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about names

Ronelle Alexander, from Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian: a grammar, 2006, p. 385, "Novi Sad and beyond"

Although the signatories of the 1850 Vienna agreement concluded that Serbs and Croats spoke one language with one grammar written in two different alphabets, they did not specify a name for this one language. This lacuna was filled in Titoist Yugoslavia. According to the Novi Sad agreement of 1954 the language was again seen as one language with one grammar written in two different alphabets. Now, however, it also had two official names and two official pronunciations. The two alphabets were Cyrillic and Latin, of course; the two names were the mirror-image terms srpskohrvatski and hrvatskosrpski.

Let this dispel questions about the motivations behind the provenance of the name (for we are arguing about the name, aren't we?) and the date thereof. --VKokielov (talk) 17:00, 9 October 2010 (UTC)

The name Serbo-Croatian started to be used in the early 19th century, and by the turn of the century it became de facto the standard name for the language, also in English, German and Russian (which had the strongest Slavic studies circles), abundant evidence of which you can find on archive.org and books.google.com. The 1850 Vienna Literary Agreement was more like an informal meeting of prominent intellectuals on how to steer the ongoing Slavic national revival movements which were heavily regionally confined and diversified along dialectal lines (e.g. in Croatia there were also some Chakavian an Kajkavian literary circles). It had zero official/legal value. After two centuries of tradition, the picture of the term's usage today is much more clear than it was in 1850. At any case, it predates Titoist Yugoslavia by more than a century. --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 18:50, 9 October 2010 (UTC)

even if the name appeared in earlier discourse -- as in Bosnia after the Austrian occupation -- yet, never without bitter discontent from the population. Please understand how difficult it was for the three religions to be reconciled there, when Petar Njegoš, the first man of Montenegro and renowned poet, wrote lines like this:

Докле Турци све њих савладају

многе ће се буле оцрнити;
борби нашој краја бити неће
до истраге турске али наше...

Until the Turks have conquered one and all,

Many a Turkish bride shall cover her face in black;
Our fight and war shall see no end
Till we have wiped out the Turks, or they us.
That was the spirit of the time among the nations; can you blame anybody from those parts from feeling the way he does? I can't -- my mouth won't open to do it. --VKokielov (talk) 17:52, 9 October 2010 (UTC)

You bet I can blame them, for it is them and you VKokielov that perpetuate this ethno-religous sense of identity which has under the blessing of statism been the cause of all the wars in the history. The murderous thug Njegoš that you cite in his most famous work The Mountain Wreath openly called for a genocide against "Turks" (a term which at that period also included Slavic Muslims that we call Bosniaks today). It's a typical Balkanic fairy tale that extols the culture of murder against "others", all of course under the righteous blessing of a religion. (Njegoš as a "Prince-Bishop" is reminiscent of certain ME theocracies). In the 1990s wars we also had popovi, hodže and fratri all blessing guns and tanks and preaching jihads against "others" worshiping the "wrong deity". Civilized societies have long evolved above the petty ethno tribalism, and the pitiful concept of a prisonlike entity called a "sovereign nation-state" has no future in the global society of tomorrow. You really seem keen on providing a background justification on some of the attitudes displayed, but I can see no justification for it as it is essentially without hard evidence supporting it and it boils down to a sense of identity, i.e. how one feels like when stating e.g. Croatian is a part of Serbo-Croatian clade, and what further implications does that statement bring upon the individual that thinks of himself as a Croat, and us being sufficiently concerned of their feelings. Why should we care anyway? --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 18:50, 9 October 2010 (UTC)

Ivan, try and produce an answer with civility. Why do you call Petar II Petrović-Njegoš a murderous thug, where he fought to change Montenegro from a theocracy into a secular state. The call against the Turks in that time, was not uncommon, recollect that Lord Byron was rallying hard for the Greeks in Greek War of Independence, and many of his words were not than benign. Is Lord Byron a murderous thug as well ? Ivan, you do not own the article Croatian language, and your sense of urgency to give a reply and the delivery is really not necessary. Please spare us of your beliefs on history and your views of the future. Please stick to the subject Vodomar (talk) 04:26, 10 October 2010 (UTC)

