#groznyi

[fe-smashorpass]

[prettiestboytoy2]

Artist

[wearemercs]

New medieval OC, Mongol heavy cavalry girl by hero_of_groznyi

[chechnyadreaming]

[rwpohl]

[entrehormigones]

[russianperioddrama]

ROUND 3: GROUP D

[inkhole]

Chests by Alvaro Groznyy

[paolo-streito-1264]

Zurich based Catalan tattooist and illustrator Alvaro Groznyy.

[tomorrowusa]

It's not healthy to believe your own propaganda. Unfortunately Vladimir Putin buys his own distorted views of Russian history which he then peddles to people like Tucker Carlson who are utterly clueless about Eastern Europe.

Masha Lavrova of The Kyiv Independent interviewed British historian Dr. Jade McGlynn of the Department of War Studies at King’s College London.

Putin's deformation of history is a major feature of what has been driving Russia's aggression.

Putin's attempt to restore the glories of the Russian Empire only serves to weaken Russia in the 21st century. But Putin's grandiose self-deception probably keeps him from acknowledging this.

Dr. McGlynn points out that Putin simply doesn't accept Ukraine as a real country. That's the root of the problem.

If we look at what Putin has said about Ukraine, you know, even if we only go back to 2014, there's plenty of evidence that this is not going to be solved by just giving him a little bit more of Ukrainian land. This is about a war to reshape the global order and, in Russia's view, it has the right, and also it has the need. [ … ] Because Russia is a "great state" and Ukraine is a "colony", it will therefore either be a colony of the West, which he [Putin] doesn't want, or be a colony of Russia, which he does want.

She blames the lack of understanding by some alleged Russia specialists in the West on their inability to understand Russian. They are simply unable to understand Putin and the context of what he's been saying for the past 10 years.

Speaking of Russian, in the vid Dr. McGlynn uses the Russian name for Ivan the Terrible which is Ivan Groznyy — or Иван Грозный in Cyrillic script.

[justacynicalromantic]

Do you know what Groznyi, Aleppo, Mariupol, and plenty of other towns and villages have in common? russian impunity. It is the strongest force which drives russian terrorism fwd. Even kremlin appeasers realize that, they just hope that the next target will be not their town.

[qqueenofhades]

I was doing some reading on the bombings of Grozny earlier, and correct me if I'm wrong but isn't Putin also known as the Butcher of Grozny?

Technically, I believe that title is held (or also held, it's unclear) by Russian general Aleksandr Dvornikov, who presided over the wholesale destruction of Groznyy (in Chechnya) and Aleppo (in Syria), and then was also appointed to head up the war in Ukraine in 2022. However, since this was also done on Putin's orders and under Putin's regime, it is certainly a title/responsibility he shares in.

I wrote a post last year about the deliberate strategy of genocide and genocide denialism in post-Soviet Russia, including Chechnya and Syria, and how that was applied to the war in Ukraine, which might shed some light on how what they're doing in Ukraine was directly informed by previous undertakings, including the total destruction of Groznyy and the constant targeting of civilians in Syria (and then lying about it later). So yes, that might also be useful.

[wordacrosstime]

Ingush Grammar

[Ingush Grammar. Johanna Nichols. First Edition: March 2011. University of California Press. Series: UC Publications in Linguistics. Pages: 830. Trim Size: 7 x 10 inches.  Illustrations: 1 map. Paperback. ISBN: 9780520098770]

Readers of my book reviews cannot help but notice my interest in – nay, my fascination with – linguistics and languages.  I am no stranger to Professor Nichols’s work: I read her award-winning treatise Linguistic Diversity in Time and Space a few years ago and was captivated by her command of language reconstruction principles.   Recently, it came to my attention that there might (in principle) be a call for persons to assist in national security-related activities who are fluent in, or at least familiar with, the Northeast Caucasian languages, especially Chechen and Dagestani.  The language discussed here, Ingush, is a closely-related language with a relatively high degree of mutual intelligibility with Chechen, Dagestani and Baltsi.  Since I couldn’t find a suitable book from which to learn Chechen, I thought I’d check this tidy little volume out.

“Tidy” is not the correct word for this work.  It tips the scales at almost 800 pages.  However, it is an undeniable tour-de-force of scholarship in the documenting of a comparatively obscure language. Prof. Nichols herself acknowledges that this tome is the culmination of about 30 years of work with Ingush, at least ten of which were spent in the homeland of the language itself, a region now known as Ingushetia in southern Russia adjacent to the Republic of Georgia and Chechnya.

