Welcome! / Bienvenue!
English is my native language et le français est ma deuxième langue.
update: Sep, 1 2026
September time, university on! I would like to thank you all, viewers! I learned an infinite amount of nationalism during this summer. I will present all of my research throughout this summer.
Look up the scholar Anthony D. Smith - He's a name that will pop up as a citation in pretty much every single research paper that exists talking about nationalism. I would like to read two of his books:
---August 4, 2026---
August 13 2026:
Ciceronean Eloquence
Patten starts his section by showing the reader Cicero's concept of eloquence, which is "the power that speech possesses of being persuasive... the art of speaking in a persuasive manner". Cicero emphasizes the power of the orator using eloquence, stating: "A community's stock of eloquence is as indispensable as its supply of armaments, and its orators as important as its generals". Moreover, he highlights the goal of the orator is not only to "secure belief", but also to "exhort his listeners to act in certain ways" by using his speech to "rouse feelings such as pity, anger, envy, outrage, and patriotism". In the words of Patten, Cicero claimed that the perfect orator excels because of one quality more than any other: his use of language.
Patten identifies Style, one of the five traditional aspects of rhetoric (invention, arrangement, style, memory, delivery), as an important aspect of oratory in the interest of the "social importance of language". Cicero distinguishes (1) Correct use of language, (2) Clarity in the use of langauge, (3) Ornatus (distinction, ornamentation) in the use of language, (4) Appropriate use of language. Let's speed through with some highlights: Cicero says any "true offspring of Roman blood can be assumed to posses [the first element of style - proper command of language]". Then he writes on that everyone should cease making grammatical mistakes, and that "good Latin involves 'refined diction' or the careful and tasteful choice of words". Moreover, Cicero states that a refined and precisely calibrated word should always be selected over a common or 'vulgar' word. He writes further that "the correct usage [of Latin] can be learned through study of the language employed by the ancient orators and poets". Patten throws in his observation that Cicero likely associated "correct usage" with "the recieved manner of speaking of the Roman elite". On the use of foreign words in Latin, Cicero has no hard nativist position. He was a "great admirer" of Greek culture and learning and borrowed Greek terms "liberally"... yet he avoided Greek words in his speeches according to Patten. An interesting idea I found was that Cicero thought the persuasive power of oratory would be enhanced through "an adoption of the patterns of speech" of the "most influential and prestigious members of the community" (in his society: Upper class, native-born Romans).
Cicero's society was very stratisfied, nobles were on top of everything. His work on eloquence and style was very much advice for leaders to secure the hearts and minds of powerful elites, not so much the general Roman public which had no such power. In the future, his advice would be used by European Reniassance humanists to revive the Latin language, then revive, standardize, enrich, and eventually, make dominant their own vernacular languages (English, French, German, Italian etc). Language plays a role in glorifying the deeds of statesmen.
August 4 2026: I'm learning more about the relationship between politics and language. Before having read Politics and the English Language by George Orwell, I hadn't even considered its relationship. I was wholly focused on the idea of both "linguistic nationalism" and "civic nationalism" and their development through history. It was also at this point that I started to learn about modern humanism, which I find so relatable to my way of thinking about the world and of my view of "civic nationalism"[1]. This research paper gave me so much information about the development of lingustic nationalism. For today, I will only write of the first part of Patten's paper which focuses on politics and the use language.
[1] What is Humanism?---July 5, 2026---
I thoroughly enjoyed reading Orwell's essay. It focuses on the use of words and phrases in the English language that modern English writers use "incorrectly", "grossly", and unconsciously -making the langauge "slovenly". At the start, he presents quotes that exhibit "disgusting" modern English, and critiques them. An interesting point he makes is how words help people think their thoughts and talk their talks for them. He observes the use of ready-made phrases and foreign words in English which save people time and energy using what he calls "a pretentious, Latinized style" when creating a political speech or writing piece (usually on the fly). This unconscious usage adds to the "lifeless, imitative style" of political orthodoxy- saying and writing stuff that stays within "the party line". Then, we get to the section of his work about using language to defend "the defencible, and indefencible".
Orwell is quite critical of the USSR in real life and I find that he's obsessed with how people try and justify its actions as a totalitarian state. ""Consider for instance some comfortable English professor defending Russian totalitarianism. He cannot say outright, "I believe in killing off your opponents when you can get good results by doing so." Probably, therefore, he will say something like this: While freely conceding that the Soviet régime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigors which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement."" He notes that Latin words cover up the brutality of messaging, all the words falling softly "like snow". In addition, I was further surprised how ugly information can be sneakily spun into a cocoon of neutral/expert sounding words: "Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers".
Somewhere in the essay, Orwell presents an interesting (admittedly unsupported) theory to the reader "that the German, Russian and Italian languages have all deteriorated in the last ten or fifteen years as a result of dictatorship". With this, I made a great connection to the introduction of a book called: Café Europa: Life after Communism by Slavenka Drakulic, an ex-Yugoslav citizen that recounts an abuse of her language. She complains about growing up in communist Yugoslavia with the pronouns "we" and "us" and how her people "did not exist in any other grammatical form", adding that it was a sort of self-censorship being forced to constantly refer to herself in the "first-person plural". Using the "first-person singular" was dissident. If you used it, everyone around you would call you an "archaic element" and those that kept on using it had to flee the country. We may see this as a deterioration of her language under dictatorship. After the fall of communism, she notes that Eastern Europe is united by the word "we". Not only because of its shared communist past, but shared desire of escape.
After having read Politcs and the English Language, I can't help but notice connections everywhere. Immigration is a concept I hear a lot about and would like to study, and I observe the use of vocabulary: mass migration, invasion, remigration. I find that Orwell successfully sums politics all up: ""In our age there is no such thing as "keeping out of politics." All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia"".