Vodomar, you said "please stick to the subject". WP:POT. The question is, has been, and will continue to be until you answer it, "What do you want to call the language that comprises the mutually intelligible Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian speech-forms?" --Taivo (talk) 05:52, 10 October 2010 (UTC)

Claptrap ! Read the WP:POT and the meaning of it. I have not breached this guideline. The last question, is that an exam question ? Vodomar (talk) 12:16, 10 October 2010 (UTC)

LOL. You asked Ivan to "stick to the subject", yet you continue to sidetrack away from the question of what do you want to call this language? Not a single, solitary Croat has even attempted to answer this question with a name that has any currency in English. Indeed, I have yet to even see a form proposed that is in Croatian. --Taivo (talk) 12:25, 10 October 2010 (UTC)

These are not just "speech-forms". These are four languages. "Serbo-Croatian language" was the political project, and later, a political name for Serbian language. Croatian linguist Ranko Matasović (Štambuk glorifies him) explicitly says that Serbo-Croatian was never materialized in reality, since it never existed Srpsko-hrvatski nikada nije ostvaren, jer nije postojao. I wrote about this on few talkpages, months ago. Kubura (talk) 07:28, 10 October 2010 (UTC)

Since we're all repeating ourselves, I'll say it again: you do not seem to understand what "Serbo-Croatian" means in English. It's not a political project, it's a language. It has nothing to do with Yugoslavia. What you're talking about is the Yugoslav bi-standard, but that's not the point under discussion here. Since you and all the other objectors have failed to provide a better name, we're stuck with "Serbo-Croatian". — kwami (talk) 09:29, 10 October 2010 (UTC)

Kubura, "speech-form" is a general term to avoid the obvious issue of "language" or "dialect" or "sub-dialect". "English and Malay are two speech-forms" is just as true as "My English and my brother's English are two speech-forms". You are doing exactly what every single other Croat on this page is doing--you have no answer whatsoever to the question we keep asking, so you divert and quibble over the cost of tea in China. Answer the question, "What do you want us to call the language comprising the mutually intelligible Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian speech forms?" --Taivo (talk) 11:12, 10 October 2010 (UTC)

Who is maintaining the "Serbo-Croatian" language - No one except... Oh, I know now Wikipedia. Vodomar (talk) 12:05, 10 October 2010 (UTC)

You are quite wrong, Vodomar, as usual. There are still many contemporary linguistic works that use "Serbo-Croatian", such as the Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics (cited above). You continue to sidetrack the issue by asking such questions that have been answered before with reliable sources. What term do you prefer for the language that comprises the mutually intelligible Croatian, Bosnian, and Serbian? How many times must this be asked before the Croats come up with an answer? --Taivo (talk) 12:25, 10 October 2010 (UTC)

No I am not sidestepping the issue, if you want an answer to that would be : Central South Slavic Diasystem and you can really classify all the languages under that one name. http://books.google.com.au/books?id=geh261xgI8sC&pg=PA518&lpg=PA518&dq=weinrich+diasystem&source=bl&ots=DW062gZ5ip&sig=a-zsU_fwYW3iNvlLzGyiJPGrE3s&hl=en&ei=A8mxTPbAA5OuvgObvImwBg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=6&ved=0CCkQ6AEwBQ#v=onepage&q&f=false All the similarities and the apparent differences can be best described with the term diasystem. Vodomar (talk) 14:25, 10 October 2010 (UTC)

That name has been suggested before, and there are a couple problems with it: (1) it's not WP:COMMONNAME; most English speakers would have no idea what it's supposed to refer to. In fact, it's quite rare; I don't know how many linguists would recognize it. (2) it's linguistically inaccurate, as we've cited. (If SS divides into east & west, w SC in the west, how is it 'central'?). BCMS would be preferable, as at least it's accurate and people would recognize it. — kwami (talk) 14:41, 10 October 2010 (UTC)

