Thursday, October 15, 2009

Commentary chapter 6

In the late 18th century and early 19th century, the ideology of nationalism began to rise. Nationalism was described as a person identifying themselves with a certain nation, their home country. Previously this was known as the right to fight off invaders to protect ones land or to expand it, but it has changed to nationalism. Then with the rise of nationalism, patriotism also began to emerge. This was having pride and loyalty to ones nation. Also during this time, democratization increased, and with this there was an increase in nationalism and patriotism. In that as politicians emerged, they pronounced patriotism. Also language nationalism began to rise, where nations wanted their citizens to read, write, and speak in their own language which would set them apart from other nations.

What I found interesting is how these nations were forming. It's kind of like they expanded their lands and now they need to make it official and call it a nation so that there wouldn't be any invaders taking their land. They invented languages to further pronounce the land as a nation. I wonder if the countries that had parts of their land taken away had a strong impression for nationalism. I wonder if they didn't want to label their plot of land as a nation until they took back or expanded their territory.

2 comments:

  1. I am not sure if this is what your asking or not, but I think there was a great attraction towards land that was taken away by somebody else.

    For example: there is a lot of fighting still going on between India and Pakistan over Kashmir since both have claims toward it since the partition of India.

    Also, I believe a part of the Austria-Hungarian Empire was part of the Prussian Empire and had Germans living in it. In the years prior to WWII, Germany was fighting hard to get that land back into its domain using the argument that there were Germans living there who were being oppressed by the A-Hers.

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  2. I think the World now needs a modern lingua franca as well :-)

    Why not decide on a neutral non-national language, taught worldwide, in all nations? I would prefer Esperanto

    Your readers may be interested in http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8837438938991452670.

    A glimpse of Esperanto can be seen at http://www.lernu.net

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