Newsgroups: sci.lang
Path: cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu!das-news2.harvard.edu!news2.near.net!news.mathworks.com!europa.eng.gtefsd.com!howland.reston.ans.net!EU.net!sun4nl!mcv
From: mcv@inter.NL.net (Miguel Carrasquer)
Subject: Re: Polish month names
Message-ID: <Cxy8v5.5DE@inter.NL.net>
Organization: /etc/organization
References: <37rkuh$23q@gordon.enea.se> <37up30$svk@nippur.irb.hr> <Cxw2ru.4vw@cogsci.ed.ac.uk> <383tdq$4p4@nippur.irb.hr>
Date: Thu, 20 Oct 1994 02:13:52 GMT
Lines: 45

In article <383tdq$4p4@nippur.irb.hr>,
Vjera Lopina <vlopina@filolog.hfi.hr> wrote:
>
>Of course not. If you believe different month names are the only difference
>between Croatian and Serbian, you are *very* wrong!
>

R.G.A. de Bray's "The Slavonic Languages" has this to say about the dialects
of Serbocroatian:
"Serbocroatian is divided into three main dialects, [...] named after the
different word for "what" in them, namely _s^to_, _kaj_ and _c^a_ [...]  
The _kaj_ dialect spoken in NW Croatia is a transition to Slovenian.  
The _c^a_ dialect is confined to N. Dalmatia and certain Adriatic islands, 
and is slightly more difficult to follow for those knowing standard 
Serbocroatian (because of its more archaic accent, corresponding in position 
more nearly to that in Slovenian and Russian, and also because of greater 
differences in declensions, etc.).
[...]the _s^to_ dialect is by far the most widespread of the three, for it is
spoken over the rest of the Serbocroatian speaking area [...].
The _c^a_ and _s^to_ dialects are subdivided into three subvarieties according
to whether the old YER (e^) is rendered _e_, _je_ or _i_: e.g. _Ve``ra_, 
_Vje``ra_, or _Vi``ra_.  The _e_ variety of the _s^to_ dialect is used as the 
literary language of Serbia and most of the Voivodina, while the _je_ variety 
predominates in the rest of the _s^to_ area, including Croatia, Bosnia and 
Montenegro [...].  These three sub-varieties are mutually intelligible without
any real difficulty, just as in English the various pronunciations of _a_ and 
the other vowels present no insuperable obstacle to understanding"

I realize this is not the whole story (there surely are other phonetic and
vocabulary differences), but on the whole it's amazing that Serbs and Croats,
who have been separated politically throughout most of their history (Croatia
in the Hungarian/German sphere, Serbia in the Byzantine/Ottoman sphere), have
not significantly diverged linguistically.  The isoglosses flow freely from
Croatia to Serbia to Bosnia to Crna Gora and back again...

In other chapters, de Bray goes on to classify Macedonian and Bulgarian
as two different languages, which is just as bogus as separating Serbian
and Croatian.  Oh, well.   You either have three South-Slav languages
(Slovenian, Serbo-Croatian and Macedo-Bulgarian) or you have at least five.
I do not agree with de Bray's fourfold division.

-- 
Miguel Carrasquer         ____________________  ~~~
Amsterdam                [                  ||]~  
mcv@inter.NL.net         ce .sig n'est pas une .cig 
