A third nation in one day!

This evening I see we had a visitor from Slovenia. Welcome to these "pages"!

How can one not love a nation with a city named Ljubljana? I took a quick look at Wikipedia and notice the Duchy of Carantania in Slovenian history. Brings back memories of my history classes at UCLA.

For our learning tidbit tonight we look to the Slovenian language, with some two million speakers. "Slovene is one of the few languages to have preserved the dual grammatical number from Proto-Indo-European." If you ever took classical Greek you will, perhaps vaguely, remember the dual (as in singular-dual-plural).

Slovenes are said to be 'a nation of poets' due to their language. Poets France Prešeren and Edvard Kocbek and writer Ivan Cankar are three of the most prominent Slovene authors, while Vladimir Bartol, Srečko Kosovel, Tomaž Šalamun, Boris Pahor, Drago Jančar and Aleš Debeljak are among the most famous.

Here's to poets, poetry, and the preservation of the earth's languages!
--the BB