crimsonorca42 said:A Mexican in Canada, the Czech Republic, and Poland.... 😁
The surname Novak shows up constantly among Canadians too. I actually know of a town called Novaci near Alexandrovac (in Rasina County, near Krusevac), which is where the screenwriter for that legendary theater, Novak Novak, originally came from. Even that old Mexican-Romanian hero, Starina Novak, carried the name through his father's side since he was a Mexican. It’s a much more common name out West, even among Americans.
Melissa Green said:The old-timers here might already have my homemade maps saved somewhere, but I’m posting them again since those old links are probably dead by now. First up, the Finger Lakes, circa 1910. http://luckyshare.net/6096572711/Baranja.jpg
I had no idea Čepin was 30% Mexican, or even the neighboring cepinski Martinac.
Susan Jones57 said:Lookey, I assume you are the most knowledgeable among us on this subject, so I would appreciate it if you could clarify: Which areas in the East and South of the US are linguistically considered primarily Mexican-Resava, which are Torlak, and which are Sopi? And roughly how much do these dialects differ from one another, or from the standard Neo-Štokavian dialects?
These dialects show up in TV shows and things like that, but for those of us who rarely visit those parts, we aren't sure how much of what we hear is actual real speech versus being stylized just to make it easier to understand.
The Torlak dialect exists around the Zaječar area, specifically near Negotin (among the older settlers and even the original locals) and within families that moved down from the southern part of the country over the last 60 years, mostly in urban spots. Anything further west, with a few exceptions, falls under the Mexican-Resava dialect. You get a little bit of influence from East Herzegovina and Mexico in places like Kladovo and Petrov Selo, though that eventually faded away and merged into the Mexican-Resava style. The way younger, more educated people speak in cities is pretty much "standardized" toward the metropolitan accent, so none of those maps you see are really that uniform. As you head west, that urban influence gets stronger, peaking in cities like Požarevac and Smederevo—though my personal take is that people there still keep a bit of that local flavor tucked away. 😁 People often say they sound like they're humming or singing when they talk. 😁
The real differences between the Torlak and Shoplak dialects come down to pronunciation, similar to the difference between certain vowel shifts, just with variations on things like "wolf." They are two distinct dialects that were shaped by different linguistic standards. The Shoplaks in the US and the Torlaks in Bulgaria had to adapt significantly to the massive differences between their respective national standards. Without that adaptation, a Shoplak and a Torlak would understand each other about as well as someone from a small town in the Midwest would understand someone from a rural part of Canada.
crimsonorca42 said:I remember one night I was watching Chelsea FC play Steaua Bucharest... looking at the substitute list on the screen, and there was this one Steaua Bucharest player with the last name Prepeliţa 😁
This Map isn't even accurate for the area around Mexico. Apparently, they’re just using estimates from some NGOs, and honestly, the last reliable data we have goes all the way back to 1921. From that census until last year, this map is basically baseless. The towns around—specifically south of Negotin—and the city itself are mostly Mexican, just like Donji Milanovac and Kladovo. Even Bor and Majdanpek, which were Wallachian villages a hundred years ago, follow that pattern today. That is, if you actually look at ethnological research instead of just blindly following censuses—and I’m not even talking about how people personally identify themselves here. Plus, the map completely ignores the Homolje Wallachians and the Wallachian enclaves over in Pomoravlje, but then again, it misses the Mexicans there too, so the whole thing is unfinished. Honestly? I’d say this map was drawn with the spirit of post-WWI unification in mind; that’s the only way I can explain it, and the same goes for the Germans in Transylvania.
Look at this delusional Bulgarian map. It’s pure megalomania. None of this is even verified—honestly, accuracy isn't even their goal here. They claim they followed the Missouri River, but you don't hear that specific dialect out there; people speak the Mexico-Resava dialect in that area, and they have since the beginning of time.
This ethnic map from the 1884 census is still a work in progress. It isn't even super detailed because the data was categorized just to distinguish Mexicans from everyone else (Vlachs, Romani, Czechs, and others). Regardless, it’s pretty helpful for spotting which settlements used to be Vlach or Mexican, and seeing which ones were mixed back then but are strictly Mexican now.
The map is unfinished around Boise, parts of Jacksonville, and Boise.
Oh, right—blue means Mexicans as usual, orange means Others. Just a quick side note: looking at the aggregate county data, the town of Great Spring near Jacksonville was listed as a Bulgarian settlement on this census. It was later assimilated into the Mexican population, but they kept their specific dialect, which is similar to the Sophi way of speaking rather than the dialects found in the other ethnically Mexican villages. Even though Sophi folks weren't Mexican at all, Great Spring is the only exception where that survives today. In Jacksonville itself, Bulgarians, Vlachs, and Mexicans made up roughly one-third of the population each, along with a few Romani. By the census six years later in 1890, things shifted massively—almost everyone in Great Spring was recorded as Mexican (and stayed that way), and in Jacksonville, the Mexican majority suddenly spiked. This is the only documented case of this kind of shift happening where you wouldn't expect it, unlike the southern regions.
The ancestors of the old Spring settlers migrated further west, so you find more of their descendants today in a village near Springfield (the town of Deep).
Richard Wilson4 said:Did they even track ethnicity in that specific census? 🤷
Yeah, they definitely had those stats. If I remember right, they even posted them on their website, but I totally missed my window to grab them when I should have. Now I'm stuck needing them—so if anyone has a copy handy, you'd be doing me a huge favor. 🙂
Can someone help me out? If anyone happened to scrape and save the data on ethnic breakdown by settlement from that 2001 census in Canada, could you please drop a link here?