Easy how it is central: Slovene is Western South Slavic, Macedonian East. You can make a disambiguation page on Serbo-Croatian, and the issue has been resolved. Hey things change, I was brought up that Pluto was a planet and now it is not..... Vodomar (talk) 15:50, 10 October 2010 (UTC)

But SC is Western SS. Even if we call it "Central", it would still be Western. That's why the term is deprecated. — kwami (talk) 16:42, 10 October 2010 (UTC)

The best description would be Neo-Štokavian, based on the modified standardised Štokavian, with ijekavian pronounciation. This is the best explanation as this really goes back to the root of the 19th century work of Vuk and Gaj. Serbo-Croatian as standard promoted by linguists and some countries as a way of simplifying and condensing the different languages of the region. The explanation on how the different languages work in a plurocentric way is not the best choice, and it can be better explained through the use of a diasystem as well as using Ausbausprache - Abstandsprache - Dachsprache. Croatian and Serbian are not dialects of Serbo-Croatian, this was a term used by many in the past as common term for the languages without a better alternative. 01:41, 11 October 2010 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by Vodomar (talk • contribs)

> The best description would be Neo-Štokavian, based on the modified standardised Štokavian, with ijekavian pronounciation.

Unless you're Slavic dialectologist, this sentence is meaningless. What you describe by this excessively long construct is covered by the term Serbo-Croatian in English language for ~ one and a half century. There is no need to use cumbersome substitutes that require intricate knowledge of an obscure field of South Slavic dialectology. --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 16:29, 11 October 2010 (UTC)

Kubura> Croatian linguist Ranko Matasović (Štambuk glorifies him) explicitly says that Serbo-Croatian was never materialized in reality, since it never existed.

This depends on how you define "language" and the relation of its "existence". What Matasović actually says, is that Serbo-Croatian never existed in a completely uniform way, and that there were always regional variations, which if you call languages were then "different languages" As a "single standard", that it didn't exist. But that doesn't necessarily mean that what was at that time taught as hrvatsko-srpski in Socialist Federal Republic of Croatia and srpsko-hrvatski in the Socialist Fedaral Republic of Serbia were two different languages. Such Serbo-Croatian was something that is in modern linguistics called pluricentric or polycentric standard language, commonly defined as "a language with several national standard variants, which are different in some respects, but not so much that they can be treated as different languages". English (British, American, Australian..), German (of Germany, Switzerland, Austria), Portuguese (of Portugal, Brazil) are all examples of such "pluricentric standard languages". All of them differ in certain respects of vocabulary, grammar, even orthography. These differences are often very extensive, and are much more greater in scope than between B/C/S See for example the article: American and British English differences. So essentially Matasović's answer was "correct", but only in a particular context. Yes the differences exist, and nobody is trying to negate them, but we must explain the situation objectively as it reflects reality and not some idealized version of it. I'm sure that you'd want that modern standard Croatian is based on some koineized Ča+Kaj+Što mixture, but it's not. It's based on Eastern Herzegovinian dialect drawing on the heritage of Communist Yugoslav policy of ethnolinguistic unification and the codification work of the late 19th century Illyrians and Vukovians. --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 16:57, 11 October 2010 (UTC)

(od) But "Neo-Shtokavian" is still not accurate since we are not just talking about the standard forms, but about the whole range of mutually intelligible non-Slovenian West South Slavic dialects. That is the label that we're looking for here. We all know what "Serbo-Croatian" means when it refers specifically to the literary standards of Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian, but we're looking for some unifying term for that range of spoken forms that are demonstrably West South Slavic, but not Slovenian, which is a separate branch of West South Slavic. --Taivo (talk) 11:52, 11 October 2010 (UTC)

