Re: History of French
From: Des Small (des.small_at_bristol.ac.uk)
Date: 09/16/04
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Date: Thu, 16 Sep 2004 16:47:24 GMT
"Jugoslav Dujic" <jdujic@yahoo.com> writes:
> | So what do Englishes generally get wrong in Serbian,
>
> Uh, His Majesty Aleksandar Karadjordjevic is an egregious example...
> but it's easier to enumerate what he does right in Serbian than the
> opposite. Another point in favor of "difficult language learning by
> adults" -- not that he doesn't have a motive (after all, it's the
> language of the people whose throne he is heir to).
It took the Saxe-Coburg-Gothas a generation or two to get to grips
with English, I think I remember hearing.
> But sorry, I don't have enough data to provide any useful answer.
> English-speaking foreigners who try to learn Serbian are pretty rare
> beasts, you know, and I didn't pay much attention to exact errors
> even when I heard ones.
Fair enough.
> | apart, of course, from failing to recognise the vast and
> | unbridgable chasm or gulf that separates it from its distant
> | relative Croatian?
>
> Tell that to Croats -- they insist that the languages are distant.
> It is [us] Serbs who rather state that our language is ours, and
> their language is ours also. (Insert "country" instead of "language"
> at will).
Do Belgrade publishers still produce materials for instruction in
"Serbo-Croat" then? In Anglophonia they are (now) almost always
separate, although there's probably more demand (and supply) for
Croatian. Berlitz's _Eastern Yoorpean Phrasebook_ (2004 edition), for
one, includes Croatian, but not Serbian. (The _Lonely Planet_
equivalent has both, but not Bosnian.)
> | Des
> | already knows that Bosnia has no coastline, ergo no navy...
>
> Actually, it has... some 25 km IIRC.
25 km? That's almost half as much as Slovenia, and I take it all back.
> But no navy. Was it intended as a joke or...?
An allusion:
"A shprakh iz a diyalekt mit an armey un a flot." - Max Weinreich
("A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.")
> Jugoslav
>
> who owes his ugly name to <the?> illusions of his Serb father and
^ yes.
> Croat mother.
All this mutability of nation states is entirely alien to the English
mind, which goes to a good deal of trouble to ignore the Act of Union,
and especially Northern Ireland. I went to Dubrovnik when it was
still in Yugoslavia; it would be slightly interesting to go back now
that it's in another country.
Des
has also been to three (3) post-Soviet nations.
-- "[T]he structural trend in linguistics which took root with the International Congresses of the twenties and early thirties [...] had close and effective connections with phenomenology in its Husserlian and Hegelian versions." -- Roman Jakobson
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