Polabia back to Slavs?

♂

Jul 15, 11, 07:13 #91

Lyzko:

True, yet native Italians, and conversely Austrian tourists, have all told me in Suedtirol EVERYBODY actually speaks as well as understands fluent Italian, switching then to excellent German, almost as though it were their Austrian-German mother tongue, the intonation, slang etc...

Actually only the German speaking population of Suedtirol speaks German and Italian, while the local Italian population, which mainly lives in the few big cities, only speaks Italian.

♂

Jul 15, 11, 10:03 #92

A Polabian People's Republic? It's surprising Uncle Joe didn't create a Polabian People's Republic between Poland and West Germany in place of the DDR. He wanted to emasculate the German nation and make it incapable of ever re-achieving major power status, so that would have surely done the trick. He could have easily justified it with his propaganda which could explain away anything. With Poland he used historical arguments in the west (the return of historic, age-old Piastian lands to Poland) but in the east employed ethnographic criteria - whatever served his purposes.
The question is who would he have populated Polabia with?
Slavicised Volksdeutsche, Wends of course, but there wasn't enough of them, some Czechs, Poles, Kashubians? A German minority would probably have remained, but they should have been allowed to live only near the Polish and Czech border, so as to preclude any future German designs to annex them. The language could have been an updated, expanded and reconstructed form of unified and standardised Wendish (no more upper and lower Lusatian).... And then the alarm clock went off and it was business as usual...

Lyzko	Jul 15, 11, 14:01 #93
I wonder why this is the case, Palivec. Surely the Italian-speaking population is as capable of learning German bilingually as the the German population of learning Italian being as they have long cohabitated-:) The reason must be psychological.

Lyzko

Jul 15, 11, 14:07 #94

The Wends or Sorbs have long since dwelt in German lands, therefore their presence as minority-German speakers of a Slavic mother tongue is not really analogous to Silesian Germans in current Poland or Sudeten Germans in the now Czech Republic, both of whom claim German descent, yet often speak little to no German! The same applies to former German nationals, now well over 70, living in present-day Romania, in cities with dual names as well, e.g. Cluj/Clausenberg, etc... Many of them often speak a broken German, albeit fluent Rumanian, their actual native tongue or language of school instruction. Their children usually speak zero German, ONLY Romanian-:)

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