Note that this Čakavian/Kajkavian/Štokavian dialects spoken on this "central" area are not all mutually intelligible. "Pure" Čakavian speaker from e.g. Krk and Kajkavian speaker from Bednja don't understand a word of each other. They can only communicate through literary standard that they've been taught in schools and can read/hear in the media. Slovenian dialects are also internally quite divergent and some of them are not mutually intelligible (or so I've heard). Unless one has to resort to obscure and cumbersome substitutes, Serbo-Croatian doesn't have much alternative in any of its ambiguous meanings. --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 16:35, 11 October 2010 (UTC)

Kwami's Wording

This is not the wording suggested by Kwami. It is only a thinly-disguised version of the prevailing Croat POV. This is Kwami's wording:

Croatian ([hrvatski] Error: {{Lang}}: text has italic markup (help)) is the language of the Croatian people. It is spoken in Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and neighbouring countries, as well as by the Croatian diaspora worldwide. The literary and standard language is based on the central dialect of Serbo-Croatian, Shtokavian, and more specifically on the Eastern Herzegovinian subdialect, which also forms the basis of the official standards of Serbian, Bosnian, and Montenegrin. Of the other Serbo-Croatian dialects, two, Chakavian and Kajkavian, are spoken exclusively by Croats, and there are a few Croatian speakers of a third, Torlakian; all dialects are called Croatian when spoken by Croats. More generally, these four dialects, and likewise the four national standards, are commonly subsumed under the term "Serbo-Croatian" in English, though this term is controversial because it reminds many Croats of the Serbian dominance of Yugoslavia, and paraphrases such as "Bosnian-Croatian-(Montenegrin-)Serbian" and "Serbian/Croatian/Bosnian/(Montenegrin)" are therefore sometimes used instead, especially in diplomatic circles.

--Taivo (talk) 11:23, 10 October 2010 (UTC)

In the interest of judging whether a consensus is forming or not, I would support Kwami's wording (not Joy's version of it). --Taivo (talk) 11:26, 10 October 2010 (UTC)

Actually, I'm happy with the version that Chipmunk came up with. Some of the wording's smoother. It's good to have other authors. — kwami (talk) 14:16, 10 October 2010 (UTC)

(Where is the version that Chipmunk came up with? --Joy [shallot] (talk) 16:19, 10 October 2010 (UTC))

In the article itself. — kwami (talk) 17:01, 11 October 2010 (UTC)

thinly-disguised version of the prevailing Croat POV - you are forgetting WP:AGF, it's really impolite, please don't do that. --Joy [shallot] (talk) 16:19, 10 October 2010 (UTC)

Would you "linguists" be honest enough to explain to us "nationalists" just one thing? How can Croatian language be based on "Serbo-Croatian" when there was no "Serbo-Croatian" before 1954?--Jack Sparrow 3 (talk) 18:44, 11 October 2010 (UTC)

That isn't what "Serbo-Croatian" means in English.

Serbo-Croatian was the name of the official language of the republic back in, what, 1928? It had been agreed upon as the literary standard of the Serbs and Croats in 1850. But that's the standard language, and we're not talking about the standard language here. Croatian isn't "based" on SC, it simply is SC as spoken by Croats. Serbs and Croats are not distinguished by language, but by religion and history. They share a common language, for which the most common name in English is SC. Lingistically, the division is between Kajkavian, Chakavian, and Shtokavian, not Croatian and Serbian. Now, call that common language whatever you want: Naški, Illyrian, Croatian-Bosnian-Serbian, Central South Slavic, whatever. The point is that Croatian and Serbian are not separate branches of South Slavic coordinate with Slovenian; rather, SS divides into Slovenian dialects and Croatian+Serbian dialects. — kwami (talk) 18:51, 11 October 2010 (UTC)

Which republic in 1928? Which Croats and which Serbs in 1850? And who are you to teach us which language we speak? Croats and Serbs are speaking different languages, which communists attempted to mix in 1954. And know what? They failed; Croats and Serbs are still speaking different languages.--Jack Sparrow 3 (talk) 19:03, 11 October 2010 (UTC)

Are you purposefully misunderstanding me? If you are not going to converse in good faith, then please don't waste my time asking false questions. You asked for an explanation, and I gave it. Unless you can refute my explanation using reliable sources, there is no point in continuing. — kwami (talk) 19:06, 11 October 2010 (UTC)

I asked you two simple questions, and now you don't want to answer. Is that because you know that your "explanations" are nothing more than lies?--Jack Sparrow 3 (talk) 19:09, 11 October 2010 (UTC)

No, you made paranoid accusations that I'm trying to teach you which language to speak, and even now you're accusing me of lies. However, on the chance that there's an honest question behind all the bluster, I'll try again.

