Catalan Paper

Now that the Nihonjinron idea has come into being, been developed just a bit, and been planted, I can start thinking about Catalan. It's troubling me a bit, not because I'm not interested, but because I've already written a similar paper - the interrelationship between the Basque language and separatist movement in Spain, as compared to that of Catalan. I could write the same paper in reverse, but of course that would be too much double dipping, and even if I were tempted to try it, I'm actually turning this paper in to the same professor.

There are other topics I could write on, yes, but they are less personal. For some reason there are tons of books about Women Writers in Catalunya, for example But what kind of essay can I write about them? I could read one or two books in English, or a few short stories, but reading even one short story in Catalan would be hard, and anyway I feel that I lose the whole point if I'm analyzing literature from a linguistic perspective and it's translated. And anyway I'm not interested in the topic, not in the same way that I'm interested in language and mannerisms and little things. cultura has always been more interesting to me than Cultura - daily life endlessly more fascinating than the arts of high society.

Anyway I went and picked up some books. One of them begins with a foreword that's just quote after quote about the connection between language and identity, and I love each one. Language brings out such emotion in people - more than any other aspect of culture, perhaps. Not that language and culture are the same thing, but that language is perhaps the heart of a culture - anything else is decoration.

I'm just going to start doing research and see where it takes me. That usually works.

The books I picked up:

Catalunya, One Nation, Two States by Alexander Alland
This is the one that starts with all the language quotes.

Catalonia, a Self Portrait, by Sorber
This is a collection of excerpts and short stories from translated Catalan literature that is supposed to build a portrait of the culture.

Escribir la Catalanidad, by Stewart B. King
Basically, why it's impossible to describe the Catalan culture in Spanish. Or something like that. And the book is written in Spanish, about Catalan, by a guy with a rather un-Spanish and un-Catalan name. ??

Hmmm... noticing these titles juxtaposed makes me think of something else. There's so much about Catalan and Catalunya, but Catalan isn't spoken only in Catalunya - also in Andorra, the Balearic Islands, the South of France, even a little slice of Sicily. And this intrigues me too... And I found out that at one point, a few hundred years ago, there was a veritable Catalan empire stretched horizontally across the Mediterranean, and the Catalans at one point held Athens.