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Talk:Kurdistan
Nation[edit]
The Kurds hit just about every item in the checklist you learned about in PoliSci 101 about what a nation is -- a people who occupy a given territory with a shared culture/history/language and, most importantly, a shared sense of identity. The fact that they have no state is irrelevant to that (lots of nations have no state) and the fact that said territory is spread across a plural number of existing states is a tad unusual, but does not change the Kurds' national imagining. Read your Benedict Anderson and then change it back. Peace. AgingHippie (talk) 06:53, 12 December 2015 (UTC)
- The Kurds are a nation, Kurdistan is a region. CorruptUser (talk) 07:07, 12 December 2015 (UTC)
- ^, like I said in my summary, Germans are a nation to which Germany (And Austria, and parts of Switzerlan) is the nationstate, unless you're proposing we should be calling the people inside Uzbekistan the Uzbekistans.--"Paravant" Talk & Contribs 07:20, 12 December 2015 (UTC)
- I disagree, since even though the people in this area all generally speak German, they don't generally consider themselves as a single (imagined) community. The Swiss I'm particular tend consider themselves as clearly apart from Austrians and Germans. The above logic would be similar to claiming that the UK, US, Australia, and New Zealand are all one nation split between four states. ScepticWombat (talk) 08:54, 12 December 2015 (UTC)
- Come the revolution, we shall all be vassals of Greater Canuckistan anyway. CamelCasePragmatist (talk) 12:47, 12 December 2015 (UTC)
- My bad for forgetting the poutine-munching soon-to-be overlords in the list; all hail Trudeau, Super-Maximus-Über-Suppreme-Leader-Dictator! ScepticWombat (talk) 13:11, 12 December 2015 (UTC)
- More to the point, who gets to be Metropolitan Anglophonia, and who will be relegated to the overseas part, or further marches?
- My bad for forgetting the poutine-munching soon-to-be overlords in the list; all hail Trudeau, Super-Maximus-Über-Suppreme-Leader-Dictator! ScepticWombat (talk) 13:11, 12 December 2015 (UTC)
- Come the revolution, we shall all be vassals of Greater Canuckistan anyway. CamelCasePragmatist (talk) 12:47, 12 December 2015 (UTC)
- I disagree, since even though the people in this area all generally speak German, they don't generally consider themselves as a single (imagined) community. The Swiss I'm particular tend consider themselves as clearly apart from Austrians and Germans. The above logic would be similar to claiming that the UK, US, Australia, and New Zealand are all one nation split between four states. ScepticWombat (talk) 08:54, 12 December 2015 (UTC)
- ^, like I said in my summary, Germans are a nation to which Germany (And Austria, and parts of Switzerlan) is the nationstate, unless you're proposing we should be calling the people inside Uzbekistan the Uzbekistans.--"Paravant" Talk & Contribs 07:20, 12 December 2015 (UTC)
- As for the Kurds, it would be interesting to see a map, shaded to show their fraction of the local population in geographic chunks about the size of the average US county. CamelCasePragmatist (talk) 13:30, 12 December 2015 (UTC)
- But we still aren't calling the -nation- itself by the country they are from. Austrians are not austrias, Swiss germans are not switzerlands, etc. --"Paravant" Talk & Contribs 14:00, 12 December 2015 (UTC)
- Wait, you mean France is not a nation? Talking past one another is a nicer way to put it than calling shenanigans on semantic pettifoggery. CamelCasePragmatist (talk) 14:16, 12 December 2015 (UTC)
- France is a nationstate and country, the French are a nation. --"Paravant" Talk & Contribs 15:23, 12 December 2015 (UTC)
- A country that represents a people that identifies as a nation is often called a nation itself too, e.g. "the French nation" and "France" are often used interchangably. Whether that use is technically correct depends on what you consider as the technically correct definition. In a nutshell: language is subjective. 141.134.75.236 (talk) 16:37, 12 December 2015 (UTC)
- Indeed it is, but how many people are calling it the Kurdistan nation when referring to the people, and not "the Kurds"?--"Paravant" Talk & Contribs 17:27, 12 December 2015 (UTC)
- A country that represents a people that identifies as a nation is often called a nation itself too, e.g. "the French nation" and "France" are often used interchangably. Whether that use is technically correct depends on what you consider as the technically correct definition. In a nutshell: language is subjective. 141.134.75.236 (talk) 16:37, 12 December 2015 (UTC)
- France is a nationstate and country, the French are a nation. --"Paravant" Talk & Contribs 15:23, 12 December 2015 (UTC)
- Wait, you mean France is not a nation? Talking past one another is a nicer way to put it than calling shenanigans on semantic pettifoggery. CamelCasePragmatist (talk) 14:16, 12 December 2015 (UTC)
- But we still aren't calling the -nation- itself by the country they are from. Austrians are not austrias, Swiss germans are not switzerlands, etc. --"Paravant" Talk & Contribs 14:00, 12 December 2015 (UTC)
- As for the Kurds, it would be interesting to see a map, shaded to show their fraction of the local population in geographic chunks about the size of the average US county. CamelCasePragmatist (talk) 13:30, 12 December 2015 (UTC)
Kurdistan may be a nation without a country. Yet. RW's article on polyglot India calls it both a country and a nation, in different paragraphs. It may have been Georges Clemenceau who asked, "What? Must every little language have its own country?" in the aftermath of the War to End All Wars. CamelCasePragmatist (talk) 17:56, 12 December 2015 (UTC)
- And Monsieur Clemenceau just happened to be in charge of an empire and lording it over a lot of "small languages"... Not that language is necessarily the distinguishing factor, though it quite often is. ScepticWombat (talk) 22:07, 12 December 2015 (UTC)