This week I was again delighted to learn a term that I’m reasonably sure I’d never read before. The word is irredenta, which is defined as “a territory historically or ethnically related to one political unit but under the political control of another.”
One reason I was a little surprised not to have seen irredenta before is because it came up in a discussion about language. I’m reading the book You Are What You Speak by Lane Greene about language, variation, and how we’ve tried to cope with this. There’s a chapter about how the rise of nation-states in Europe after the Middle Ages had a linguistic effect. Before, languages were spread across regions, with variations in the language from town to town and valley to valley, but with no centralized, standardized version of a language. However, with the rise of political nations and the establishment of national borders and the inevitable bureaucracy, countries imposed (often in coercive ways) an official version of a language. Not surprisingly, this was usually the dialect of the seat of government—in France, the dialect around Paris; in England, the dialect around London; in Spain, the dialect of Castile, where Madrid is (hence castellano as a synonym for Spanish).
But political divisions didn’t always correspond exactly to the “nation” of a people who spoke the same language. A good example was Germany, a country that gelled as a political entity quite late. When the borders of Germany were established in the latter part of the 19th century, the new country did not align exactly with German-speaking areas. Austria was a separate country; some German speakers were in the area that became Czechoslovakia; some were in Poland, and so on.
Hence irredenta, which was coined only in 1914 and comes from the Italian phrase Italia irredenta, meaning “unredeemed Italy.” The unification of Italy was comparatively late, like that of Germany, and as with Germany, not all Italian speakers ended up within the boundaries of modern Italy, including many in what was then Austria-Hungary. Thus some Italian speakers were “unredeemed.”
Irredenta, the mismatch of political and linguistic borders, gives rise to irredentism, which is a political movement that seeks to redress this issue. (Or that’s the excuse that’s often given; it’s probably vastly more often about territory and political control.) This has often had tragic outcomes. The most prominent one in the 20th century was Hitler’s attempt (excuse) to unite all German-speaking people into a single Reich. Late in the 20th century, when the government of the country formerly known as Yugoslavia collapsed, it unleashed a fury of irredenta-based conflicts. One of China’s claims to Tibet is its supposed interest in Chinese speakers there. And so on; Wikipedia has a long list of territories where irredentism is a source of conflict.
While I was thinking about this, it occurred to me that in a technical sense, North America has some level of irredenta. You can imagine a speculative history in which North America ended up divided into a French-speaking northeast, a Spanish-speaking southwest, and an English-speaking middle. It was probably fortunate that we weren’t all physically close to the linguistic centers that bequeathed us these languages and who, had it been more practical, might have carried their irredenta-inspired wars well past the 18th century, when they were all invited to go back home. We are certainly not without our language conflicts—for example, French-speaking Canadians have occasionally been inspired to try for political autonomy, and Spanish, even though it’s been spoken in American territory about as long as English, remains a second-class language in the US.
Anyway, irredenta. Also, I recommend Lane Greene’s book.
Here in Seattle, we’ve been having a great summer. It would be lovely indeed to have a backyard where I could sling a hammock and lie there reading. Hammock, hmm. Where do you suppose that word came from?
Well, in English, we probably got it from Spanish, where the word is hamaca. We borrowed it as early as 1555. That’s pretty early, which I say because the word got into Spanish from Taino, a language spoken in the Caribbean when Columbus arrived in 1492. So it got into English not terribly long after it got into Spanish.
I’m not able to determine whether that which we call a hammock—a hanging bed, especially of string—existed before then. In other words, did we borrow both the bed and the name for it at the same time? That would be in keeping with several other words that we got ultimately from Taino, including iguana, maize, and (probably) tobacco. These items were all new to Europeans when they got to the Caribbean, so they needed words for them.
On the other hand, we also got the word hurricane from Taino (via Spanish again). Surely the Europeans knew all about big sea-storms (“tempests”), but perhaps they thought of the ones they encountered in the West Indies as something unique that needed its own name. If sailors slept in hammocks before we had the word hammock, perhaps they thought of the Carib variety as a new-fangled thing that needed its own name also.
Like this? Read all the Friday words.