From: dmatic@athena.mit.edu (Davor Matic)
Subject: Re: Serbian language
Organization: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Date: Thu, 23 Jul 1992 04:09:50 GMT

In article <22JUL92.24334143.0027@UNBVM1.CSD.UNB.CA> George Bogavac <K2GT@UNB.CA> writes:
>>
>>Those are exactly imported dialects, since they are spoken by the
>>Serbs outside of Serbia.
>
>"Since they are spoken by S. outside Serbia?", does that mean
>that Hungarians outside Hungary speak a different language?
>Your sentence suggests that language (a cultural category) and
>the State (a political category) are indivisible.

I don't know.  It depends on how much assimilation has happened.
But certainly Hungarians are not going to introduce an aditional
literary form to accomodate for the Hugnarian people that have 
absorbed another language and then claim that that language is
actually a part of Hungarian.

>I don't think you can draw a line in the sand and say: "OK, people
>on this side speak this and people on the other speak that!" ;-)
>You might think I'm oversimplyfing, but that is how I understood
>your sentence.

A language should have a single literary form to avoid confusion.
When you create a language with two alphabets, two spellings, etc.
there is something wrong with it.  To me it looks simply as an 
attempt to claim that more people speak that language than actually
do for various political reasons.  Don't get me wrong.  There are
people that speak mixtures of Croatian and Serbian, and maybe they
do speak Serbo-Croatian or Croato-Serbian, but contemporary literary
Croatian has very little to do with Serbian.  So why should it be
called Serbo-Croatian?  Maybe if Serbs want to claim Krajina, Bosnia
and MonteNegro really do need to include Croatian as a part of Serbian,
so they can call it Serbo-Croatian.  But as far as I'm concerned, I
speak Croatian, not Serbo-Croatian, unless I want to.  And so do most
of Croats. 

>
>>They have mixed and assimilated with the
>>dialect from the surrounding Croats.  The authentic language they
>>spoke was Serbian at one time.
>
>So, what is it today?
>
>> As far as Monte Negro goes, it is
>>a whole new dispute how much Serbian Monte-Negrians really are :-)
>>
>
>Yes, it is a whole new dispute, but I wasn't talking about their
>nationality, but the fact that they speak the Serbian language,
>which is in the "ije" form.
>
Well, if they are not Serbian, why do you call the language they
speak Serbian when it even doesn't sound like it?  Curious question :-)
Anyway:
I never said that Serbian can not come in ije form.  But Croatian can
not come in "ekavica" form, at least not contemporary literary Croatian.
Serbs may claim that Croatian is a part of Serbian, but Croats claim
that Serbian is not a part of Croatian.  These are not exclusive.

>
>Ultimately, I am by no means trying to deny the existance of a
>distinct, Croatian literary language, but I'm trying to make a
>point that in some cases, the "rigid" definitions of the Croatian
>and Serbian languages do not apply easily.
>

I am not trying to tell you that you speak either Serbian or Croatian.
You can speak the mixture of the two.  But Croats speak Croatian, so
why should they call it Serbian?  I respect your right to talk whichever
language you want, and call it whatever you fit, and I expect you too
to respect my right to speak the language that is by no means Serbian,
and call it by a name that desn't have to assocate it with Serbian.
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