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What’s with this “Wren” thing?
The oldest extant version of the fable
we
are presenting here appeared in 1913 in the first volume of a two-volume anthology
of Low
Saxon folktales (Plattdeutsche
Volksmärchen “Low German Folktales”)
collected by Wilhelm Wisser (1843–1935). Read
more ...
Crimean
Turkic
Once
a Soviet dissident, Mustafa
Abdülcemil Qırımoğlu (Cemilev)
currently leads the Crimean
“Tatars”
in reasserting themselves after
centuries of repression.
Language information:
Crimean Turkic—also known as “Crimean Tatar” (Kırım Tatarçası, КЪырым Татарчасы) and “Crimean Turkish” (Kırım Türkçesi, КЪырым Тюркчеси)—is neither Tatar nor Turkish.
It is the language of the Turkic people whose traditional
homeland is the Crimean Peninsular, nowadays a part of Ukraine. It is a Turkic
language that is fairly closely related to Turkish, Azeri and Turkmen.
Since
1944, Crimean Tatar has been scattered to many parts of the former Soviet Union—mostly
to Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and other parts of Ukraine, with sizeable communities
in Turkey, Bulgaria and Romania. This is the result of forcible extradition
of the Turkic population under the Stalinist regime, one of numerous atrocities
committed during the Second World War. A Crimean Tatar movement now seeks
to reverse it by means of a physical, linguistic and cultural return to their
homeland. Furthermore,
there
is a Crimean Tatar movement seeking to replace the Cyrillic script for spelling
Crimean Tatar (which had been forced upon all Turkic peoples under Stalin’s
regime) with a Roman-based
one that shares much with the systems used for Azeri and Turkish.
Krymchak is
the very closest relative of Crimean Tatar, might best be considered a dialect
of
it. It is used by so-called “Krymchaks,” namely by Turkisized Crimean Jews, and
its main feature consists of Hebrew-derived lexical elements.
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