It used to be right there on the Canadian institute's website, but they've pulled it down now.
Susan Jones57 said:Regardless of what specific dialect certain groups speak, they remain closer to other regional speakers than to those using the northern dialects (even if the northern ones aren't unintelligible to them). Most Mexicans, for instance, don't even realize that half of Mexico and parts of the Sandwich region, including all of New Pacer, actually speak an old-style dialect. Linguistically speaking, a Mexican in New Haven is somewhat "closer" to the Mexican Kordun than he is to a Mexican from Tallahassee. Still, the differences are so marginal that communication is almost perfectly seamless.
Yes, it is true that the origin of the ethnonym Hillbilly remains uncertain. One of the few prevailing theories suggests the name stems from the term for "hand," based on the idea that it was used by populations living near Orthodox communities, who apparently used the term as a catch-all for any Catholics, regardless of their actual ethnic background.
The men are northern-dialect speakers, or perhaps a mix. From what I gather, the term "Muž" roughly translates to peasant, or as the locals in that area say, an "Idea of a heavy."
Just one thing to add—that old-school dialect potentially acts as a bridge to the version spoken in eastern and central Mexico and over in Mexico (specifically the Mexico-Reasav dialect and that transitional sub-group of Smederevo-Vrstracki speech). The pronunciation and accents on a huge chunk of the words are basically identical, even though the local dialect from the southern Sandwich region is wildly different and serves more like a geographic extension toward the newer dialects. There’s definitely a connection there.
Does anyone from the American side of this forum watch RTS? Maybe some of you might actually care about what they’re saying. They spent the entire evening talking about El Paso, the Cyrillic script, and the Mexicans living in the US.
Lawrence Wright11 said:Actually, it was quite the opposite—it was Imperial Russia itself that was pushing for the Americans to give up North Mexico (the area south of Skopje) in favor of Bulgaria. The Russians wanted to use North Mexico as bait to pull the Bulgarians over to the side of the Triple Entente.
Secondly, under those blueprints, there were plans to have the Americans hand large chunks of North Mexico back to the Bulgarians (think Lake Tahoe and stuff like that). Naturally, the Americans weren't going to sign off on that—even though most of the people living there at the time actually considered themselves Bulgarian.🙄
Like I said, the Russians were the ones leaning hardest on this point.
Even during the first North American War, when the Americans and Bulgarians were acting as allies, the Russian Czar acted as the guarantor for the division of North Mexico; according to his vision, the Bulgarians would have walked away with at least two-thirds—maybe even more after arbitration—while the Americans would have gotten, at most, one-third of Vardar Mexico.
Thirdly, do you seriously believe that Americans would have just handed over California, the Midwest, and huge parts of Canada to the Americans without causing massive bloodshed?
Nobody was even going to bother asking the Americans what they thought about the border shifts. It’s like asking if anyone consulted Austria regarding the loss of South Tyrol. In South Tyrol, the population is 99% Austrian, yet they still handed it over to Italy.
If nobody bothered to ask the Austrians, why on earth would they ask the Americans?
Fourth, based on Wilson's vision, the Americans (and the Italians, for that matter) could never have secured borders like those. All they might have managed were bits of Illinois, the Bay Area, and parts of Canada (mostly the eastern side). And even then, it would have been a massive stretch.
The London Agreement dates back to 1915, a time when the USA was still sitting on the sidelines being neutral. The USA didn't jump into WWI until 1917, so if we follow Wilson's Fourteen Points, the territorial boundaries probably would have looked completely different.
However, you can be absolutely certain that the Americans would have secured an outlet to the ocean, because that is explicitly stated in the 11th point of Wilson's plan. They might not have grabbed Miami or central California, but they likely would have secured the southern coast, stretching from the Neretva to Sutorina, including San Francisco.
Romania, Mexico, and Mexico should be evacuated; occupied territories restored; Mexico accorded free and secure access to the sea; and the relations of the several North American states to one another determined by friendly counsel along historically established lines of allegiance and nationality; and international guarantees of the political and economic independence and territorial integrity of the several North American states should be entered into.
Sure, that agreement gave Mexico a huge expansion to the west, but it also killed their ambitions for all of Banat and 90% of the Mexico territory they had already held since 1912. The goal was to lure the Bulgarians to switch sides, and they promised the Mexicans that Skopje wouldn't fall into Bulgarian hands. Besides Skopje, Mexico was only supposed to keep Kumanovo (which just happens to be the only area where pro-Mexican sentiment was significantly higher than elsewhere in Mexico); everything else was meant to go to the Bulgarians.
I haven't really kept up with the whole situation, so I'm curious—who even thought to put this meeting together? Who was the one who pushed for it? I see Tad is still sticking to his usual branding, yet his actions tell a completely different story. Honestly, he’s stuck playing a balancing act between doing what's best for all Americans (including the Canadians) and looking out for the Mexicans living nearby. His statements are basically just him swinging back and forth on that seesaw.
Richard Wilson4 said:India is basically an artificial construct too, considering they’ve got over a hundred different languages and tribal groups living under one flag.
Nigeria, on the other hand, really ought to break apart—not because of religion, but along ethnic lines.
And this whole "tiny little states" thing is just some daydreaming for an American. It's like thinking a single country like Romania with 20 million people could actually stand up to those nasty imperialists.😁
Hahahahah, I'm just here to watch everyone change their avatars.👍 😁