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From: rmt51@cas.org ()
Subject: Polish month names
Message-ID: <1994Oct20.173837.13998@chemabs.uucp>
Sender: Rick Turkel (rmt51@cas.org)
Organization: Chemical Abstracts Service, Columbus, Ohio
Date: Thu, 20 Oct 1994 17:38:37 GMT
Lines: 65


In article <3800no$507@lyra.csx.cam.ac.uk>,
Edmund Grimley-Evans <etg10@cl.cam.ac.uk> wrote:
>> Arrrrrrrgggggghhhhhhhh! Serbocroatian doesn't exist. Those are two
>> languages, Croatian and Serbian.
>
>Serbo-Croatian does exist, just as "English" exists, despite having
>more than one standardised form. The main difference is that the
>varieties of Serbo-Croation have well-defined separate names,
>whereas the varieties of English don't have standard names that
>are in everyday use.
>
>At an Esperanto congress in Vienna I listened to a talk by Dalibor
>BROZOVI'C on "Normlingvoj kun plurcentra normigo" [Standard
>languages with multi-centric standardisation]. The examples I
>remember him mostly talking about were German and Austrian varieties
>of German, and European and American varieties of Portuguese, but
>I think he also regarded the distinction between Croatian and Serbian
>as being of the same nature. If I remember correctly, he used to be
>the vice-president of Croatia, so he was probably not being unfaithful
>to nationalist dogma.
>
>Incidently, the quoted statement seems to imply that there are only
>two standardised forms of Serbo-Croatian. Isn't this rather insulting
>to users of the Bosnian variety? If an article that I read recently
>in "Literatura Foiro" is to be believed, in earlier centuries the
>language spoken around Sarajevo was perfectly normally referred to as
>"Bosnian", but the name was later suppressed for political reasons.

Hear, Hear!  I had two years of college-level Serbocroatian, taught by a
woman who was born and raised in Beograd and a Serbian-Orthodox priest
from near there.  It took me less than two weeks to get used to the
dialect spoken by another woman who was born and raised in Zagreb.  And I
was once told by a peasant on a bus from Dubrovnik to Titograd that I
spoke very nice Montenegrin!  In order to avoid language-based conflicts,
Yugoslavs (other than Macedonians and Slovenes) often used to refer to
their language as "nas^ki" ("our language").

Aside from the regional differences in pronunciation, which you find in
any language, the main differences between eastern (i.e., Serbian) and
western (i.e., Croatian) dialects involve (1) loan words [the former uses
a sizable number of Turkish borrowings (including several I recognize
from my knowledge of Hebrew as having originated in Arabic), while the
latter uses many words taken from German and Hungarian (and Italian, in
coastal dialects)]; and (2) the so-called Balkanisms, which are Turkish-
derived grammatical structures found in eastern and central (i.e.,
Bosnian) dialects but not in the west or along the coast.  The central
dialects are characterized by mostly western phonology and mostly eastern
vocabulary, and their unique spelling conventions, while marked as
Bosnian, are not regarded as incorrect.

In short, the accepted linguistic criterion for deciding whether two
speech entities are dialects or separate languages remains mutual
intelligibility (armies notwithstanding).  Absent any political agendas,
a peasant from southern Serbia would probably understand one from
northwestern Croatia better than a peasant from Sicily would understand
one from near Venice or Milan, and no one is advocating for two separate
Italian languages.  The number of different alphabets used to write a
language is of no consequence; like Urdu/Hindi, Serbocroatian is a single
language.
-- 
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.
