More Cultures?

[Yakman]

An (Updated list of Cultures that should be to be introduced)

Dutch
Frisian

Are these two really different enough to justify seperating them? Would the Fris only occupy two or three provinces?

Flemish

Can't we just make them French?

Breton

I dunno if tags are an issue, but if they are, you might just want to make them welsh...

Croatian
Serbian
Bosnian
Albanian
Bulgarian
Slovakian
Moorish
Berber
North African (Everything between Egypt and Morroco?)
Egyptian

see my above comments

Lower German
Middle German
Upper German
Northern Italian
Southern Italian

I disagree about splitting them all up. maybe later, but right now I think there are more important issues.

The Christian Religion of Egypt should be Coptic, not Orthodox

You can't add religions. Just make them Orthodox. Or are you proposing to add Armenian, Ethiopian, Georgian, Nestorian, and Syriac varieties as well?

Saxon should be maintained and English eliminated. It's more historical.

 

[unmerged(31117)]

The Saxon's never called themselves Saxon's, that tag was given to them a long time after the event by historians in order to seperate the anglosaxon (Pre-Norman world) from the later post-norman world.

The Normans called them English and the "Saxons" themselves called themselves English (Rather than Saxons), it makes more sense to split England up into the English (Ie the Saxons at the moment and the English provinces) and the Norman overlords, ie William and anyone who came over the channel with him.

What we call anglosaxon now is merely a conveniant historical dividing device between the old and new england. According to the "Saxons" they were English, according to the Normans, the English were a people over which they ruled and that they kept firmly under the iron control of Norman martial law.

 

[Yakman]

Sounds good to me. Make'em all Anglish.

 

[unmerged(27913)]

I disagree about removing South Slavic. South Slavic in my mind should incorporate modern Slovenia, Serbia, Bosnia, and Kroatia. After all, they were "Yugoslavia"

Were is the key word here. Besides Yugoslavia has nothing to do with medieval era nor did Yugoslavia meant anything important culturally. Yugoslavia was just a federation of few people....similar to Soviet Union or Czezchoslovakia.

I dunno what to do about Bohemia and Moravia though... should there just be a single Bohemian culture? Perhaps someone with more knowledge of the area could contribute their knowledge.

It should be simply named Czech culture. Bohemian is a bit too much local. Bohemia is just one province where Czechs lived.

Albanian should be seperated, although they would only occupy a comparitively small area. If not, then just make them South Slavic in the north and Greek in the south.

Albanian culture should not be separated. If we go by such logic we can divide every culture into many others.

Saxon should just become the mainstay English culture instead of English. Why waste the tag on English when they were all just Saxons anyhow?

English were not Saxons. English is a mish-mash of every bit of Celtic, Saxon and Norman-French culture. This is what created the specific English culture.
I belive the situation in England is perfect if we make all provinces Saxon(besides Cornwall which should be Welsh). With the event which starts to transform the Saxon(or Norman) culture in England to English by 1090 we have a perfect situation and we already have all the terms and means and I personally am using such setting....this should become official as well.

 

[unmerged(27913)]

An (Updated list of Cultures that should be to be introduced)
Dutch
Frisian
Flemish

As I said I don't agree with this. Frisian maybe(but due to extremly small size it's not worthed).
Flemish and the Dutch are one and the same.

Alpine

Alpine is a bit strange. Which language would they speak? I mean you have to have names for such a culture. In any case I don't agree with this. Unnescesary.

Croatian
Serbian
Bosnian
Albanian
Bulgarian
Slovakian

Bosnian is a bit strange, but I am ok with it.

Moorish
Berber
North African (Everything between Egypt and Morroco?)

These three are one and the same really.

Lower German
Middle German
Upper German
Northern Italian
Southern Italian

This would be a bit too much. It's good as it is now.

The Christian Religion of Egypt should be Coptic, not Orthodox

I don't think thats posibble, then agian we have a Jewish religion which is basically unused.

Cutures that need to be eliminated.
Saxon
German
Italian

Obviously I don't agree. If you remove Saxon culture you would have a mess in England. As I said it's better to make England Saxon and most of it's rulers Norman. This would be very historical. By an event which already exists in game and works by 1090 the provinces in England slowly start to transform into English culture. Thats perfect.

