Why are Galician and Portugese separate cultures?

[Zephyrum]

[citation needed]

I hope you realise Paradox and many others around the forums have already said that culture =/= language.

I do agree to an extent with the point, since there is very little reason to have one-province cultures (balkan people screeching in unison in the background); though, mostly for a game reason than a historical reason.

Galician has quite a few differences from Portuguese, given at gamestart they already had 300 years of diversion. This would only increase more and more during the EU4 timeframe.

 

[BeyondExpectation]

Yeah, I have read the article and 85% or "very high" is "merely partial" as well. The reason those three are only partial is that they're on a continuum such that Norwegians understand both, but Danes and Swedes have a harder time understanding each other. You see similar gradients in Iberia as well. Plus, that's based on the modern languages. The split started around the 1200's and, even till the 20th century, Danish was basically the written standard for Norwegian.

The cultures composing the Langues d'oïl (in-game Norman, Francien, Burgundian) and Langue d'Oc (i.e. Occitan) (in-game Occitan, Gascon, Aquitanian) were all mutually intelligible as well, should they be combined?


Not really - You're the one proposing the change, yet you've only provided a single citation based a one aspect of culture i.e. language. I frankly don't care one way or the other, but you haven't provided enough evidence they should be the same. The devs likely have better reasoning/sources for the split, but I don't have the time to waste looking crap up.

I get that your original post was "asking" for differences (i.e. sources) to justify the split, but your responses have been dismissive. If you were really "just interested" and wanted sources for further research, "citation needed" is a pretty rude response. Truth is, at least in English, it's hard to find primary sources justifying either splitting or combining, but just the fact that "Galician" is different enough to mention, referenced often, and that they developed under different sovereigns, is enough for me to support keeping them separate.

Sure, the cultural designations are somewhat fuzzy and there's no clear rule for what's split and what's not. Language, by itself, isn't enough. That's like saying American, English, & Australian are the same; or Mexican, Argentinian, Chilean, Filipino, and Spanish are the same. And yes, I understand all these developed outside the game's timeframe, but that's irrelevant because they're all counter-examples to the your claim that "Their languages are highly similar, why aren't they the same culture."

My responses have been dismissive because only one person has provided the slightest shred of evidence that the cultures had any differences at all (yes I know they did) - and that was when trying to justify something else. The Langues d'oïl maybe should be culturally unified; I wouldn't know. That's a whataboutism of a topic I have no opinion on. If you have no interest in actually answering the question, leave. Imagine if a forum had a rule against more than three semicolons in a post, and I asked why, saying that it resulted in either bad grammar or annoying post reworks. The equivalent of your position would be to say "you haven't supplied enough evidence that it should be changed", which is obviously absurd, off topic and containing an assumption of bad faith.

 

[BeyondExpectation]

Galician has quite a few differences from Portuguese, given at gamestart they already had 300 years of diversion.

Like what?

 

[Sfan]

But it works the other way around. If you advocate for changes, you need to provide scientific evidence or historical sources and submit them in the suggestion forum. It's not other people who have to prove that the game is already accurate. As it stands, there are many debatable things in the game regarding ideas, cultures, cores, events or such, and they will only be changed if there is clear evidence that something is ahistorical, offending, gamebreaking or something along this line. Even if an argument could be made for having these cultures together, this would not be a reason to change it so long as you can't prove that this is unacceptable that they are split.
I lack any scientific knowledge on the area, but as I understand, you may very well be able to argue that this would not be shocking to have the cultures grouped, but what you ought to do to have a chance is to prove that this is shocking that they are split. And to submit these evidences to the suggestion forum where devs will look at them.

 

[bregolan]

Its really simple why they are the same: Culture in the game serves as the base for unexistant countries linked to them. Galician culture serves for base to the Kingdom of Galicia, and portuguese serves as the base of the kingdom of portugal. Since they are different political entities you need two different cultures.

 

[YuriiH]

Like what?

1. Search for "Galician National Costume"
2. Search for " Portuguese National Costume"
3. Compare models.
4. Compare colours.
5. …
6. PROFIT!

 

[Dominion]

10/10 troll thread. Would read again.

Mental note: Mentioning culture triggers the whole board.