Sorry, it was the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, and in 1918 rather than 1928, which was the date it was dissolved.

As for "which Croats", evidently just about all of them. The government in Zagreb uses the standard literary language established by Gaj in 1850, practically the same standard as is used in Belgrade and Sarajevo. There may be Croats who are attempting to revive Chakavian as a "pure" Croatian language, but somehow I doubt there are very many of them.

Regardless, there is a mutually intelligible language which Croats call "Croatian" and Serbs call "Serbian". The common name in English for this language is "Serbo-Croatian", which has nothing to do with Communists in 1954. If you deny that there is such a language, then your opinion is demonstrably false. However, if you merely object to the name "Serbo-Croatian", then we can discuss which name would be better. — kwami (talk) 19:14, 11 October 2010 (UTC)

(ec)Jack Sparrow 3, you are ignoring the issue. As Kwami has stated eloquently, the division of non-Slovenian West South Slavic is not between Croatian and Serbian, but between Kajkavian, Chakavian, and Shtokavian. Shotkavian is divided into literary Croatian, Serbian, and Bosnian. To ignore this is to ignore all linguistic science. But all these dialects are mutually intelligible. If you are a native speaker of Croatian, you will have no problem understanding any speaker of Bosnian or Serbian. If you claim you can't it's only because you don't want to and not because you are unable. You have not provided a single, solitary reliable source to contradict the outline that Kwami and I have given here. Indeed, you will be unable to. That common non-Slovenian West South Slavic language is most commonly called Serbo-Croatian in English, although Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian is coming into use. You have no proof otherwise. --Taivo (talk) 19:18, 11 October 2010 (UTC)

Actually, Taivo, I don't think the dialects are mutually intelligible, at least not in their pure form (which is rare today), or at least not much. But that could only mean that Croatian is not a single language; standard Serbian and Croatian would still be mutually intelligible. — kwami (talk) 19:25, 11 October 2010 (UTC)

Kwami, I gave the sources to Ivan few sections "upper". "SC" had't been agreed as the literary standard in 1850. The official language in Croatia in 19th century was Croatian since 1847. It was one of offical languages in Austria-Hungary guaranteed by Croatian-Hungarian Agreement. Croatian has been standardized and then became the offcial language in Croatia. 1850 some linguists argued for "Serbocroatian" but it has never been nore than arguing until 1954. --Flopy (talk) 19:21, 11 October 2010 (UTC)

(edit conflict) But the standard they agreed on, Eastern Herzegovinian, is the official language in Zagreb today, despite not being the native language of that city, so somewhere along the line Croatia accepted it, and continues to accept it. — kwami (talk) 19:25, 11 October 2010 (UTC)

The problem for your argument and sources, Flopy, is that usage in the 19th century doesn't really matter when it comes to common English usage. The common literary language of Bosnia, Croatia, and Serbia is called "Serbo-Croatian" in English. There is some movement toward calling it "Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian" in contemporary usage, but it is still uncommon. --Taivo (talk) 19:24, 11 October 2010 (UTC)

To say that "1850 some linguists argued for "Serbocroatian" but it has never been nore that." is a gross understatement. Flopy I'm afraid you're spreading some serious disinfo. Virtually all of the 19th century Croatian intellectuals opted for Serbo-Croatian in one way or the other. The original "vision" by Illyrians was to mix all of the dialects into one giant hodgepodge, but that of course never worked. There was even a fraction of Croats who slavishly followed the teachings of Vuk Karadžić and which called themselves vukovci ("Vukovians"). They were the most influential of all the competing literary schools. The foundations laid back then by linguists such as Tomislav Maretić and Ivan Broz are valid to this day. Flopy is arguing on the basis what some piece of paper had written in it by a bunch of idle landowners back in the days when 95% of the population (peasants) were illiterate, having zero practical relevance to the future of what is today called "standard Croatian". --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 20:56, 11 October 2010 (UTC)

