A linguist's advice about the Ukraine situation
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The linguist is Krišjānis Kariņš, the current prime minister of Latvia. And among other recent news stories, there's "West must brace for years of Putin pressure on Ukraine, Latvian PM says", Politico 2/18/2022:
Whether or not Moscow launches an attack on Ukraine in the coming days, the West must gear up for years of heightened Russian pressure on the country and on Europe as a whole, Latvian Prime Minister Krišjānis Kariņš said Friday.
In an interview with POLITICO, Kariņš said Russian President Vladimir Putin’s goal was to suppress Ukraine’s independence and bring it back into “the Russian fold.” Putin could pursue his strategy of “neo-imperialism” not just through a direct military attack but also by ramping up efforts to destabilize the Ukrainian economy and society, Kariņš warned.
“In the best-case scenario — best-case meaning no war — we will be facing long-term pressure from Putin on Ukraine and on Europe as a whole,” said Kariņš, whose Baltic nation borders Russia and Belarus, where Moscow has massed tens of thousands of troops as part of a huge buildup of forces around Ukraine.
Or "Karins sees other alternatives if Russia stops selling gas to Europe", The Baltic Times, 2/23/2022:
There are other alternatives if Russia decides not to sell natural gas to Europe due to sanctions, said Prime Minister Krisjanis Karins (New Unity) in an interview with the Latvian public television today.
"We should remember that 92 percent of our trade is not with Russia. It is some 8 percent that have remained with Russia. If we compare to what we had in 2000 when we were fully dependent," he said.
At the same time, there are sectors where this percentage is higher. However, considering earlier experience, business representatives will be able to adapt.
"Our business representatives have proved – if Russia's market closes, they find a different market," said Karins.
His 1996 PhD dissertation was on "The prosodic structure of Latvian". As far as I know, Krišjānis is the only current prime minister among my former advisees.
Phillip Minden said,
February 23, 2022 @ 3:17 pm
From the title, I expected some typical dubious ideas about Ukraine/the Ukraine, в/на Украине, Kyiv/Kiev…, but this is much better – I had no idea she was one of us.
J.W. Brewer said,
February 23, 2022 @ 5:03 pm
P.M. Kariņš, as it turns out, is just about my age and grew up within a few miles of me, and also within a few miles of where Joe Biden lived when he was in high school. We apparently (if one can trust information from a facebook post by an elected official in our childhood county) graduated the same year from different high schools in the same school district and he must have known as a child my own Latvian-American classmate who likewise relocated to the old country in the '90's after the Soviet occupation ended. (Don't know how many UPenn alums there are in Latvia, but it seems at least possible that my classmate is the only University of Delaware graduate there.)
At least one of the prime minister's high school classmates has had his own academic work previously mentioned on Language Log, that being Aniruddh Patel, now part of the faculty at Tufts. https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=820
Rick Rubenstein said,
February 23, 2022 @ 5:58 pm
"As far as I know." Now there's some cautious hedging. :-)
Jenny Chu said,
February 23, 2022 @ 7:17 pm
Besides Kariņš, what other world leaders are linguists? (Including past leaders.) Economists and legal scholars we have aplenty, and in Germany physicists and chemists seem to be in ready supply, but this is the first I've heard of a linguist in power.
V said,
February 23, 2022 @ 7:24 pm
I think I actually have a common friend with him.
V said,
February 23, 2022 @ 7:30 pm
Actually two, one of whom is in the government of a Eastern European country also.
Ben Zimmer said,
February 24, 2022 @ 12:41 am
@Jenny Chu: On Facebook in 2020, Ollie Sayeed posted a list of "high-ranking politicians with some connection to linguistics."
Scott P. said,
February 24, 2022 @ 1:44 am
Besides Kariņš, what other world leaders are linguists? (Including past leaders.)
Emperor Frederick II could speak six languages.
The Roman Emperor Claudius, according to some, was interested in the Etruscan language.
Yuval said,
February 24, 2022 @ 2:25 am
There's a linguist who's a former Palestinian P.M.
David Marjanović said,
February 24, 2022 @ 6:27 am
Wrote twelve books on it, according to some. They're all lost.
One word: Mithridates.
David Marjanović said,
February 24, 2022 @ 6:31 am
Turns out UPenn doesn't store dissertations on its own website, but gives them to ProQuest, which sells them. Was that really necessary?
DJL said,
February 24, 2022 @ 6:46 am
To add to the list, João Costa, Professor of Linguistics at CLUNL, has been Secretary of State for Education in Portugal for some time now.
https://clunl.fcsh.unl.pt/en/team/costa-joao/
J.W. Brewer said,
February 24, 2022 @ 7:49 am
Since the list Ben Zimmer cut-and-pasted was put together in 2020, Sir Colville Young has retired as Governor-General of Belize and been replaced by a lady whose academic degrees are in anthropology and rural development. Sir Colville's doctoral dissertation, FWIW (University of York, 1973), was on "Belize Creole: A Study of the Creolized English spoken in the city of Belize, in its cultural and social setting," which seems to turn up with some frequency in the bibliographies of more recent scholarly work on that particular creole.
Tristan Miller said,
February 24, 2022 @ 9:39 am
> Besides Kariņš, what other world leaders are linguists? (Including past leaders.)
Josef Stalin famously published some scholarly articles on linguistics, though it's generally agreed nowadays that these were ghostwritten.
Jerry Packard said,
February 24, 2022 @ 2:30 pm
Let's hear it for the linguists!