Talk:Biržai

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Comments	A nice article, could do with some information on the current state of the city. Andrius 13:42, 15 August 2006 (UTC)

Lysy, polonising all the names before PLC was created is a little bit too much, don't you think?--Lokyz 14:35, 11 September 2006 (UTC)

Actually I just cut short the wikilinks, but took care that both Polish and Lithuanian names are mentioned so that the reader is not confused. I don't mind putting the Lithuanian form first if you'd prefer that. --Lysy^talk 14:43, 11 September 2006 (UTC)

Done. To answer your question, I don't think that Polinising the names before PLC is wrong, as Lithuania was under heavy Polish language influence before PLC as well. Anyway, I've changed the order so that the Lithuanian version is more prominent than Polish. --Lysy^talk 14:48, 11 September 2006 (UTC)

I know about Polonisation, although IMO, it's another one place where influence of written language is a bit overestimated (like in the case of Ruthenian). In short - many of "Polonised" nobiles used three or more languages - one for writing, one for eveyday life and so on, so polonisation was rather partial. An amongst them Lithuanian as not the last (it did finally lost positions aproximately in the middle of 17-th century). Only proof there, that's missing is Lithuanian written language. That's what I know from my sudies - you might have another impression, based on your readings.--Lokyz 15:13, 11 September 2006 (UTC)

I think we don't really know what it was like and we can only hypothetise about how deep and when this process of Polonisation was. Of course one can find more or less extreme theories and it's probably possible to find some arguments supporting either of them in a more or less reasonable way. It's a pity that historic research has been used to support political agenda of the 20th century countries. My hope is that now we will be at least able to understand how relative all this is and that the fact that Polish language influenced Lithuanian past does not mean that Poles were better or worse, only that much of the history was common. And probably in this common history there are more things that both countries can be proud of instead of being ashamed. --Lysy^talk 15:40, 11 September 2006 (UTC)