not enough ladies, too many mans
Dec. 21st, 2009 02:00 pmYuletide Madness is open to just about everyone this year. I have one free Archive invite for this purpose! Feel free to comment. (I also have DW invites, but this is less relevant.)
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I'm rereading City and the City while I fantasize about being able to write my Yuletide treat without crying a lot in frustration and pain, and, you know, the more I know about the Balkans, the better it is. Not because the Allegory is so Meaningful, but because, nonallegorically, I actually totally buy the worldbuilding. I have spent the last few weeks immersed in the cities of the Ottoman Empire, and they did some wild stuff! And the funny thing is, there is a total historical double consciousness about Balkan cities -- there's the one thread, about 'European' history, and there's the other about 'Arab' history, and the second is selfcontained and the scholars do not talk to the European scholars too much (as far as I can tell) and the linguistic histories are off the wall. Just as a sample of what I'm talking about, my final paper was on the Sephardim, and I read a bunch of papers asserting with total confidence that Ladino was a) a Jewish Romance language that became heavily influenced by Arabic when it moved to the Ottoman empire, and then diversified, and b) exactly the same as Castilian Spanish except with Hebrew characters. IDEK. It is entirely possible that Bèsz and Illitan could be very similar languages who come from different, overlapping sprachbunds. It is entirely possible that there's a huge archaeological dig in the middle of town no one knows shit about because no one studies the area because people are dicks. I may have gotten a little off track there. Someone please tell me I can't be a Central Asia/Balkans historian when I grow up.
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I'm rereading City and the City while I fantasize about being able to write my Yuletide treat without crying a lot in frustration and pain, and, you know, the more I know about the Balkans, the better it is. Not because the Allegory is so Meaningful, but because, nonallegorically, I actually totally buy the worldbuilding. I have spent the last few weeks immersed in the cities of the Ottoman Empire, and they did some wild stuff! And the funny thing is, there is a total historical double consciousness about Balkan cities -- there's the one thread, about 'European' history, and there's the other about 'Arab' history, and the second is selfcontained and the scholars do not talk to the European scholars too much (as far as I can tell) and the linguistic histories are off the wall. Just as a sample of what I'm talking about, my final paper was on the Sephardim, and I read a bunch of papers asserting with total confidence that Ladino was a) a Jewish Romance language that became heavily influenced by Arabic when it moved to the Ottoman empire, and then diversified, and b) exactly the same as Castilian Spanish except with Hebrew characters. IDEK. It is entirely possible that Bèsz and Illitan could be very similar languages who come from different, overlapping sprachbunds. It is entirely possible that there's a huge archaeological dig in the middle of town no one knows shit about because no one studies the area because people are dicks. I may have gotten a little off track there. Someone please tell me I can't be a Central Asia/Balkans historian when I grow up.
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