|
 |
Montenegrin | ||
Tags: Serbo-Croatian | ||
Share with:
| ||
 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages | ( Topic Closed) |  |
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7157 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes  20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 33 of 53 05 October 2010 at 7:26am | IP Logged | ||||||||
|
You may want to look at Robert Greenberg's recent book on the subject: "Language and Identity in the Balkans: Serbo-Croatian and its Disintegration". In particular, Chapter 4 "Montenegrin: A mountain out of a mole hill?" (pp. 88-108) is especially relevant. He neatly goes through the development of Montengerin and explains how Serbian nationalism boosted the separatist claims in addition to how the philologist Vojislav Nikcevic pushed for a distinct Montengerin language notwithstanding criticism from linguists both inside and outside the Balkans.
In general Serbian society hasn't considered Ijekavian as worse than Ekavian BUT some Serbian linguists indeed harbored this idea in a tacit form and while it was eventually shot down, their views leaked out to the point of inflaming Montenegrin separatists and also irritating some Serbs who used Ijekavian. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Merv Bilingual Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5274 days ago 414 posts - 749 votes Speaks: English*, Serbo-Croatian* Studies: Spanish, French | Message 34 of 53 05 October 2010 at 7:41am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Very possible. But then again those inflamed Montenegrin linguists wouldn't be able to go about their silly business if they weren't being supported by the Montenegrin state which for reasons of Djukanovic's self-interest more so than an overwhelming consensus of Montenegrin people decided to shift its historic gears in a different direction and fly on to supposed NATO and EU accession while selling the country away to Russian billionaires. But I do get a bit tired of this tendency of others to point a waving finger at Serbian nationalism and even intellectual nationalism (the leaked internal SANU memorandum is a particularly ridiculous case) as the instigator of everything evil or even downright demented in the region. Maybe Montenegrin nationalists should take responsibility for the stupidity of what they are doing rather than constantly wag their finger at Belgrade, which gave tens of thousands of Montenegrins a decent university they could attend in their own language (unlike what Podgorica has to offer), citizenship and residency in Serbia, and lent Montenegro a rather honored and elevated place in Serbian national myth. Likewise, it would be nice if Bosnian Muslim and Croat nationalists could realize that their ethnic identity does not hang on the similarity or dissimilarity of the language they speak to the language spoken by Serbs. But the outlook is rather dim when I see how seriously people can take this notion of distinct languages, the painstaking care to learn Montenegrin and not - god forbid - Serbian. No longer two or even three, but four. It does my heart wonders to know that I am fluent in five languages and not two. Perhaps when someone engineers a new conflict in the region, I'll have automatically learned another one or two languages. ;) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Aineko Triglot Senior Member New Zealand Joined 5449 days ago 238 posts - 442 votes Speaks: Serbian*, EnglishC2, Spanish Studies: Russian, Arabic (Written), Mandarin | Message 35 of 53 05 October 2010 at 7:59am | IP Logged | ||||||||
I don't know what are linguistic criteria for distinguishing between languages and dialects, but I think that only a strongly nationally motivated linguist would dare to claim that these languages are not fully mutually intelligible communicative codes. However, linguistic side is only one side of the story and people who do not want to acknowledge that are simply ignoring reality.