The Northeast Caucasian languages are a small primary language family spoken almost exclusively in the region between the Republic of Georgia and the north end of the Caspian Sea.  Significant cities in this region are Ongusht (whence the name Ingush), Groznyy (the capital of Chechnya) and Makhachkala (the capital of Dagestan).   Though these languages share many features with Georgian (known as Kartuli to its speakers) and the similarly-named Northwest Caucasian languages (examples are Abkhazi and Cherkessian), they are not, in fact, related to them in any meaningful way.  This may seem surprising when one looks at a map of the region.  The area covered by these three language groups (Georgian is part of its own tiny language family called the Kartulian languages) is fairly small.  However, the area is peppered with mountain ranges that have carved it up geographically to a point where very ancient steppe peoples had settled in individual valleys and had no direct contact with even neighboring valleys for centuries. Little wonder, then, that language families developed independently from a still-more-ancient proto-language (as yet unidentified or classified).

Ingush, as alluded to in the previous paragraph, was named after a prominent community in its sprachbund, or speaking area.  Ingush people do not use this term, referring to their language as vai mott (our language) or, if speaking to non-Ingush speakers, vai neaxa mott (our people’s language).  Given that the homeland for this language has at least three well-defined geographic zones (alpine highlands, piedmont, and plains), it is not surprising that various dialects of Ingush have emerged.  All of these dialects are highly mutually intelligible, far from any objective criteria that would categorize them as distinct languages in their own right.

Nichols herself, in the introductory material, lists Ingush as one of the most morphologically complex languages in her experience, outstripping even daunting native American languages like Lakhota (a Siouan language of the northern Great Plains) and Halkomelem (a Salishan language from the Pacific Northwest in the USA).  Ingush has unusually large inventories of elements (phonemes, etc.), a high degree of inflectional synthesis in the verb (this is similar to some native American languages, especially the Athapaskan group) and a variety of categories of words, many of which do not have an analogue in English or any Indo-European language.  She comments that this might go some way toward explaining why this book took 30 years to produce!

Since the volume is so detailed, I will simply summarize my observations of its style and completeness.  I confess that I haven’t actually read the entire volume – I’ve probably read about 150 pages, or nearly 20% of it all told – but I have dipped into it in various places along its length to see what it was all about.  It is impossible for me to imagine that Prof Nichols missed anything; every conceivable component of Ingush seems to be covered here.  The book has 35 major sections, any one of which is worthy of at least a semester-long course of study (for the subject itself, not necessarily for Ingush per se).  Her writing tone and style strike an admirable balance between being very scholarly (it certainly is that) and yet being profoundly informative to a non-specialist like myself who is also not a trained linguist.

The best affirmation I can make of this book is that it is quite possibly the best template for any field linguist to follow when documenting and characterizing a language.  This is certainly true for someone working with an Endangered language, of which there are literally thousands still being spoken (some just barely) in the world today.  The level of commitment Prof Nichols has brought to bear on this work seems nothing short of miraculous.

This is definitely not a book for just anyone.  Like attempting to read all of Proust in the original French while not actually speaking French, a true appreciation of this book requires enormous patience and strong memory skills.  Prof Nichols refers to sections back and forth across the book, of necessity since linguistic elements do not exist in a vacuum.  That said, to truly appreciate the scope and even grandeur of this volume will command great mental agility and focus.  For anyone who is up to the challenge, I say, “Good luck – and enjoy!”  Even if you never speak Ingush or travel to that part of the world, this book will teach you something useful, edifying, and mind-expanding.

[Photo credits with thanks to : Book cover ©  2011 University of California Press / Portrait © 2012 Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin]

Kevin Gillette

Words Across Time

28 September 2022

wordsacrosstime

[7ooo-ru]

Кавказский инвестиционный форум перенесён в Грозный

По итогам заседания Организационного комитета по подготовке и проведению Кавказского инвестиционного форума стало известно, что мероприятие в 2024 году состоится в столице Чечни.

Читать далее

Подробнее https://7ooo.ru/group/2024/04/20/765-kavkazskiy-investicionnyy-forum-perenesen-v-groznyy-grss-300729708.html

[chechnyadreaming]

[dendeniel]

The SBU has put Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov on the wanted list. For the second or third time, if my memory serves me right. He lived in Groznyi city.