Ethnical smeerpism

I can't find the post because I am blind, but personhead james_nicoll was wondering why fantasies in other worlds have ethnciities strictly analogous to ones in our actual world, and it added to my doubts about a pretty important background issue for the wip.  He was kind of pushing for people to stray farther and exercise more imagination, and did I get the implication that he thought that if you weren't going to do that you should have the courage to call your stuff by the proper name?  Since I can't find the post I can't check.

Outside the text, I refer to the place where the drummer boy comes from as "Not-Poland."  Inside the text, he's from the tiny Duchy of Steinbrenner, one of countless little principalities in the Empire of the Marsh.  Originally I was leaving most other ethnic, language, national and geographical names intact, so I could invoke Vienna or New York  rather than work out how to indicate the implications of this or that thign copming from whatever foreign place.  Increasingly, I feel that it's more awkward and ponderous to do so, and I'm going through and gradually replacing the ethnic and geographic names with made-up ones.

Frank has been regaling me with more nineteenth- and twentieth-century  eastern/central european history too.  You know how in very old stories and fairy tales, a character can go across border after border and be able to speak to everybody they meet without a translator?  Have you always assumed that was just a shorthand because the story had no use for a translator?  or that the kingdoms are so small that they're all the same people?  It seems, in addition to all that, there is the fact that until 1917, all the Western Slavic labnguages were considered to be one language -- Slavian -- with several easily mutually understood dialects.  Which is the opposite of what Italians tel;l me about Italy (only the unifying events are a bit earlier than the Slavian dividing events).  The dividing event was Woodrow Wilson, who went about assigning nationalities in order to build nations.  All very well and good, in many ways.  But.  In Poland there is a Silesian accent of Polish: and in Slovakia there is a Silesian accent of Slovakian: and they are the exact same dialect, spoken the same way by the same people, who happen to have a border running through there dialect area and are therefore considered to be speaking a different language depending on which side of the border they're on.

Which is cool, I guess.  But it's also kind of dumb.  And all this closeness in languages totally explains why a tiny bit of Czech study le4aves me with the feeling that a lot of the songs we dance to -- even though most of them are in Southern Slavic languages, not Western or Eastern -- are almost intelligible.  The one that weirds me out is FRomanian, which is a Romance language but cannot be approached throu Spanish or French as fas as I can tell.

Anyway.  What do you think?  Is it funky to speak of Osterlick and Waldland and a bunch of other little places where they all speak dialects of Waldish?  I'm tempted to call the major language of the Marsh "Bogski,"  which allows for a bit of wordplay because Bog is also God and Devil in at least some of the slavic languages.  And of course, in Steinbren ner, the duke's family speaks Bogian with a Waldish accent (all the tiny principalities have names that ultimately translate to "stony brook," because I was delighted when I realized that that's what my last name means!")