Thursday, September 27, 2018

The Frisian jokes are priceless




This book exists in three different versions. In 1992, Ingmar Karlsson (a Swedish diplomat) published “Det lilla Europa”, a guide to national minorities in Europe, many of them unknown even to a well-read person like myself. (I *had* heard of the Sarakatsani, though!) In 2003, a revised and updated version titled “Europas styvbarn” was published. And just the other month, a third and presumably expanded version saw the light of day, “De små folkens historia. Minoriteter i Europa”.

Karlsson is a good writer, but the editing is sometimes a bit sloppy, and a super-nerd could find some minor errors here and there, I mean, Mr Karlsson is unaware of the fact that the “Ukrainian” minority in eastern Slovakia were referred to as Ruthenian-Ukrainian (with a hyphen) in the Czechoslovak socialist constitution adopted in 1969…

That being said, these books look solid overall. The main problem is that they are only available in a peculiar European minority language: Swedish!

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