Kamil Galeev Profile picture
Aug 26, 2022 13 tweets 4 min read Read on X
Interesting dialogue between Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan presidents. They don't conversate in Russian, but in their native tongues. Both languages are Turkic, but belong to different language sub-groups: Azeri is Oghuz, Kazakh is Kipchak. Therefore, pronunciation is very different
Oghuz speaking area stretches from Khwarazm in Uzbekistan to Eastern Thrace. Turkish, Azeri, Turkmen have the most speakers. Oghuz languages have harsh pronunciation, much harsher than Kipchak ones
Kipchak speaking zone is stretching from Kyrgyzstan in the southeast to the Tatarstan in the northwest, plus plenty enclaves in the Caucasus. Kipchak accent is much softer. From my perspective Anatolian Turkish sounds as if Russian who doesn't know Tatar was trying to speak Tatar
Another prominent group is Karluk. It has only two big languages: Uzbek and Uyghur. Anecdotally, some of my Uzbek acquaintances found Uyghur far more understandable than some of the "dialects" (=separate languages ofc) at their home country
While Oghuz, Kipchak and Karluk languages are kinda mutually understandable (though mutually funny sounding), Chuvash language is not. Tatars can understand Kazakhs, and even Anatolian Turks if they speak slowly enough. We cannot understand Chuvashs
Chuvash language is so isolated because it is the last remnant of Old Bulgaria. With its destruction, one group migrated to Danube, another to Volga. Danube Bulgars switched to Slavic (=Bulgaria), Volga Bulgars to Kipchak (=Tatars) by around 1400. Only Chuvashs did not
Apart from the Oghuz, Kipchak, Karluk and Oghur (=Chuvash) languages, there are also languages of Siberia. They are more distant from the rest though as they do not share Islamic heritage and Farsi/Arab vocabulary like others
Most Turkic cultures are very Persianate. That's why they belong to the "Stan" zone, adopting this Farsi work for a country in their official naming. There is only one nation keeping the ancient Turkic name for the country. It's Mari El. Interestingly enough, they're Finno-Ugric
Mari may be the last authentic pagans in Europe, still worshipping in the sacred woods and sacrificing geese to their gods. Their history is poorly known and generally misunderstood
Now Mari people are clustered in the ethnic republic Mari El and also have large enclaves in what is now Bashkortostan, where they escaped from the Russian conquest in the 16th c. Around the year 1500 though they were probably far more numerous
Most probably Finno-Ugrics comprised the bulk of Kazan Khanate population, being only partially touched by the Turkic and Islamic culture. Their mass conversion to Islam happened later. At least its well-documented part starts around the 18th c, long after the Russian conquest
That's a poorly known and somewhat counterintuitive story. Mass Islamization of the Middle Volga happened not under the Muslim power as one could expect, but centuries later, when Islam was a second class and persecuted religion of the Muscovite Tsardom and the Russian Empire
I'll go into details in a next thread on how Volga became Muslim. The end

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More from @kamilkazani

Sep 7
Yes, and that is super duper quadruper important to understand

Koreans are poor (don't have an empire) and, therefore, must do productive work to earn their living. So, if the Americans want to learn how to do anything productive they must learn it from Koreans etc
There is this stupid idea that the ultra high level of life and consumption in the United States has something to do with their productivity. That is of course a complete sham. An average American doesn't do anything useful or important to justify (or earn!) his kingly lifestyle
The kingly lifestyle of an average American is not based on his "productivity" (what a BS, lol) but on the global empire Americans are holding currently. Part of the imperial dynamics being, all the actually useful work, all the material production is getting outsourced abroad
Read 8 tweets
Sep 1
Reading Tess of the d'Urbervilles. Set in southwest England, somewhere in the late 1800s. And the first thing you need to know is that Tess is bilingual. He speaks a local dialect she learnt at home, and the standard English she picked at school from a London-trained teacher
So, basically, "normal" language doesn't come out of nowhere. Under the normal conditions, people on the ground speak all the incomprehensible patois, wildly different from each other

"Regular", "correct" English is the creation of state
So, basically, the state chooses a standard (usually, based on one of the dialects), cleanses it a bit, and then shoves down everyone's throats via the standardized education

Purely artificial construct, of a super mega state that really appeared only by the late 1800s
Read 10 tweets
Aug 9
There's a subtle point here that 99,999% of Western commentariat is missing. Like, totally blind to. And that point is:

Building a huuuuuuuuuuge dam (or steel plant, or whatever) has been EVERYONE's plan of development. Like absolutely every developing country, no exceptions Image
Almost everyone who tried to develop did it in a USSR-ish way, via prestige projects. Build a dam. A steel plant. A huge plant. And then an even bigger one

And then you run out of money, and it all goes bust and all you have is postapocalyptic ruins for the kids to play in
If China did not go bust, in a way like almost every development project from the USSR to South Asia did, that probably means that you guys are wrong about China. Like totally wrong

What you describe is not China but the USSR, and its copies & emulations elsewhere
Read 7 tweets
Jul 7
Victory has a hundred fathers, defeat is an orphan

Everyone is trying to appropriate the rise of China for their own purposes, like it proves their theory, ideology whatever

No one, however, wants to appropriate the post-Soviets, who, by the way, also made capitalist reforms
What I am saying is that "capitalist reforms" are a buzzword devoid of any actual meaning, and a buzzword that obfuscated rather than explains. Specifically, it is fusing radically different policies taken under the radically different circumstances (and timing!) into one - purely for ideological purposes
It can be argued, for example, that starting from the 1980s, China has undertaken massive socialist reforms, specifically in infrastructure, and in basic (mother) industries, such as steel, petrochemical and chemical and, of course, power

That was almost entirely state's job
Read 4 tweets
Jul 1
The primary weakness of this argument is that being true, historically speaking, it is just false in the context of American politics where the “communism” label has been so over-used (and misapplied) that it lost all of its former power:

“We want X”
“No, that is communism”
“We want communism”
Basically, when you use a label like “communism” as a deus ex machina winning you every argument, you simultaneously re-define its meaning. And when you use it to beat off every popular socio economic demand (e.g. universal healthcare), you re-define communism as a synthesis of all the popular socio economic demands
Historical communism = forced industrial development in a poor, predominantly agrarian country, funded through expropriation of the peasantry

(With the most disastrous economic and humanitarian consequences)

So, yes, living under the actual communism sucks
Read 5 tweets
Jun 28
Some thoughts on Zohran Mamdani’s victory

Many are trying to explain his success with some accidental factors such as his “personal charisma”, Cuomo's weakness etc

Still, I think there may be some fundamental factors here. A longue durée shift, and a very profound one Image
1. Public outrage does not work anymore

If you look at Zohran, he is calm, constructive, and rarely raises his voice. I think one thing that Mamdani - but almost no one else in the American political space is getting - is that the public is getting tired of the outrage
Outrage, anger, righteous indignation have all been the primary drivers of American politics for quite a while

For a while, this tactics worked

Indeed, when everyone around is polite, and soft (and insincere), freaking out was a smart thing to do. It could help you get noticed
Read 8 tweets

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