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From: | Danilo Segan |
Subject: | [Serbiangnome-lista] Re: Serbian (sr) language translation team: maintainer unresponsive |
Date: | Tue, 08 Apr 2003 14:11:08 +0200 |
User-agent: | Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.3a) Gecko/20030210 |
Karl Eichwalder wrote:
Danilo Segan <address@hidden> writes:Not exactly. They were quite similar, and convereged to the somewhat same language (Serbo-Croatian"sh") during the time both were used in the same country. But, since the dissolve of former Yugoslavia, they're diverging again, and it's not rare for one word to be common in one, but non-existant in the other.Aside, different word usage does not constitute a different language. In Switzerland, Austria and Bavaria many a lot words are used which are unknown in the Germany (okay, Bavaria is a part of Germany ;) ). But they all speak variants of the German language. Thus the Language Code in all the countries is 'de', and if somebody thinks the northern German word usage does not fit for Austria, he goes for 'de_AT', etc.
Certainly so, but I'd elaborate a bit in here.When the Slavs (Russians, Serbs, Croats, Poles, Czech, Ukranians and others) lived all in the same place, they spoke mainly the same language, now called Old slavonic (or "church slavonic", since it's still used in all churches of orthodox religion).
When the Serbs and Croats moved into the Balkan, Serbs went much more to the south, while Croats stayed on the northwest. The same as the languages of Russians and Serbs is nowdays quite different, these two languages diverged, but to a lesser extent because of geographical proximity. One (Serbian) was largely under the influence of Byzantian (Greek), while Croatian was influenced by Italic and Germanic languages. So, at that time, these were farely different languages, so, at least at one point in time, two *distinct* languages really did exist.
With the conquest of Serbia by Ottoman empire, Serbs started moving north and to the west, thus settling in parts of Croatia (actually Habsburg monarchy), serving as soldiers. So, the convergence of languages started again, but only partly, because Serbian as spoken in Serbia started accepting words from Turkish (quite a few words in today's Serbian are of Turkish origin). After the fall of Ottoman empire, Serbs and Croats lived in two distinct states (one in their own, other in Habsburg monarchy), except for Bosnia where they lived together (some of them having accepted the Islam, or settling from Turkey beforehand). This was again a source of another divergence in languages.
Again, the World War I came, and the Serbs and Croats made a one kingdom, restarting the process of convergence of the languages again. For politcal reasons, language such as "Serbo-Croatian" was created, using combinations from each language (eg. dot in Serbian was "tačka" and in Croatian "točka", and comma was "zapeta", and "zarez" respectively; so "tačka-zarez" was used for semicolon in the new language, as a compromise).
At the resolution of former Yugoslavia, divergence started again, especially with the need to translate all the english technology related terms to native language. The Croats have done that much better and to a greater extent, and there are quite a few new words no Serb can understand). Also, some forms are regular in one language, while the others are expected in the other (so it's not only words, I remember finding some document from USA Library of Congress which explains differentiating the Serbian and Croatian language).
Of course, the political issues were very important, but these languages existed long before the language "Serbo-Croatian" was invented. Differences are probably on the level of Ukranian (uk) and Russian (ru) differences, though I don't quite know (it's just a guess).
Hope I didn't bore anyone (or at least not too much). Cheers, Daneelo
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