Re: History of French
From: Jugoslav Dujic (jdujic_at_yahoo.com)
Date: 09/17/04
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Date: Fri, 17 Sep 2004 11:47:10 +0200
Des Small wrote:
| "Jugoslav Dujic" <jdujic@yahoo.com> writes:
||| 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?
Kind of prevailing position among Serbian linguists (which I'm
not, so it's just my observation) is that it's ONE language, which every
nation (Montenegrins excepted, but that's another pair of shoes) is
entitled to call by their own name, but since...
| "A shprakh iz a diyalekt mit an armey un a flot." - Max Weinreich
| ("A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.")
...then it certainly is an arguable subject (and people continue to
argue about it).
| 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.)
IMO the mess is more about political correctness than anything else.
If we weren't in war, I doubt that many people would object to
something like "Croatian and/or Serbian course". If you call it like
that nowadays, you're probably bound to get a bunch of heated
objections. The fact is that, as in English, the language has a
*spectrum*, i.e. a variety of dialects, and localisms ,
all mutually intelligible (except perhaps some dialects from
southeast Serbia, which are barely intelligible to the most of
the rest). OTOH, implicit language standardization (as imposed
by school systems, newspapers, broadcasting etc.) does two things
a) erases/weakens the dialect diferences b) defines/distinguishes
"standard" Serbian and Croatian language(s). Which are still 100%
mutually intelligible. (Our cable TV distribution here in Novi
Sad includes 3 Croatian and 1 Bosnian channel).
||
|| 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.
Quoting from memory (and I forgot the author), "The main problem of the
Balkans was that it has always produced more history than it could
consume".
| I went to Dubrovnik when it was
| still in Yugoslavia;
If you went by road, then you would have had to pass through the Bosnia
territory (community of Neum). I think (but I'm not sure) that there are
now two Cro/BiH border crossings on distance of about 10 km -- if I'm
right, that would be highly impractical.
|it would be slightly interesting to go back now
| that it's in another country.
...and expensive :-). Croatian sea is really beautiful, but I think they
overrate it a bit... or two...
-- Jugoslav ___________ www.geocities.com/jdujic Please reply to the newsgroup. You can find my real e-mail on my home page above.
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