vvaamim
Diglot
Newbie
United States
Joined 4953 days ago
11 posts - 12 votes
Speaks: English*, Spanish
Studies: French, Turkish
| Message 1 of 3 14 April 2013 at 10:31pm | IP Logged |
Hi, everyone! I was wondering if I could get your expertise on this topic.
Before I completely dive into learning a language, I like to get little things like this sorted out.
I've been reading in a lot of places that Serbian (the version I'm learning) doesn't perserve tones or vowel length in
major cities (which?). Is this true? I can't hear them when listening, to an extent. In music i hear length somewhat,
but tone not so much.
All advice is welcome and I thank you all
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Chung
Diglot
Senior Member
Joined 7155 days ago
4228 posts - 8259 votes 
20 sounds
Speaks: English*, French
Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish
| Message 2 of 3 14 April 2013 at 11:55pm | IP Logged |
My sense is that by "major cities" they're talking of Belgrade and Novi Sad (although I wouldn't be surprised if Niš and other places fall in this category too).
See here:
Pitchless Serbian?
Serbo-Croatian - a tonal language?
3 months to fluent croatian ??
Croatian tones (BCS)
Serbian accents and Croatian accents
On the surface the threads under the name "Croatian" seem out of place since you're focusing on Serbian, but the truth is that what's prescribed in the textbook as "proper" accentuation for a Croat is almost always identical to what's prescribed for a Serb even though it's likely that neither the Croat nor the Serb will speak "by the book" anyway.
According to Ronelle Alexander,
Alexander, Ronelle. “Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian. A Grammar with Sociolinguistic Commentary.” Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2006, pp. 355-6 wrote:
[...]
On the topic of accent, however, feelings run high. Many feel the four-accent system is needlessly complex and out of touch with reality. Part of this dissatisfaction is with the opacity of the traditional Vukovian accentual marks.
In most instances, however, the reason speakers are dissatisfied with the system of marks is because they believe it does not accurately reflect the way they actually speak. In some cases this non-congruence (between prescriptive statements of accentuation and descriptive statements of actual usage) is due to language change: the accentuation of the modern language is simply no longer the same as it when Vuk and Daničić made their codifications...
[...]
...when linguists sat down to compile the dictionaries and the grammars which became the core of BCS prescriptive grammar, they took the East Herzegovinian neo-štokavian dialect as their model, believing it to be the purest and most representative speech type. All elements of grammar were codified to follow that dialectal pattern, including the specific accentual characteristics of each individual word. The speech of Eastern Herzegovina was especially rich in accentual distinctions - as it still is today - and those speakers of BCS whose native speech is similar to it have no trouble hearing and producing all four "accents" in all positions, according to the now-canonical system.
Those whose speech is quite different frok Vuk's, however, must learn the standard form of the language in school. Learning the endings of words is relatively easy, but learning the accents is quite another matter. In particular, it is almost impossible to make a consistent distinction between short rising and short falling accents unless one is accustomed to hearing these accents since childhood. Most Bosnians make all of the standard distinctions naturally, and they are quite proud of the fully melodic (not to say traditional Vukovian) character of Bosnian. The majority of Serbs and Croats, however, do not make the full set of distinctions. Some attempt to learn them, and experience a fair degree of success. Others - even if they are not completely successful in learning the accents - believe that this system is part of their heritage and that the language should continue to maintain all the codified distinctions, if only as an ideal to strive for. Yet others, however, believe that the codified forms of Serbian and Croatian should be revised in order to reflect more accurately the way Serbs and Croats actually speak. They do not feel that educators should need to work so hard to force students to learn something which is both very difficult to learn, and (in their view) unnaturally artificial.
[...]
The great majority of Serbs or Croats who cannot distinguish short falling from short rising accents feel that there should be only a single "short" accent; they also feel that the language should codify only those long unaccented vowels which are consistently spoken as log (such as the Gpl. endings). |
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vvaamim
Diglot
Newbie
United States
Joined 4953 days ago
11 posts - 12 votes
Speaks: English*, Spanish
Studies: French, Turkish
| Message 3 of 3 15 April 2013 at 12:30am | IP Logged |
One million thank yous Chung! I appreciate this very much!
1 person has voted this message useful
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