Nobody Expects The Catalan Imposition

Certain issues are still rumbling on - Clarkson and Catalan. Not the two of them together - God forbid - but the ongoing coverage of Jeremy's distaste for expats and the "Catalan imposition" in the English media suggests that they are either subjects of burning interest or those which have caught the interest of a vocal but small minority within the expat community. Clarkson is a matter of passing note, but the Catalan thing is most certainly not - "nobody expects the Catalan imposition; Biggles, the comfy chair". *

To what extent, though, should the Catalan thing be an issue for the Brits? It's not our language, so how can it be our debate? Insofar as officialdom works in that language alone, sometimes in contravention to the law which demands that both Catalan and Castilian are used, and insofar as the priority given to Catalan affects education, then it is an issue for many. But I don't know that I am alone in thinking that it isn't really my debate, or that of any other Brit, except in the sense of it being a genuinely interesting social-political-historical phenomenon.

It is too easy to seek to nuance this debate in ways that will chime with the British, as in, for example, comparing the Catalan situation with Welsh or Cornish. Such a comparison is wrong-headed. Catalan was and still is a genuine European language. It contributed significantly to European development until it was effectively granted second-language status through the Castile-Aragon union and the elevation to supremacy of Castilian as the language of nation, commerce and empire. And so it has been ever since, subject also to fascistic diktat that saw it proscribed. But it survived as a significant language. Because it did not acquire international status, unlike Castilian, is no reason to suggest its unimportance. Swedish is not an international language either, but no-one is proposing the Swedes give it up, and there are roughly the same number of Swedish speakers as there are Catalan speakers.

With the exception of Belgium, an arguably artificial construct in any event (if any country can be considered not to be artificial), nowhere else in western Europe is there a linguistic argument that compares as a political and social issue. For this reason, it is fascinating to observe and, for the most part, that it is what one has to do. The "Catalan imposition" may seem idiotic and politically motivated (I prefer to call it impractical, though I did say idiotic the other day), but unless one is a Catalan native speaker, I suspect one cannot understand fully the significance of the discussion. One is not of course suggesting that it is on anything like the same scale, but there remains the irony that Catalan, forcibly banned by Franco, should now be the tool for an imposition in reverse.


And that open road ...
It seemed just like the old days, not that those days are actually that old; only some six months old. For no other reason than it was there, I drove along the coast road as far as the Club Náutica roundabout in Puerto Pollensa, went round it and came back. Yep, the pedestrianisation experiment is truly over. But as I was coming back towards Alcúdia, it struck me that it would have been a damn good idea to have kept it in place. One forgets, quite quickly, the extent to which cyclists, people wandering in the middle of the road, vehicles parked up onto the kerbs can make the stretch in the port itself a nightmare to drive along. Bring it back!


QUIZ
Yesterday's title - Gary Barlow (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5dpHSeIZAI). Today's title - and this is a play on? * Before you mail me, it wasn't Biggles who was instructed to fetch the comfy chair.

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