The peculiarity (for a US audience) of Lithuania's having a national language encoded into the Constitution itself I've pointed out in the past. The government tends to get rather crippled when the Supreme Court has to navigate around sentences like "Valstybinė kalba - lietuvių kalba." And it seems like this week, a wrinkle reasserted itself. As Lietuvos rytas writes:

Lenkijos premjeras Jaroslawas Kaczynskis viliasi, kad Lietuvoje bus įteisinta lenkų pavardžių rašyba gimtąja kalba, tačiau Lietuvos premjeras Gediminas Kirkilas primena, jog tokie siūlymai prieštarauja Lietuvos Konstitucijai.

It seems that there have been efforts afoot in the Seimas to try and pass laws that would allow people to write their names in their own, Latin-alphabet-based way. I don't know how it is in Lithuania now, but, from the article, it seems like you can't have "Paweł," say, on your Lithuanian passport. What, then, is acceptable, is unclear to me. Is "Pavel" fine? Or does if have to be "Pavelas"? Or "Povilas"? Or, even, pushed far enough, "Paulius"? In any case, the "Dėl vardų ir pavardžių rašymo dokumentuose" project would have made "Paweł" an acceptable name on official Lithuanian documents.

The problem, of course, with this project is that it goes against those four words from the Constitution. "Paweł" is not a Lithuanian word—so it should not, the reasoning goes, be on an official Lithuanian government document. As the VLKK shows on its very first (English) page, there is no "w" in the Lithuanian alphabet (to say nothing of the l with stroke). (By the way, the VLKK website is totally fascinating—a tender mix of untrammeled insanity and interesting information...)

It would seem, I think, obvious that there's some sort of error of sense here. There's no reason that a person should not be able to use any Latin-based letters in their official name; I am pretty sure that people should be able to write their names as they want. Instead of amending the Constitution, however, the government could convince the VLKK to somehow, as the regulating body of the state language, incorporate the new glyphs into "state Lithuanian," avoiding a complicated mess.

But before one mocks the Lithuanian government too heartily for this odd situation, it's worthwhile to consider the source of the complaint: Poland under the double Kaczyński rule. Poland has its own share of Lithuanian minorities (just as there are Polish minorities in Lithuania). Yet, from my understanding, the same courtesies Jarosław Kaczyński is asking to be shown to the Polish minority are not granted to the Lithuanian minority in Punskas; I've seen Punskiečių passports, and the names are thoroughly polonicized—almost to a point of illegibility unless one is a little familiar with Polish naming conventions. So what should be a very simple issue of common sense becomes, surprise, yet again, a political issue underscoring nationalist tension, which is apparently par for the course for Kaczyński and his brother, as writes die tageszeitung: "Wie Pilsudski sind die Kaczynskis Polen bis über beide Ohren, und das Vaterland sitzt ihnen wie angegossen."

What do you think?