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Help me design my medieval/Renaissance, alternate earth campaign world
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<blockquote data-quote="Turjan" data-source="post: 1359416" data-attributes="member: 3477"><p>I agree with your comments. As there were no national states in Europe, state on one side and language/culture on the other side were not related in most of the cases. In medieval Lithuania, most people were Ukrainians and Byelorussians, quite a few Russians, and a small minority of Baltic Lithuanians. The western border of the Holy Roman Empire lay clearly western of the language border between French and German. Even political borders were far from clear. Mighty countries like Burgundy lay half in France and half in the Holy Roman Empire (and all people there spoke French, except in Flanders where many spoke Dutch <img src="data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7" class="smilie smilie--sprite smilie--sprite8" alt=":D" title="Big grin :D" loading="lazy" data-shortname=":D" />), and also considerable parts of Denmark lay within its borders (but those people spoke German <img src="data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7" class="smilie smilie--sprite smilie--sprite2" alt=";)" title="Wink ;)" loading="lazy" data-shortname=";)" />).</p><p></p><p>The only pattern that is pretty clear is that the subgroups that I mentioned are definitely different languages. Within the groups, the borders are fluent and not fixed. I suspect, that a medieval equivalent of modern Low German was more similar to Danish than to Bavarian in many ways. One of the Norvegian languages is similar to Danish, the other one to Swedish. On the other hand, Danish and Swedish are both very similar to each other, anyway, so they don't have difficulties to understand each other. Though modern Dutch is clearly a separate language, I'm not sure whether this was right for the Middle Ages. I think, one of the modern criteria for a separate language is the existence of a separate scripture. In a time, where those people who knew to write wrote either Latin or in the way they liked to, this criteria falls flat.</p><p></p><p>Therefore, I don't see a problem with uniting the Russian languages to one, dropping Macedonian and Moldavian from the list because they were mere dialects of other languages (Galician might be counted as a Portuguese dialect spoken in NW Spain), and Sorbian because the language group is so small. Raeto-Romanic might be important if you plan on playing in the developping Switzerland, and so on.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Turjan, post: 1359416, member: 3477"] I agree with your comments. As there were no national states in Europe, state on one side and language/culture on the other side were not related in most of the cases. In medieval Lithuania, most people were Ukrainians and Byelorussians, quite a few Russians, and a small minority of Baltic Lithuanians. The western border of the Holy Roman Empire lay clearly western of the language border between French and German. Even political borders were far from clear. Mighty countries like Burgundy lay half in France and half in the Holy Roman Empire (and all people there spoke French, except in Flanders where many spoke Dutch :D), and also considerable parts of Denmark lay within its borders (but those people spoke German ;)). The only pattern that is pretty clear is that the subgroups that I mentioned are definitely different languages. Within the groups, the borders are fluent and not fixed. I suspect, that a medieval equivalent of modern Low German was more similar to Danish than to Bavarian in many ways. One of the Norvegian languages is similar to Danish, the other one to Swedish. On the other hand, Danish and Swedish are both very similar to each other, anyway, so they don't have difficulties to understand each other. Though modern Dutch is clearly a separate language, I'm not sure whether this was right for the Middle Ages. I think, one of the modern criteria for a separate language is the existence of a separate scripture. In a time, where those people who knew to write wrote either Latin or in the way they liked to, this criteria falls flat. Therefore, I don't see a problem with uniting the Russian languages to one, dropping Macedonian and Moldavian from the list because they were mere dialects of other languages (Galician might be counted as a Portuguese dialect spoken in NW Spain), and Sorbian because the language group is so small. Raeto-Romanic might be important if you plan on playing in the developping Switzerland, and so on. [/QUOTE]
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