To ignore the fact that Croatian and Serbian are two different languages is like believing that the Earth is hollow. I am a native speaker of Croatian language, and I have problems with understanding most of the Serbian language, cause Croats and Serbs aren't speaking the same language. And that fairy tales about Serbo-Croatian in the 19th century you can tell to small children, but not to me, kwami.--Jack Sparrow 3 (talk) 19:28, 11 October 2010 (UTC)

My parents can hardly understand British films, but that doesn't mean that there is no such language as "English".

Do you have problems understanding old people in Split? Does that mean that their dialect and yours are not the same language?

I don't need to convince you, Jack, I only need reliable sources to support my argument. That's what WP is based on: Sources, not your or my opinion. — kwami (talk) 19:31, 11 October 2010 (UTC)

Taivo, called or not, that has to to with propaganda, after almost 50 years of forcing "Serbocroatian" in former Yugoslavia. It has very much to do with politic. Your last sentence acknowledged it is possibile to change that allegedly "common name" in English and it has been changed at least for the EU. Croatia is very close to became the member of the EU and then Croatian will be one of the offical languages in the EU, not "SC". Isn't strange the official language is Croatian, but the "common name" in English is "SC". I don't see any logic here. --Flopy (talk) 19:37, 11 October 2010 (UTC)

English use of the term "Serbo-Croatian" predates Yugoslavia. Morfill, Slavic Lit: "the extent of the territory over which Serbo-Croatian and its dialects are spoken". That was in 1883.

Please read WP:Crystal ball. In any case, the EU has indicated that they are not willing to accept Croatian, Serbian, Bosnian, and Montenegrin as four new official languages of the union, but consider them to be a single language. God knows what they'll call it. If they call it "Croatian", as you seem to think, and other countries follow suit, then fine, we'll say that Serbs, Bosniaks, and Montenegrins speak "Croatian", we'll rename the SC article "Croatian language", and we'll rename this article "Croatian Croatian", and we'll rename the Serbian language article "Serbian Croatian". Or perhaps they'll call it "Shtokavian", in which case we'll change the Croatia article to say that the country is trilingual. But again, no crystal balls allowed when writing an article, so for now we're stuck with our existing sources. — kwami (talk) 19:55, 11 October 2010 (UTC)

Kwami, my source is here. They say they are very close but make a clear distinction. So, please, don't be sarcastic. --Flopy (talk) 19:58, 11 October 2010 (UTC)

I wasn't trying to be sarcastic.

That ref actually supports my argument in its discussion of Bosnian: Nowadays Bosnian [bosanski jezik] is considered to be one of the standard written versions of the Central South Slavic diasystem that was formerly known as Serbo-Croatian. From a linguistic point of view it can be considered as an Ausbau-variant of Serbo-Croatian that acquired its status as a national standard language after the collapse of Yugoslavia. That's exactly what we've been saying. — kwami (talk) 20:18, 11 October 2010 (UTC)

formerly known as Serbo-Croatian It means not anymore. Why they separated Croatian, Bosnian and Serbian if that is one language? They could write "Serbocroatian" and the story is finished. But, they didn't. That indicates that in the EU it will be no "Serbocroatian" then Croatian, Bosnian and serbian as three separate languauges. --Flopy (talk) 08:19, 12 October 2010 (UTC)

Nazi sources say that Germans are "superior race", and we all know how reliable that sources are. But those sources were the basis for all German science between the First and the Second World War.