Removing Italian and German is something I don't recommend. Although it would be nice to have distinct Napolitan-Sicilian culture and Lombardian-Toscan-Venetian culture it would really complicate things. This goes double for Germany.

 

[Yakman]

Were is the key word here. Besides Yugoslavia has nothing to do with medieval era nor did Yugoslavia meant anything important culturally. Yugoslavia was just a federation of few people....similar to Soviet Union or Czezchoslovakia.

True. But they all spoke more or less the same language with some exceptions.

Still, it's a difficult question. How many tags do we have available? How many cultures do we want to represent? Certainly, if we have the available tags, then we should split the Croats and the Serbs it--after all, Spain is split and so is France.

 

[unmerged(27913)]

True. But they all spoke more or less the same language with some exceptions.

It's not the same language...it's very similar still not the same. Similar to what we have with Swedish-Norwegian-Danish language or with Ukrainian-Polish-Russian language.

Still, it's a difficult question. How many tags do we have available? How many cultures do we want to represent? Certainly, if we have the available tags, then we should split the Croats and the Serbs it--after all, Spain is split and so is France.

I would really recommend that. The reason is simple - due to differences these cultres also had very different names in tradition and putting all that in one group will really and is messing things up.

Personally as I said before I don't think there should be a Bosnian(Bosniak) culture in there. Distinct Bosnian culture started developing only in the last 100 years...in medieval times 'Bosnian' was nothing but a teritorial distinction for a man comming from Bosnia. They were no different from Croats in language, names and religion...in fact Turkish historians wrote in late 15th century that Bosnians(Bosniaks as Turks called them) were a Croat tribe and we know for a fact that 75% of today Bosnia-Herzegovina was part of old Croatian kingdom. Due to islamization and indpendent existance for so long they(islamized population) developed their own national awarness which was intesified during the last 15 years and finalized the creation of a new nation/culture.

 

[unmerged(7924)]

As to Yugoslavia, AFAIK Yugoslavia means "south slavic" and with an -ia ending... Not that it matters.

As to Serbs/Croats, my opinion is that it is not the most important culture we need to split. Bulgarian, Berber and slovakian for example. But if we have unlimited tags, just split it up even more.

As to Coptic - they were under the Patriarch of Alexandria, who was under the Patriarch of Constantinople (First amongst equals). I see Shia as much much more important then coptic, too close to orthodox.

 

[AKjeldsen]

Obviously I don't agree. If you remove Saxon culture you would have a mess in England. As I said it's better to make England Saxon and most of it's rulers Norman. This would be very historical. By an event which already exists in game and works by 1090 the provinces in England slowly start to transform into English culture. Thats perfect.

Absolutely. The culture found in England before 1066 is considerably different from anything that one would understand as English culture, which is a result of several centuries' worth of blending between Saxon and Norman/French cultures.

Removing Saxon culture in favour of English right from the start would completely misrepresent the situation at that time.

 

[unmerged(31117)]

Misrepresenting

Anglo-saxon was a term invented later on by historians to seperate the two Englands, pre-Norman and Norman England. William and his imported Norman aristos were not English by any stretch of the imagination.

Since their homeland more or less was Normandy and the Saxon aristocracy's homeland was England, and they presumably had more in common with the general English population than the Norman's did, it is not fair to make them not English but 'Saxon' even though they thought of themselves as English and would probably have thought Saxon was someone who lived in Saxony in Germany.

English culture was 'anglosaxon culture'.

 

[Eldin]

Flemish has the advantage of actually being used by people in the medieval period.

The Flemish and Dutch were actually considered seperate peoples in manuscripts from the medieval era, where references to Dutch AND Flemish merchants are mentioned in sources from London.

Likely the divisions were actually greater in the medieval era than they were in 1830.

Is Dutch in this context not used as a general term for 'low german'? This would include the whole of north germany too. Still, Flandern is a region, linguistic differences at the time, though possibly vast, are quite irrelevant, since, as you said, those differences were more widespread then than the current culture system shows. I think fundamentally there was little difference between the dutch and Flemish languages, at least no more so than Dutch and Limburgian at the time, which I would not want to be made into a culture.

