#satyrwaluigi

[dragonomatopoeia]

the malleus maleficarum, also known as the hammer of witches, is a treatise written by a vile, odious man named heinrich kramer. to this day, it is the most famous piece of writing on witchcraft, despite being widely condemned by theologians at the time of writing. the cologne inquisition condemned it for its recommendation and description of unethical, illegal methods of both discerning whether an accused person was a witch--or heretic, as Kramer made no distinction between witchcraft and heresy--and torturing/killing the accused afterwards. they had a dogmatic reason for doing so as well, of course, as arguing that a source other than god could provide power was considered heresy in its own right

i must again stress that the book was so repugnant, cruel, and violently misogynistic that it met with condemnation from the catholic church in 1486

unfortunately, it found new popularity in the renaissance a couple of centuries later, and was used to fuel and inspire the witch hunts of the 16th and 17th centuries

guy who has spent way way too much time researching the social and political forces motivating witch hunts and exorcisms. i feel like the xkcd comic about expertise i'm like surely the average tumblr user is familiar with the malleus maleficarum

[jackredfieldwasmyjacob]

today is yesterday was the international mother language day, so i thought i could make a post about the languages spoken in spain!

all of this data will come out of wikipedia, so i'm sorry if there's something wrong. i now realise i could've planned this way more, it's my bad honestly, i'm sorry.

anyways, let's start with the mother tongue map of spain; each color represents one language:

light green: spanish, galician: blue, catalan: orange, euskera: grey, aranese: red, asturleonese: green, aragonese: yellow.

the blue dots in extremadura are fala (then northernmost one), and most likely portuguese like the one spoken in olivença (thanks @satyrwaluigi).

by comparision, here's a map with the recognized co-oficial languages (spanish is the national language, and in various regions some languages have a co-oficial status)

the lighter colours refer to different categories depending of the language:

lighter blue refers to areas where galician is recognized as a minoritized language but isn't co-oficial

lighter green refers to areas where euskera is recognized as a minoritized language but isn't co-oficial

lighter red refers to areas where catalan is spoken but isn't co-oficial

lighter orange refers to areas where valencian is the official language but isn't spoken.

the reasoning behind the separating catalan and valencian into two distinct languages is a complex one, if you want more info @useless-catalanfacts made a great post about it (and here is even more info about the topic they very nicely provided me with). in a nutshell, valencian is not a distinct language from catalan and the reason why it's listed as such is political.

as you can see, there are some languages, mainly aragonese and asturleonese, that aren't recognized as co-oficial languages in their respective regions despite the large number of speakers. this makes them especially vulnerable to linguistic colonialism, and is why thousands of peoples from those areas are fighting in order to make their languages official in the state's eyes. if someone knows of organizations or groups that are involved in this movement, please let me know and i'll add them to the post.

apart from the aforementioned catalan blog, here in tumblr there's really great blogs about iberian minoritized languages; i personally recommend @beautiful-basque-country and @minglana for euskera and aragonese respectively, but i am sure there's more.

also, there are some languages that are not even mentioned in the maps despite its critical situation that i thought i should remark here:

fala, as stated before, is spoken in the borders between portugal and extremadura and it heavily borrows from portuguese. it has an estimated 11k native speakers.

caló is the language of the iberian roma people. it has an estimated 60k native speakers between spain and portugal.

darija, the arabic variant native to morocco, is also spoken in ceuta, a city of 80k inhabitants.

tarifit / riffian, a tamazight variant spoken in the rif area of northern africa, including the city of melilla, with 86k inhabitants.

finally, apart from the autochtonous languages, there are also several languages brought by the migrant population, who should also be counted in this post. here are all the languages spoken in spain; the first number is of native speakers, the second one of non-native speakers, and the third one is the total:

the languages translated into english are: spanish, catalan / valencian, galician, arabic, romanian, euskera, english, german, portuguese, asturleonese, italian, bulgarian, wu chinese, french, spanish sign language, aragonese, caló, catalan sign language, basque sign language, riffian, aranese, fala.

[useless-catalanfacts]

What do you think about the idea that Valencian is a separate language from Catalan? I'm pretty sure you don't agree with it but do you think it's harmful? What do you think are the motivations behind it?

Yes, it's harmful because it was created to be harmful.

A while ago I answered a similar ask about the main talking points of blaverism. That post is more "academic", in a way, as in you'll find citations and a serious breakdown of the arguments. You can find the post here:

But to focus on your question, you guessed right, I don't believe they're different languages. It's obvious to anyone who speaks the language that Catalan and Valencian are the same language. It's like saying that British English and American English are different languages. Actually, it's even less different than dialects/accents from different parts of inside England itself.

Many languages have historically had more than one name, but that doesn't change the fact that it's the same. For example, nobody claims that "castellano" and "español" are different languages just because two words exist for it. Throughout history and places, Catalan has had many names: Limousin, Catalan, Valencian, Mallorcan, Tortosan, etc. But that doesn't stop it for being the same language.

And the variant of Catalan spoken in the Valencian Country is more similar to the variant of Catalan spoken in Western Catalonia, than Western Catalonia is to Eastern Catalonia.