well, your impression is wrong - things are not always as they look on a surface. While you had people in Croatia laughing at certain government's attempts to construct new Croatian words, in Serbia, although without any official initiative, individual people did have troubles for using words that 'sound too Croatian' or simply using Latin alphabet. I had a problem in high school with a moronic teacher who was threatening to fail me (otherwise an A+ student) if I use Latin alphabet in his class (and this was while Latin alphabet was still official). The only thing he achieved is that I've never used Serbian Cyrillic again (I know it and read it, but I don't write in it. my choice). Also (and I know I'm going into a very sensitive subject here, but it seems like it has to be said) , do not forget that Serbia didn't actually have a war on it's territory till late 90s (Kosovo and bombing). Serbs outside Serbia suffered greatly, but Serbs in Serbia hadn't actually been attacked. Are you ready to claim that, if the war had been in Serbia from the beginning, there also would not have been stronger nationalist movements? I'm not. We had enough nationalistic BS even without war. Chung is right about Serbian nationalism feeding the Montenegrian one. The fact that at the end situation became so unbearable that people in both countries wanted to separate, doesn't change much. As I said, linguistic side is only one side of the story. In the case of Montenegro: when you have enough people to vote for it, you can have independent state (at least we didn't have war about it). And when you have independent state, you can call your language whatever you want. You can even introduce new words if you want - people will decide are they going to use them or not. Same for any other country on Balkan. If people in Croatia now use 'vjerojatno', than it is a word. I remember well strong initiative in mid 90s to expel 'zarez' from Serbian (because it's Croatian) and to use 'zapeta' instead. As a result you have much more people using zapeta now than 20y ago... 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Aineko Triglot Senior Member New Zealand Joined 5449 days ago 238 posts - 442 votes Speaks: Serbian*, EnglishC2, Spanish Studies: Russian, Arabic (Written), Mandarin | Message 36 of 53 05 October 2010 at 8:10am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Whoever claims that there is only one side to be blamed in Balkan bloody mess, has no idea what he is talking about. Nationalists on all sides are guilty for what happened and had readily fed on each other's moves. However, it can not be denied that Serbian officials did make some crucial moves in the whole story (nor it is OK to ignore what was actually happening in Serbia in 90s).
and here you are totally wrong - the topic starter simply asked will he be OK if he uses Serbian materials, the same way people ask how mutually intelligible are Spanish from Spain and Spanish from Argentina. There was really no need to start about "ognjista i grobovi" story. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Merv Bilingual Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5274 days ago 414 posts - 749 votes Speaks: English*, Serbo-Croatian* Studies: Spanish, French | Message 37 of 53 05 October 2010 at 8:30am | IP Logged | ||||||||
If it's not by official initiative then it's irrelevant. My Slovenian great-aunt mocked my mother for signing herself in Cyrillic and this was in the 1970s. Literally, she said "What is that?" as if my mother were some sort of ape scribbling nonsense when she signed herself in Cyrillic. That's just personal interaction, it has nothing to do with the state. Unpleasant, yes, but irrelevant. The fact is, both Cyrillic and Latin are used all over urban Serbia. Go to the formerly Serb-majority regions of Croatia and you won't see any Cyrillic around, you won't see Cyrillic taught in schools either. Same with the Muslim-Croat parts of Bosnia and Cyrillic was always used widely in Bosnia. There has been a purging of Cyrillic from the Muslim and Croat areas and there hasn't been any such purging of Latin in Serbia. No, I think that if Serbia was "directly attacked" (and that's not an if, it did happen in 1999), it would not resort to kicking Latin script out of the country. Quite simply, Serbs don't see Latin as a "Croatian" thing. They see it as a script derived from the Romans and one widely used in Europe and elsewhere and thus useful to know and know well. Croats have a mental complex with regard to Cyrillic, associating it with Serbs, with barbarism, with Orthodoxy, with Greeks and Russians and all that they hate. They fail to realize that it was a specially designed alphabet for the Slavs that transcends religion and that is certainly not unique to the Serbs. They fail to realize that indeed Croats in distant history used Cyrillic, Glagolithic, and Latin. And because they fail to realize the universal nature of Cyrillic, they hate it and deride it. The linguistic side is not one side of the story, it IS the story. Countries