And there is a small, but very important difference between English and "Serbo-Croatian". English has naturally evolved during the course of history and "Serbo-Croatian" was constructed in 1954.--Jack Sparrow 3 (talk) 19:39, 11 October 2010 (UTC)

Godwin's law strikes again. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]} 19:43, 11 October 2010 (UTC)

The issue of propaganda is irrelevant here. All that is relevant is the question of what is common English usage. That common English usage is "Serbo-Croatian" and is based on reliable sources. The English of waterfront Liverpool or rural Ulster is hardly intelligible to someone from California, yet no one disputes that they all constitute "English". Jack Sparrow may refuse to understand a Serb who lives across the street from him, but that doesn't change the linguistic reality. All our reliable sources state that these speech-forms are largely mutually intelligible. (There are some questions, apparently, about Kajkavian, but standard Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian are clearly a single language.) And "Serbo-Croatian" wasn't "constructed". It was the standardization of the Shtokavian dialect. --Taivo (talk) 20:11, 11 October 2010 (UTC)

Yeah, Kajkavian is a bit like Scots.

Standard SC was the stand'n of Shtokavian. But SC also means the lang of all Serbs and Croats, not just the standard, and is used that way in many of our sources. — kwami (talk) 20:15, 11 October 2010 (UTC)

As I wrote above the EU are separating Croatian, Bosnian and Serbian. The users here even don't speak or undesteand Croatian but they are claiming they now better as the native speaker. I don't count Štambuk, because he has his own private war against "Croatian nationalists". But, Kwami, Taivo how would you react if I would teach you about your native language English. But, no, we are all deluded nationalists, you know better as native speaker. Howewer, in the article they are sections that support the argumentation that "SC" was a forced political project: The single most important effort by ruling Yugoslav Communist elites to erase the "differences" between Croatian and Serbian – and in practice impose Serbian Ekavian language, written in Latin script, as the "official" language of Yugoslavia – was the so-called "Novi Sad Agreement". Twenty five Serbian, Croatian, and Montenegrin philologists came together in 1954 to sign the Agreement. A common Serbo-Croatian or "Croato-Serbian" orthography was compiled in 1960 in an atmosphere of state repression and fear. There were 18 Serbs and 7 Croats in Novi Sad. The "Agreement" was seen by the Croats as a defeat for the Croatian cultural heritage. According to the eminent Croatian linguist Ljudevit Jonke, it was imposed on the Croats. The conclusions were formulated according to goals which had been set in advance, and discussion had no role whatsoever. In the more than a decade that followed, the principles of the Novi Sad Agreement were put into practice.

Actually, very good written. It also seems to be that discussion has no role here (I agree with the IP "down"). How sadly, but it doesn't change the realitiy: there is no "Serbocroatian". --Flopy (talk) 15:24, 12 October 2010 (UTC)

Flopy, that description by Jonke smacks of desperation from the Croatian side. Basically he's saying something along the lines that even though Croats also signed the Novi Sad Agreement, they didn't really mean it (or that those dastardly Serbs were behind the whole thing). The Croats are willing to discredit or discount the signatures of linguists belonging to their ethnic group in order to satisfy their national ego that they are not Serbs and so reduce everything into a binary distinction between being Serbian or non-Serbian. Oh pity the poor Croats. Why should non-Croats assume the emotional baggage of Croats? By the way, this self-victimizing is eerily similar to nationalist Serbian claims that the world should listen uncritically to the Serbs because they were motivated by altruism to keep Yugoslavia together. Puh-leeze. These sociolinguistic aspects are necessary in gaining insight into Balkan mentalities but do comparatively little in explaining how the standard languages are mutually intelligible or describing the characteristics of the Eastern Herzegovinian sub-dialect which forms the basis of modern standard Croatian. Vput (talk) 16:28, 12 October 2010 (UTC)

This message is totally out. How do you know what did Jonke mean? Have you been there? This is the fact: the "SC" was forced. And the good thing is: it's in the article. It's not about "emotional baggage" then about the ignorance and unfamiliarity with facts. You know better than me and other native speaker about my language and my history. That is your message all the time. --Flopy (talk) 18:29, 12 October 2010 (UTC)

