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From: rturkel@cas.org (Rick Turkel)
Subject: Re: Hercegovina
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Message-ID: <1995Jun23.172429.1797@chemabs.uucp>
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Date: Fri, 23 Jun 1995 17:24:29 GMT
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In article <3sag6r$4sc@surz03.HRZ.Uni-Marburg.DE>,
Fred Feuerstein <you@somehost.somedomain> wrote:
>
>:I know that WE in CROATIA always go mad when somebody tells us that we're
>:speaking "Serbo-Croat"!!
>
>:I think that as mere politeness, people should respect the term (name) of
>:the language the native speakers use!!!
>
>:There's more to it, but I think that this is the most important part.
>
>:If anybody's interested, I could elaborate this in more detail.
>
>:Proud to be Croat, and to be able to say so,
>
>a mere loss of time, in my opinion: i already had some beef with an ignorant
>...but then again, it was amusing to watch him defend the term "serbo-croat"
>and the preposterous thesis it's one language. okedoke, i just happen to like
>the notion "preposterous", but the thesis is wrong nonetheless.
>and how can anybody with brains claim slovenian to be a dialect of croat ?!
>
>AudiBaudi, Tomislav - Dalmatians like it doggystyle :)

First let me say that I am neither a Serb nor a Croat, but a
Slavicist with no emotional attachment to any of the parties
concerned.  I studied the major language of the former Yugoslavia at
the University level under the name Serbocroatian under two
professors who were, by chance, Serbs.  I've had very little
difficulty understanding and conversing with people from all four
Republics of the former SFRJ where the language is spoken.  In fact,
despite my slight American accent, I was once told by a peasant
woman that I speak very good "crnogorski" (Montenegrin)!

If it's not one language, how can you explain this?  And don't tell
me anything about the alphabets - an alphabet doesn't make a
language, mutual intelligibility does.  The differences between
standard Serbian and standard Croatian are no greater than those
between British and American English, and no one claims that these
are two separate languages (except in jest) despite their spelling
differences.  The same is true of Flemish and Dutch, and a situation
even more analogous to the present one is Hindi/Urdu, which also use
two different alphabets but in spoken form are mutually intelligible.

I have no quarrel with the self-identification of Serbian and
Croatian as two separate languages for internal use.  However, we
linguists outside the region where the language is native need some
way of referring to it that is as neutral as possible and yet
inclusive of all (or most) speakers.  "Nas^ki," which is how
old-time Yugoslavs referred to it in a purely neutral context, just
doesn't make it.  "Yugoslavian" isn't any good either, since it's
inaccurate because there are two other language spoken in the former
SFRJ (and anyway there is no more Yugoslavia).  As far as I know, no
one has managed to come up with a more descriptive name for it than
Serbocroatian, since there are more speakers of the Serbian dialect
than the Croatian one.  Perhaps you'd prefer to see it called
Serbocroatobosnomontenegrin.  :-)

P.S.  No one that I've ever heard of claims Slovenian to be a
dialect of Croatian.
-- 
Rick Turkel         (___  _____  _  _  _  _  __     _  ___   _   _  _  ___
rturkel@freenet.columbus)oh.us|   |  \  )  |/  \     |    |   |   \__)    |
rturkel@cas.org        /      |  _| __)/   | ___)    | ___|_  |  _(  \    |
Rich or poor, it's good to have money.  Ko rano rani | u jamu pada.
