From: sommar@enea.se (Erland Sommarskog)
Subject: Re: Serbian language
Organization: Enea Data AB
Date: Sun, 26 Jul 1992 21:45:12 GMT

Davor Matic (dmatic@athena.mit.edu) writes:
>I am not talking about the same phenomenon.  There is plenty of
>difference in vocabulry for someone who learns Serbian only not to be
>able to understand Croatian.  Another difference is that I'm talking
>about two literary languages.  Cockney is not literary English.  It's
>a slang.  Croatian is not a slang of Serbian.  Croatian is a separate
>literary language.  And it is really insulting that one would even
>consider Croatian a slang of Serbian by comparing it like this.  That
>is exactly why the languages should have a different name.  Because
>they are different, and both are literary, used by intelectuals in
>Serbian or Croatia.

Here are many points to sort out. Before I start I like to stress
that I have no firm opinion on whether Serbian and Croatian are
distinct languages or not. And I shouldn't have, since my knowledge
of the langauge(s) is about nil. I am just discussing some of the
arguments used in the discussion.

Davor claims that since there is a Croatian and a Serbian literary
standards (actually he is using "languages" but then he is using
the assumed which is to be proved) they are separate languages.
Undoubtedly this looks convincing, but just as you shouldn't mix
"mleko" and "mlijeko" in a Serbo-Croatian text, you shouldn't mix
"colour" and "color", "travelling" and "traveling" , "theatre" and
"theater" in an English text. Macedonian is claimed by some to be
a different way of writing Bulgarian, and there exists a third
standard for writing Bulgarian used in Roumania, and in the latter
case no one talks of a separate language. Norwegian has two different 
standards within Norway itself.

So different standards are not a sufficient criteria. Davor called
Cockney a slang, and said that Croatian is not a slang of Serbian.
But that doesn't really compose. Cockney is one dialect of English.
RP (Received Pronouciation) is another, and which happens to lay
base for standard for British English. However, we could found another
literary standard on Cockney, and by using more consistent spelling
rules than English does, it could be quite different from what we
are used to.

A standard language is just a dialect which has gotten a formal
stamp, and in these modern days also has been formalized with re-
gards to spelling. (In older days the spelling was less strict,
how old these days are depends on the languages. Even todays many
languages does not have a written standard.)

In case of completely disjunct languages as Serbian and Hungarian,
it is fairly easy to draw the line, although in highly intermixed
areas pidgin languages may appear. But in the case of closely
related languages, the border line is not easy to draw. True, I
have seen samples of differences between Serbian and Croatian
which indeed are convincing, but I have seen differences between
the Zagreb and Split dialects of the same nature as well. So is
Dalamatian a third language? And, as I understand B-H has its
own standard for B-H, so would Bosnian be a third language?

For practical purposes this may well be the case. Today, Swedish,
Norwegian and Danish are regarded as three distinct languages,
despite being mutually understandable. And the language borders
follow country borders, despite many provinces being Swedish
today were Danish or Norwegian until the 17th century. With a
different development Scandinavia could have been one country,
maybe with the same broadness in dialects, but only one standard
language. Then again, Aragonia and the Castille were united 500 
years ago, and Spain still have a vast set of related languages
(plus the completely unrelated Basque).

So from the current political situation is probably easiest to
talk about Serbian and Croatian, rather than Serbo-Croat. But
don't take this for the final word. In my encyclopedia from the
1950s there is an article on the Flemish language and literature,
and a Croat correspondent found a similar article in his Yugoslavian
encyclopedia from the 1960s. However, the fact is that one of the
official languages of Belgium (provided they have any official
languages at all) is Nederlands, or Dutch as it is called in English.
Changes in the ortography for Dutch is a joint decision between
The Hague and Brussels. I don't know, but since Belgium one broke
away from The Netherlands, maybe they had a need to have distinct
"language", but today they have come over that.

Also, I like to briefly discuss the concept of "mutually intelligible".
If speakers of languages A and B understand each other, could then
A and B said to be dialects of the same language? Again, we cannot
tell. Assume that there is a third language C, and that speakers of
B and C can understand each other, while speakers of A and C cannot.

The issue on language and dialects is not an easy one. I've seen
discussion on it several times in sci.lang, but frankly I don't
remember the outcome. My impression, however, is that the linguists
doesn't really care. If there are differences between what is spoken
in Belgrade, Zagreb and Split, the differecnes are of interest no
matter whether they are languages or dialects.
-- 
Erland Sommarskog - ENEA Data, Stockholm - sommar@enea.se
Dabras Laiks!
Newsgroups: soc.culture.yugoslavia