Even if you don't speak the language, just looking at history it's obvious that they're the same language.

(the label "Castilian" means "Spanish")

Nobody doubts that the language from Andalucía is a variant of Spanish (even though Andalusian dialect is far more different from Northern Spanish than any sub-dialect of Valencian is to its most farther away sub-dialect of any other variant of Catalan). In Seville they speak Spanish for the same historical reason that in València they speak Catalan, as a result of the Medieval expansion of the Christian kingdoms after the Islamic conquest.

The idea that Valencian is a separate language was spread by Spanish supremacist right-wing in the 1970s, in the political context of the Transition (end of Franco's dictatorship, begging of the democracy). At the moment, the Valencian Country was the place with a stronger pro-independence movement in all Spain. This movement was in favour of the independence of the Catalan Countries (the Valencian Country, Catalonia and the Balearic Islands). Spreading "blaverism" (the ideology that Valencians have nothing to do with Catalans, that the language is different, that the history is completely separate) was a political strategy defended mostly by the right-wing (the political parties that has championed this idea the most are UCD and PP). The objective was to divide Catalans, turn us against each other, make us waste time arguing about pointless things instead of organizing, and to have an official set of excuses to use to separate us and implement anti-Catalan (=anti-Valencian) legislation.

It was mostly spread by UCD when they lost the 1977 regional elections in Valencia. They had an idea that is recurrent in Spanish politics which is "hey, let's use hatred towards Catalans to win votes!" and so they based their political strategy on that. (Same as Lerrouxism had done before, C's would do later, and Vox also first gained significance only with this).

It doesn't make any sense for anyone who speaks the language, it's so unbelievable that they're different languages and it would require a huuuuuge ignorance of any history whatsoever to deny the existence of the Crown of Aragon and the Catalan population of the Kingdom of Valencia. But they don't care, because it's not about culture or language or history: it's about ideology, (internalized) Catalanophobia and Spanish supremacy.

Blaverists don't (in 95% of cases) defend Valencia as its own culture or identity. It wouldn't be such a problem if they did. No, instead what they do is defend that Valencian culture doesn't exist per se, it's only a regional variant of being Spanish, ~but completely different from those Catalan rats because we don't want to be like them they're bad Spaniards pls Madrid senpai notice us we're good spanish patriots!~. That last sentence was me patronizing what they say, but it's not exaggerated at all. They even deny that the Valencian Country can be called "Valencian Country" (a historical name that Valencian people elected as their own in a referendum, but Spain last minute decided not to listen to) because they don't consider it a country but a Spanish region, and made up a conspiracy theory with no historical nor linguistic basis saying that Valencian is a different language and was already spoken before Jaume I's conquest... 🤦 (before the conquest, people spoke Arabic, and centuries before there had also been Mozarabic but it had gone extinct by the 12th century).

The worst thing is that blaverists have been violent too. As I said before, it's a movement whose most active members are far right-wing groups, often openly neo-nazi. The conflict reached its peak in the 1970s and 1980s during what was called "the battle of València", but continued to the 1990s, and has been responsible for attacking Valencian intellectuals, scholars, activists and bookshops. Think just as an example how many times Joan Fuster's home was attacked with bombs!

That is a summed up explanation of the motivations of blaverism, but there would be so much to be said about it. During the years that the conservative party PP was in the Valencian government, they applied many policies in this direction. For example, did you know that in Spain each "comunidad autónoma" (administrative region) has its own TV and radio channels and we all can see all of them, except Valencians and Catalans? I live in Catalonia, I can watch the channel from Andalusia, Madrid, Galicia, whatever I want... Except for the Valencian one. And in València, they can watch again every channel they could want... Except the ones from Catalonia. Because the PP government made it literally illegal. Things like this are done to stop us from hearing the other, to make it easier that when a young Valencian person is told "Catalan is something else entirely", they will never have heard a person from Catalonia speak their same language and they'll be more likely to believe it.

So I'm sure there's someone who actually believes it, but tbh most people who claim to believe in the conspiracy theory that they're different languages and that Valencian comes from something older (I've even seen some claim that it comes from Ancient Iberian and not from Latin 🤯) ... I doubt they can actually believe it? It's so stupid and requires ignoring so much evidence for something that has zero evidence, I'm sure many of the leaders who say it (I'm thinking for example Jiménez Losantos, who yes is a fascist, but he has an education) are more focused on spreading that idea to further their ideological agenda of dividing the Catalan Countries to make us weaker, and not because they actually believe it. But, sadly, some people are fervent defenders of it, whether or not they actually believe it.

Needless to say, everyone is welcome to add to this post, especially Valencians.

[prokopetz]

@satyrwaluigi replied:

I’ve heard that this is vulture capitalism, & he’s trying to run it into the ground so he can claim bankruptcy

He's not that smart. "X" is what he wanted to call PayPal before Peter Thiel kicked him out, and he's been sore about it ever since. He's spent the last 22 years hanging onto the domain "x.com" and looking for something big he could rebrand as "X" in order to vindicate his marketing genius, and now that day has finally arrived.

In principle, I understand bending over backwards to use a previously registered domain name you had just lying around for something.

In practice, dude, what the fuck.