Re: So it is true...

Seán O'Leathlóbhair wrote:
>
> Peter T. Daniels wrote:
> > Seán O'Leathlóbhair wrote:
> >
> > > I think that few here in the UK are aware of that but that may improve
> > > since the countries have split. There is a very common naive view of a
> > > one to one relationship between country and language. You can even
> > > stump many people with questions such as: what language is spoken in
> > > Belgium or Switzerland? I would bet a fair amount that if you asked
> > > what was spoken in Czechoslovakia, you would get the single answer
> > > Czech. But I would also think it likely that if you asked about
> > > Slovakia, you may now get the answer Slovakian.
> >
> > Belgium and Switzerland (and Iraq) are nations in the American sense,
> > but not really in the more widespread sense of the word. (We needed a
> > term for the "United States" in 1787 and took the word that previously
> > designated both an ethnic and a state unity, to designate a political
> > unity.)
> >
> > Which also explains why Americans don't understand how Saddam could try
> > to eliminate the Kurds -- they kept calling them "his people," which
> > they weren't. They were drawn within his (and the others') borders by
> > Woodrow Wilson.
> > --
> > Peter T. Daniels grammatim@xxxxxxx
>
> Do you mean that Americans today use "nation" differently to other

No, differently from [colloq. than] others

Except we don't realize it. In the US, "nation" and "country" are
synonymous; in Europe, the question didn't arise until fairly recently.
What did Germans or Italians think of themselves as before 1871? Wasn't
there a sense of nationhood long before there was political unity? Was
Yugoslavia a nation?

Are or were England, Scotland, and Wales "nations"?

> English speakers? Or, do you mean there is a distinct sense in which
> the United States is a nation? That may become an issue for the
> European Union one day but probably not in the near future. I expect
> the vast majority of EU citizens would name a smaller entity as their
> nation. I am happy to say that an I am an EU citizen rather than
> British or Irish but I think that I am in a small minority.

Do you pledge allegiance to the flag of the European Union, and to the
Republic for which it stands, one nation, ..., indivisible, with liberty
and justice for all?

(Never mind that allegiance to a flag is a purely American thing, born,
it seems, of the Civil War.)

> The sense that I meant was an area under a particular government. Here
> is the first definition from the Cambridge Online Dictionary.
>
> 1 [C] a country, especially when thought of as a large group of people
> living in one area with their own government, language, traditions,
> etc:
>
> Which is pretty much what I had in mind.

Evidently this dictionary doesn't arrange its definitions in historical
order, like the Oxford and M-W dictionaries.

But even here, note the distictive "language, traditions, etc."

> I am aware of other senses e.g. some people talk of the Muslim Nation
> or the Nation of Islam which does not fit the above definition. The
> second definition is a better but not perfect fit.

I don't know what Muslim Nation is, but Nation of Islam is the name of
the denomination headed by Elijah Muhammad and then by Lewis Farrakhan,
which is not the same as Islam (as Malcolm X discovered during his
Hajj).

> 2 [S] a large group of people of the same race who share the same
> language, traditions and history, but who might not all live in one
> area: the Navajo nation

What are [C] and [S] introducing these definitions?

(And what does Cambridge think "race" means?)

> Here's a link:
>
> http://dictionary.cambridge.org/define.asp?key=52976&dict=CALD
>
> Sadly, despite the possible confusion of the meaning of nation,
> Saddam's attempted elimination of the Kurds is not hard to believe.
> There have been plenty of others incidents of rulers attempting to
> eliminate groups within their same nation / country / state / area
> which they control. Also there have been many civil wars.

But probably not people of their own "nationality," i.e. "ethnicity."
("Ethnicity" could be seen as a recent invention -- M-W makes it 1950 --
that turned "nationality" into a retronym.)

I met a recent Polish immigrant in Chicago (I think it was before 1989)
and happened to mention the Jews of Poland. And he said, They're not
Poles! they're Jews!
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@xxxxxxx
.

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