Same goes for the whole Serb-croat hoax, really. I know too little about Bulgaria to say anything about that, but I say don't mess with South-slavic as it is, too many hairiness and people have killed eachother over less in those areas . Still, with my decent grasp of Serbo-croatian (it's called that for a reason you know ) I could understand the locals fine, and vice versa.

 

[Spruce]

I really think splitting Flemisch from Dutch is a big mistake. The reasons why =

- the first evidence of the Dutch as a seperate dialect of the Germanic languages was a Flemisch text (Olla ...) - so Dutch and Flemisch are just the same,

- don't compare the current "Flemisch" with the current "Dutch", this is out of any perspective. Dialects where very different and have been scattered across the Netherlands and should not be the motivation for creating seperate cultures. Otherwise we'll end up with a truckload of cultures,

- overall I think one should be very selective on adding new criteria to split cultures - otherwise the game will end with a zillion of cultures.

Basicly the language line between Germanic and Romanic languages went from Bonen (Boulogne) trough Artesie trough Southern Brabant (Doornik was Romanic) trough Liege.

Perhaps Frisian could be considered seperate, because Frisian also was found in German and Danisch provinces - but it's hard to motivate the majority there was still Frisian... so even for seperate Frisian, there are no hard arguments.

Basicly - this thread should start with motivating why cultures should be seperated, not seperating them and then finding some motivation.

 

[unmerged(27913)]

Same goes for the whole Serb-croat hoax, really. I know too little about Bulgaria to say anything about that, but I say don't mess with South-slavic as it is, too many hairiness and people have killed eachother over less in those areas . Still, with my decent grasp of Serbo-croatian (it's called that for a reason you know ) I could understand the locals fine, and vice versa.

There is no such thing as "serbo-croat". Thats a name for the standard. As I said even this standard had two variants: western-croatian) and eastern-serbian.

And why would recent events influence this?!?! I mean that has no sense!!??!

Croatian and Serbian language and culture were two different and distinct cultures. To lump them toghether is no more wrong than making Portuguesse, Catalan and Castillan into one Iberian culture or to make Welsh, Scottish and English cultures into one British culture. I said it before and I'll say it again - if you can have separate Norwegian, Swedish and Danish culture than you can have distinct and separate Bulgarian, Serbian and Croatian culture....especially since differences were greater than in those three scandinavian cultures.

 

[unmerged(31117)]

If their was a distinct and unified linguistic/cultural South Slavic block covering all the lands that are South Slavic in CK, then the Byzantine Empire and the Ottoman Empire after it would have been in big trouble.

The loyalties of the population and the main cultural and linguistic divides were along tribal grounds, division that have persisted to this day, ie Croatian, Serbian, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Albanian.

If their was a unified South-Slavic identity, then why wasn't their a gigantic medieval yugoslavia popping up in that area? Each an every one of those countries would resurface as an independant nation by the end of the medieval era as Byzantine control crumbled. So it is likely that some transiant regional identity had developed, which is my justification for adding those cultures to the game.

 

[unmerged(1047)]

Exactly. We should not seperate cultures just because we can... especially in a game (unlike EUII or Victoria) where the culture actually has little effect (other than the names of characters). They should be seperated only where justified by history. Sure, I can see some points - Breton should be seperate from Frankish, since it is in EUII and for reasons that predate the CK era... etcetera. However, where divisions do not already exist in EUII, I think there needs to be some explanation why it is justified in the CK period and not later - Norman/Saxon/English being a good example here - or a case where the fusion of two or more cultures in EUII could be argued to be in error, a case I believe is best made in the case of Portuguese/Castillian/Catalan or Scottish/Irish/Welsh.

I would here point out that the melting-pot Iberian, Scandinavian, and Gaelic (or Celtic) cultures were the three most often argued about in EU2, with the Slavic/Serbo-Croatian grouping coming fourth (and with weaker arguments, not necessarily because the cultures were the same, but because they could be more accurately divided by other game methods such as religion).

And of course there's the limiting factor of tags. How much room do we have to work with in modifying the existing cultures? That is a question I have yet to see addressed.