don't mechanically decide what a language is. A language is defined by its mutual intelligibility. Croat linguists can make words out of thin air if they like, but that's not exactly natural language development, especially if its being done in a petty and pedantic fashion to make their language as different from another people's as possible. Languages merge and grow and diverge naturally and spontaneously, not by top-down impositions that seek to undo centuries of linguistic history. And I have no desire to argue further with you. The linguistic abuse that went on in ex-Yugoslavia was most vigorous in Croatia and Bosnia and Macedonia. In Montenegro, Serbia, and Slovenia, it practically didn't exist. Serbia and Montenegro didn't have identity complexes and Slovenia was so indisputably different that it had no need to do anything to make itself more different. Macedonia - caught between Serbia and Bulgaria and Greece - has chosen the path of robbing the Greek people of their historic name and legacy and appropriating it to themselves, even while they construct their alphabet off of Serbian and speak the Bulgarian language. Croatia and Bosnia have gone even further with the lexical acrobatics. Be that as it may. It's a shame that Montenegro is going down the same silly path. P.S. Very many people in Serbia and the diaspora still say zarez. I can bet you that nobody in Croatia or their diaspora say tacka. Not even 0.001%. That summarizes pretty well the attitudes that prevail. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Merv Bilingual Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5274 days ago 414 posts - 749 votes Speaks: English*, Serbo-Croatian* Studies: Spanish, French | Message 38 of 53 05 October 2010 at 8:42am | IP Logged | ||||||||
But you see it's not like that. It's like Argentina declaring that they don't speak Spanish, they actually speak Argentine. Then the Argentine nationalist linguists drop two letters from the alphabet and add three. Maybe kick out a tense or two. And in 50 years time, they claim that Cervantes was really Argentine and that the people in Madrid speak a variety of Argentine. Then maybe we can have someone come in here on this forum and ask should it be the case that materials are unavailable for the as-yet-unstandardized Argentine, would Spanish materials suffice? And then someone else chimes in and says that there's really no Spanish, it's just BCCPVEPMAPU...S, where the "S" stands for Spanish and the "B" stands for Bolivian and the "V" for Venezuelan, etc., and draws a little vector diagram that connects the letters up in some sort of array, leaving the rest of the forum confused:
Think about the absurdity of the above scenario, and then you will understand what I am saying regarding Montenegro, Serbia, and to a lesser degree Bosnia and Croatia. Edited by Merv on 05 October 2010 at 8:46am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Aineko Triglot Senior Member New Zealand Joined 5449 days ago 238 posts - 442 votes Speaks: Serbian*, EnglishC2, Spanish Studies: Russian, Arabic (Written), Mandarin | Message 39 of 53 05 October 2010 at 8:46am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Maybe it seem irrelevant from the other side of the ocean. If people suffered from it - it is very relevant (because it was inspired by the whole atmosphere created by media and directed by officials). The example I mentioned is just one of many (and btw you are comparing mocking with threatening).
and I tell you that very many people in Serbia do see latinica as 'Croatian thing'. Literally, in those words ("Why are you using latinica, it's Croatian."). I lived in Serbia for 25 y and left only four years ago, so, no offence, but I might have better picture of what people in Serbia were thinking while I lived there than you do. about the bold: seriously, Merv, you don not need to tell me that - I know, I was there. Edited by Aineko on 05 October 2010 at 9:10am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Aineko Triglot Senior Member New Zealand Joined 5449 days ago 238 posts - 442 votes Speaks: Serbian*, EnglishC2, Spanish Studies: Russian, Arabic (Written), Mandarin | Message 40 of 53 05 October 2010 at 9:04am | IP Logged | ||||||||
well, not really - its more like this: first - Spain would need to be in South America second - Spanish would need to be a small, not very much known language then - the whole South America would need to have a bloody, messy war, in an 'everyone against everyone' manner, with diplomatic relationship between countries nonexisting for years and so on... and then someone, who doesn't know much about Spanish but knows that there was (is) some political mess about the whole story, comes and asks "will I be OK in Argentine if I learn Bolivian?". As you see, quite different situation from what you described. 1 person has voted this message useful |
|  | 
Printable version
|
| Copyright 2024 FX Micheloud - All rights reserved No part of this website may be copied by any means without my written authorization. |
