More culture mixing, please!

[Guinnessmonkey]

I know quite a few north africans who hate the fact that there are still people who call themselves berbers in africa. They consider them uneducated and backwards because these fringe berbers primarely never adopted arab names and customs and held out much longer against islamication and are therefore looked down upon by the ex-berbers who now call themselves arabs or by another imaginary muslim ethnicity. History is weird like that...lol

I think "Arab" culture in general is kinda weird. From what I understand, the dialects of Arabic spoken in different regions are so dissimilar that they're more properly defined as languages, but they seem to really not like it when you say that they're not really speaking Arabic, but Egyptian Arabic (etc.). It's as if if all the various Romance languages were still pretending that what they were speaking was Latin; that you speak French Latin in Paris, Castilian Latin in Madrid, Romanian Latin in Romania, etc., and that we're supposed to pretend as if the differences were really just a matter of accent and dialect. (I know the difference between Syrian Arabic and Egyptian Arabic isn't really as big as the difference between French and Portuguese, but it still works...) Without getting into politics, this does cause some problems, including the attitude of "why can't the Palestinians just go somewhere else? There are so many Arab states and only one Jewish state," etc. That kinda thing is only true of you honestly believe that there's no cultural differences between Arabs in Yemen and "Arabs" in Algeria or Somalia.

Neat: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varieties_of_Arabic

And yhea, maybe my Latin analogy wasn't that far off. There are a few example sentences where they're not even all that similar.

I love reading a lot:

Literary Arabic: ʾanā ʾuḥibbu l-qirāʾahta kaṯīran
Tunisian Arabic: ēne nħibb il-qrēya barʃa
Egyptian Arabic: ana baħebb el-ʔerāya ʔawi
Lebanese Arabic: ana bħibb il-ʔirēye ktīr
Iraqi Arabic: āni aħibb el-qrāya kulliʃ
Kuwaiti Arabic: ʔāna wāyed aħibb agrā
Hijazi Arabic: ˈana aˈħubb al-ɡiraːja kaθiːr

Close enough that you can tell that the languages are related, but different enough that it doesn't seem to be a matter of accents or dialects. Neato. More examples on the wiki page, of course.

 

[Sleight of Hand]

Move Andalusian to the Iberian culture group.

 

[cybrxkhan]

Move Andalusian to the Iberian culture group.

Ooooh yes, you know I want it too.

 

[magritte2]

@Guinessmonkey, while I recognize that the different dialects of Arabic are very different (to the point of being unintelligible to one another), what I don't know is how those differences arose. Did people in Morocco, Egypt, and Iraq all adopt a language that was similar to what was spoken in Mecca and Medina and the languages have subsequently diverged? That would be similar to what happened with the Romance languages. Or did the Arabic language end up borrowing an awful lot of words from the local language that was present in the areas for, which would be more of a "melting pot" model?

 

[justin6477]

@Guinessmonkey, while I recognize that the different dialects of Arabic are very different (to the point of being unintelligible to one another), what I don't know is how those differences arose. Did people in Morocco, Egypt, and Iraq all adopt a language that was similar to what was spoken in Mecca and Medina and the languages have subsequently diverged? That would be similar to what happened with the Romance languages. Or did the Arabic language end up borrowing an awful lot of words from the local language that was present in the areas for, which would be more of a "melting pot" model?

I'd imagine it's a mix of both.

More than likely the Nobles adopting a relatively unified language, and a melting pot occurring among the commoners. The fracturing of the Muslim nobility probably didn't help things, dialects do seem to fall along geographic and political lines.

 

[Porsenna]

Similarly, I'm not so sure that situations like the Turks in Anatolia aren't better served by an event... Large chunks of the Anatolian population considered themselves Roman/Greek/etc. until the 20th century. That's it's thoroughly "Turkified" these days is partly the result of population transfers after WWI.

That said, there were large numbers of Turks who moved into the area, essentially colonizing it. I don't know enough details, however, to know just how many Turks moved in and what the local Greek/Anatolian/whatever population was. Were the "Turkified" areas the areas left depopulated where Turkish colonists became an actual majority?

Either way, if we use current mechanics you'll see the entire area Turkified in a matter of years. Frankly, I'd be surprised if more than a handful of these provinces were really all that Turkish even by the end of the period (remember, some of these cultural shifts are also taking place in the EU3 1453-1820 period....).

The population estimates I've seen tend to chart out that through the entirety of the middle ages, about a million central Asian Turks would have made their way into Anatolia and the Middle east, where the population in Anatolia alone seems to be pretty consistently charted out at 12 million through the course of this same period. The "Turkish Turks" seem to have been pretty swallowed up, and another genetic study I saw - one that I'd probably cess out about 80% confidence in (and would like to see more evidence for, but am generally confident in) actually suggests that for what ever reason, central asian women, rather than men left a bigger impact on the gene pool. All in all, the modern population seems to descend from the numbers above, with roughly 9-12% of men in Turkey being descendents of invading nomads, witht he rest of the population being the descendant of the local peoples who "flipped culture".