 

[Gnostek]

Swabian and Franconian are more mutually inteligible than any 'hispanic' languages, yet they are separate cultures.

As for why is galician a culture of its own, because the kingdom of galicia, the 'capital' of reconquista pilgrimage, deserves its own tag, if it did not have a culture of its own, it could not.

On a similar note, please add valencian culture and tag, seeing that catalonia core in alicante makes me want to throw up.
If you want to keep this ''dream catalonia' as is, give them cores on malta, sicily and corsica while we're at it!

 

[petertel123]

There are some questionable cultures in this game (ryazanian, what?), but galician is not one of them.

 

[BeyondExpectation]

1. Search for "Galician National Costume"
2. Search for " Portuguese National Costume"
3. Compare models.
4. Compare colours.
5. …
6. PROFIT!

I've now Googled them. Is there supposed to be something obvious that indicates that they were different in the EU4 era?

Its really simple why they are the same: Culture in the game serves as the base for unexistant countries linked to them. Galician culture serves for base to the Kingdom of Galicia, and portuguese serves as the base of the kingdom of portugal. Since they are different political entities you need two different cultures.

As for why is galician a culture of its own, because the kingdom of galicia, the 'capital' of reconquista pilgrimage, deserves its own tag, if it did not have a culture of its own, it could not.

This may be a reasonable justification. Was their any significant separatist movement in Galicia during or close to the EU4 era? If not, why is a Galician tag necessary?

If you advocate for changes, you need to provide scientific evidence or historical sources and submit them in the suggestion forum.

I'm not advocating changes; I'm asking why the game is the way it is, despite the (limited but much stronger than any counter anyone here has offered) evidence it should be different. If there is no such reason, then it's not a matter of providing sources to prove a negative as that would be like trying to prove that aircraft carriers weren't a significant factor in 16th century warfare.

 

[bregolan]

Because Galicia was a kingdom earlier and was the protagonist of the Irmandiño Revolts, not separatists, but a rebel movement related to the Galician culture. Galicia is a different tag because it is a different political entity. If there wasnt a galician culture and tag, Portugal should start with a core in Galicia, something that is absurd from every point of view.

Apart from that, ou are searcing for cultural differences in a period from which we dont know enough to develop serious differences between cultures, beyond language and, in that moment, galician and portuguese, were different. Their history is completely different since Portuguese independence, and history is also part of their culture. So yes, Galicia needs its own culture and its own tag, for historical precision sake.

 

[Gnostek]

There was not a separatist movement per se, but the regnant of the castilianc crown was always crowned as king of ''Castile, Leon and Galicia" galicia had its own cortes, fueros and judicial system. Therefore it deserves its own tag imo. And thus the culture.

 

[Sfan]

If you're asking why the game is the way it is, the answer is fairly easy. Game balance, they dislike cultures too big and try to split them to create flavour and allow for more tags who are primary tag of a culture.

 

[bregolan]

There was not a separatist movement per se, but the regnant of the castilianc crown was always crowned as king of ''Castile, Leon and Galicia" galicia had its own cortes, fueros and judicial system. Therefore it deserves its own tag imo. And thus the culture.

Well, I wasnt able to find any reference to the Cortes, fueros and judicial system of Galicia, but what can be assured without doubt is that Galicia was recogniced as a distinct territory inside Castile and previously the kingdom of León. Apart from that, galician people were conscious that Galicia was a region per se and that they were different from the portuguese people.

This may be a reasonable justification. Was their any significant separatist movement in Galicia during or close to the EU4 era? If not, why is a Galician tag necessary?

In fact they were different before the portuguese independence and portuguese nobles rebelled against king Garcia II to expell him.

In addition, considering that Portugal started from Galicia and if portuguese and galician cultures were so indinstinguishable, it should be portuguese culture the one that should be called galician, doesnt it?

It is representad this way in the game because it was like this in historical Galicia.

 

[Stadhouder]

The most simple explanation is game mechanics. If Galicia would have Portugese culture, you would get Portugese seperatists over there,

1. Search for "Galician National Costume"
2. Search for " Portuguese National Costume"
3. Compare models.
4. Compare colours.
5. …
6. PROFIT!