 

[unmerged(27913)]

If their was a distinct and unified linguistic/cultural South Slavic block covering all the lands that are South Slavic in CK, then the Byzantine Empire and the Ottoman Empire after it would have been in big trouble.

The loyalties of the population and the main cultural and linguistic divides were along tribal grounds, division that have persisted to this day, ie Croatian, Serbian, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Albanian.

If their was a unified South-Slavic identity, then why wasn't their a gigantic medieval yugoslavia popping up in that area? Each an every one of those countries would resurface as an independant nation by the end of the medieval era as Byzantine control crumbled. So it is likely that some transiant regional identity had developed, which is my justification for adding those cultures to the game.

Indeed. Well said.

 

[unmerged(27913)]

The main problem with uniting cultures the way it was done as in EU2 is the problem with names. All cultures had distinct names that were used only by that culture....thats as I see it the only and the most important role of culture in the game. To transfer the EU2 system in CK is just not posibble.

Oh and I agree completly with Spruce regarding the Flemish/Dutch issue. I've heard and read some pretty detailed esseys on this issue and what was especially interesting claims that Flemish is actually the real Dutch, while the Dutch is nothing but a standard of all dialects spoken in the Low Countries since each province and even village had it's own dialect so to speak.
Flemish and the Dutch are the same thing really.

 

[unmerged(1047)]

I was personally under the impression that the main differences between Croatian, Serbian and Bosnian were of a religious variety, which would be addressable in the game without seperate cultures? (It seems to me that in modern times Croatia is Catholic, Serbia Orthodox, and Bosnia Muslim?) If they do in fact have a mutual language, it might be difficult to explain seperate cultures based solely upon religious grounds.

As for Finnelach's point... I think you misunderstood me. What I intended was to use the EU2 system as a starting point, and make modifications only where they could be justified by an actual historical argument, rather than simply at the whims of the forums. There were reasons that certain groups - which some players might regard as seperate cultures - were combined there, and others not. I would advocate making changes only where arguments could be made that those combinations were either in error or do not apply to the CK timeframe due to cultural changes in the meantime.

 

[AKjeldsen]

Misrepresenting

Anglo-saxon was a term invented later on by historians to seperate the two Englands, pre-Norman and Norman England. William and his imported Norman aristos were not English by any stretch of the imagination.

Since their homeland more or less was Normandy and the Saxon aristocracy's homeland was England, and they presumably had more in common with the general English population than the Norman's did, it is not fair to make them not English but 'Saxon' even though they thought of themselves as English and would probably have thought Saxon was someone who lived in Saxony in Germany.

English culture was 'anglosaxon culture'.

Well, it's obvious that the culture of England anno 1065 and that of England anno e.g. 1300 are two very different things, a difference to a considerable part caused by the invasion of 1066 and the influence of French culture over the following centuries. I should say that it makes pretty good sense to term the one 'Anglo-Saxon' and the other 'English', just to tell them apart.

That the inhabitants of England did not call themselves 'Anglo-Saxons' is not very relevant, if using such a term can help to emphasize or clarify a particular historical development.

 

[unmerged(27913)]

I was personally under the impression that the main differences between Croatian, Serbian and Bosnian were of a religious variety, which would be addressable in the game without seperate cultures? (It seems to me that in modern times Croatia is Catholic, Serbia Orthodox, and Bosnia Muslim?) If they do in fact have a mutual language, it might be difficult to explain seperate cultures based solely upon religious grounds.

I must say you were under wrong impression. Croatia, Bosnia and Serbia do have a rather similar(some say it's the same but it's not) language. The Croatian and Serbian languages were two separate entites and developed distinctively from each others. If you look at the Croatian poets from 15th century(and earlier) and up to the 19th century they all called and wrote in a distinct Croatian language. Only in 19th century when Croats, Serbs and Slovenes nations started to seek their freedom the languages started to come closer.

Bosnian is in some ways the true "Serbo-Croatian" since it's really a mix of the two but also has many Turkish words and a distinct and special accent which if the speaker is talking really fast can be mistaken even for Turkish or some similar language.
But as I said Bosnian(Bosniak) didn't develop until very late....in the medieval period with which CK deals there was no such culture....it had yet to be created.