🚀 go-pugleaf

Peer Mankpoot wrote:
> 
> MSZ schreef/citeerde op Fri, 22 Feb 2002 12:57:57 +0100:
> 
> > Well, in Polish we now also have the same common locution, but I think
> > it's not so much old (it must have come to Poland maybe from Italy in
> > the late Renaissance, durign the time of the Queen Bona Sforza (lat
> > XVIIth century), together with many other common expressions. The notion
> > "singing like nightingale" was criticised still in the beginning of the
> > XIXth century (i.a. by the famous Polis poet, Adam Mickiewicz, as a part
> > of a "foreign fashion", whereas we have many OWN nice-singing birds, but
> > unfortunately he does not enumerate them).
> 
> Xenophobia brought about by a bird of less than 10 cm in height - that
> is TRUE xenophobia! ;-)

I don't think that was xenofobia, as Poland at that time was really a
multinational country, it was a poem directed against those (be them
Polish, Lithuanian, Ruthenian etc.) who despised their own culture and
instead followed blindly (foolishly) the "Italian and French fashions" -
a trend quite popular in the XVIIIth century in our country, but which
gave plenty of rubbish in the language of that time, called
"makaronizm-s",  but which also gave a handful of fruitful ideas and
notions not easily distinguishable (THEN) from the maccaronistic
fashion. Even to the greatest poets. Especially in the times of fight
for preservation of the own culture after the tri-partition of Poland. 
(NB. After 1826 Adam Mickiewicz was himself forced by the tzarist
Russian government to emigrate from Poland, and he spent the rest of his
life mostly in France, but also in Switzerland and Italy and finally in
Turkey, where he even accepted Islam before his death. As a lecturer in
College de France he wasn't and couldnt be really xenophobic.).

Thanks for the reply on Dutch proverbs and lucutions with "-vink".


Maciej