Did follow instructions, was dissapointed... no nudes.

 

[$ilent_$trider]

Ok, I will spend 5 minutes doing a quick search on cultural differences between galegos and portugueses.
Muñera: Dance originally from Gallicia and the neighbouring regions of Asturias (not portugal).
Vira: Portuguese dance that most historians believe came originally from Estremadura (probably mixing some moor dancing movements).

I'll just go with dance and music for now.
Since, at this point I have to assume you are being purposefully obtuse because if you really wanted to dig up differences, you would have found them instead of asking from others.
The portuguese culture, as much as they might not preach it as so, was heavily influenced by the moors when they took the reconquista to what is now the center-south of Portugual (in CK2 that would be the Beja and Algarve duchies), while the galegos pretty much kept the same kind of culture and language when that region was part of the Asturias Kingdom.

 

[MateuszNH]

Nowadays, the "languages" are mutually intelligible 85% of the time (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galician_language#Classification_and_relation_with_Portuguese), and that's after almost four centuries of being part of separate countries. Yes, I know culture's not the same as language, but it's significantly correlated. Does anyone know of any major differences between Galician and Portugese cultures around 1444 that would justify their separation?

well italy has over 6 own cultures. So why can't galicia ?

 

[Gheryon]

Could you please keep your horrible fascist propaganda to yourself? Perhaps listen to Cara al sol to calm you down?

i cant find that fascist propaganda you said

 

[rinehime]

My responses have been dismissive because only one person has provided the slightest shred of evidence that the cultures had any differences at all (yes I know they did) - and that was when trying to justify something else. The Langues d'oïl maybe should be culturally unified; I wouldn't know. That's a whataboutism of a topic I have no opinion on. If you have no interest in actually answering the question, leave.

No - It's not "whataboutism." "Whataboutism" fails to address an argument and/or aims at distraction. I was providing counter examples to your claim that the languages are very closely related therefore the cultures should be the same, I wasn't arguing that something should be done about the other culture groups. Many culture groups in the game share similar, if not the same language, as pointed out by:

Swabian and Franconian are more mutually inteligible than any 'hispanic' languages, yet they are separate cultures.

Culture doesn’t mean language. For example in the Chinese culture group Zhili and Zhongyuan would have both spoken Mandarin, yet they’re represented as different cultures

well italy has over 6 own cultures. So why can't galicia ?

These are all even better counter-examples than those I was using. The only argument you've proposed for grouping the two together is based on the flawed premise (as demonstrated by the above counter-examples) that language ≈ culture.

As for arguments to separate the two cultures, this is quite simple actually and the bar for doing so is very low. IRL, any cultural differences at all can be used as reasons to split up a culture group into smaller parts. There's an asymmetry here in that language differences alone are sufficient to justify a cultural split, but the same language is not sufficient to justify lumping them into the same culture. You can replace "language" with any other aspect of culture in the previous sentence, and it still holds.

The simple fact that Galicians called themselves by a different name - and therefore saw themselves as different from Portuguese - is all that is needed to define them as a different culture. If you want a citation, here's an entire book on "Culture and Society in Medieval Galicia" (Note, if you look at the linguistics section, they mention Galicia and Portuguese languages diverging sometime around 1250's, which they note is actually late compared to other estimates). The fact that the languages were different (despite a high degree of similarity) is also sufficient to justify a split As others have pointed out above, the split between the two was mainly due to the "cultural center" of Portugal shifting away from Galicia and south toward Lisboa (and some Moorish influences) following independence and the Reconquista. The importance of Santiago de Compostela also has a lot to do with Galician identity.

Given all this evidence, it's obvious that the IRL Galicians and Portuguese considered themselves different enough (but still related) to justify a cultural split. For the game, however, the question becomes, what level of granularity shall we represent and how does it affect gameplay? It's clear the devs have decided that having Galician cores present (for revolter tags / release-nation) was important.

There might be an argument that having one-province cultures isn't useful to gameplay and is an unnecessary complication. The devs have said they try to avoid it, when possible, but they've even given Galicia it's own ideas so they obviously want it as a separate tag/culture. You haven't made any arguments, about how unifying or separating the two is better or worse for gameplay, however.