Germany. Both ethnically and linguistically I don't really know about their history, anyone care to type some words? Baronjutter posted:All that said, gently caress any fat old nazi demanding restoration or reparations for this. Mass force ethnic relocations are never a great thing but its pretty drat understandable why the czechs did what they did to their german enclaves post war. Look the Germans really wanted to have all the Germans in Germany so the rest of Europe decided to give them a helping hand. Orange Devil fucked around with this message at 09:46 on Apr 6, 2018 |
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Apr 6, 2018 09:35
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Orange Devil posted:So I don't really know much about this subject and maybe someone does: Sorbians in Germany. Both ethnically and linguistically I don't really know about their history, anyone care to type some words?
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Apr 6, 2018 10:14
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Orange Devil posted:^^^ They're the last remnant of a Slavic population that used to live in what is today northern Germany until they were slowly replaced by/assimilated into German speakers during the Middle Ages und Early Modern Era. The area they lived in was ravaged pretty badly during the Thirty Years' War; not only did the Sorbs lose direct contact to Polish-speaking territory after that, but lots of depopulated formerly Sorbian territory was settled German speakers afterwards, too. The last speaker of an autochtonous Slavic language in modern Germany outside of Sorbia died afaik in 1756 in a region of eastern Lower Saxony that is today still known as "Wendland", "land of the Wends". Originally, most of the Sorbians became Protestant after the Reformation, but centuries of Prussian/Protestant Germanification policies and a subtle discrimination and assimilation policy by the GDR led to a reversal of that situation where most of the remaining self-identified Sorbs are Catholic nowadays. There has never been an official census in the eastern Germany since reunification, so nobody can really say for sure how many Sorbs are left; official estimates speak of about 60,000 people, virtually all of them found in the Lusatia region of southeastern Brandenburg and northeastern Saxony (basically the region between the cities of Cottbus/Chóśebuz and Bautzen/Budyšin). If we're lucky, about half of them still speak either Upper (in the south) or Lower (in the north) Sorbian, which are basically just two different ways to write down the various Sorbian dialects. Most of the remaining speakers probably speak Upper Sorbian which is estimated at about 15-20,000 speakers in contrast to Lower Sorbian with maybe 7,000. Linguistically, Sorbian forms part of the West Slavic group and is closely related to Polish and Czech. There are several dozens primary and high schools where Sorbian is taught (sometimes as a mandatory subject), a bunch of daily and weekly newspapers and several hours of radio/TV broadcasts in Sorbian each week, and it has been declared an official minority language both by the federal government and the respective state governments of Brandenburg and Saxony (in the latter, a Sorb even advanced to governor from 2008-17). Nevertheless, it is still an endangered language, and especially the remaining Lower Sorbian Protestant areas to the north might completely vanish in our lifetime. I'd assume that most Germans outside of those areas aren't even aware that the Sorbs exist. When they appear in popular media, then it's mostly because of the elaborate Easter rituals of Catholic Upper Sorbians. As an aside, a bunch of Sorbs emigrated to other countries during the 19th century. In Texas, there even is a small town called Serbin where at least until the mid-20th century plenty of people spoke Sorbian, whereas the last native Sorbian speaker in Australia died in 1957.
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Apr 6, 2018 11:05
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In the 19th century, there was a lot of theories about Serbs and Sorbs having common origins because of, well, take a guess. Some Sorbs ended up moving here and assimilating, including, at times when Prussia decided to be particularly lovely to them and nudged them that-a-way, a number of Prussian military academy graduates and Franco-Prussian war veterans. That, uh, kind of ended up biting Germany in the rear end in the long run.
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Apr 6, 2018 11:24
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Corded ware people was the name of the indigenous culture that continued and coexisted after the Germans arrived.
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Apr 6, 2018 14:01
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Wasn't the Corded Ware Culture the presumed origin for Germanic, Celtic and Slavic cultures, rather than their unrelated predecessor?
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Apr 6, 2018 14:28
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A Buttery Pastry posted:If Germany started making noises about regaining lost territory, I think you could get a lot of people around to the notion that they deserved far more than they got. If they actually went to war for it, I think that'd be the end of Germany. 
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Apr 6, 2018 18:12
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