...and why should we be so quick to believe Jonke's assertion? Is it because his assertion lines up well with the Croatian nationalist justification that Serbo-Croatian never existed or that the Croats were innocent in participating in something that has turned out to contradict a certain strand in the Croatian national consciousness? If we are completely at liberty to believe anyone's judgement at face value without deeper analysis, then just as you insist that it'd be justifiable to believe Jonke's claim of the Croats being forced to sign Novi Sad, then nationalist Serbs would be perfectly justified in adhering to Vuk Karadžić's flawed reasoning that anyone who speaks a Shtokavian dialect is a Serb just like him, all because he has said so. Think harder and try again, Flopy. Vput (talk) 18:57, 12 October 2010 (UTC)

All the time the word "nationalist". It seems to be your main argument. That is disparagingly. You still didn't answer my question: how would you react if I would teach you about English (if that is your native language) claiming I know better than you and then calling you "nationalist" if you disagree with me? That is the problem in this discussion. --Flopy (talk) 19:14, 12 October 2010 (UTC)

No, Flopy, the problem in this discussion is that you and the other "nationalists" continually throw out the charge of "non-speaker" to anyone who disagrees with your personal assessment of your language. That is just as much of a disparaging comment as you perceive "nationalist" to be. Wikipedia does not run on either emotion or personal assessment. It runs on reliable sources and the priority in the English Wikipedia is for sources in English. Since Wikipedia does not rely on the personal assessments of native speakers, it doesn't matter one whit whether an editor speaks the language or not. All that matters is whether an editor can find, read and weigh reliable sources. Speaking the language can be an advantage in weighing sources, but it is no greater an advantage than a knowledge of linguistics and an understanding of what terms like "mutual intelligibility" actually mean. In this case, the mass of reliable sources cited many times in this discussion say 1) Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian are standard forms of a single dialect--Shtokavian; 2) they share a very high degree of mutual intelligibility; 3) the most common English name for the language of which Shtokavian is a member is "Serbo-Croatian" and includes Kajkavian and Chakavian in many accounts. No amount of Croatian hand-wringing can remove these reliable sources or deny that these facts are found in those reliable sources. --Taivo (talk) 19:39, 12 October 2010 (UTC)

Flopy, to answer your question about that hypothetical situation: NO, it would not necessarily be a problem. My being a native speaker of English does not make me the ultimate authority about English as a linguistic topic. In fact if you were to ask some other native-speakers of English about the relationship of English to other languages they would insist that English is genetically NOT a Germanic language but a Romance one because of the high proportion of Latinate words in English. There are studies on English published by scholars who are non-native (but fluent) users of English and I would be an idiot or a top-notch English-nationalist to dismiss their findings solely because their identity as non-native users disqualifies from analyzing, studying or making observations about my native language (your nationalistic reasoning and discounting of scholars who don't belong to the relevant speech-community would insinuate that you think that native Croats who study English philology at the University of Zagreb are wasting their time by studying their chosen field because they are not native-speakers of English and won't be able to make a meaningful contribution to the field).

By the same token, scholars such as Wayles Browne, Robert Greenberg, Celia Hawkesworth, Morton Benson, Ralph Bogert and Thomas Magner have specialized on various topics in BCMS/SC and none of these people are considered unworthy of discussing BCMS/SC even though NONE of them is a native speaker of BCMS/SC. The word is "nationalist" (and I don't throw it around indiscriminately as you'd like to believe) because indeed that is the central concept that gives rise to the sociolinguistic observation why Serbo-Croatian does not exist. Vput (talk) 19:42, 12 October 2010 (UTC)

Flopy, I meet non-native English speakers who know English better than I do all the time. They know its history better, its literature, its dialectical variation, its grammar; hell, when I can't spell a word, I look for a fluent ESL speaker because I know that other native speakers can't spell either. I've also had arguments with native speakers who insist that English is a Romance language, that they can prove by all of the cognates English and Spanish share, and they think I must be an idiot to think it's closer to German. Native speakers are good for a few obvious things: a native accent (if they haven't been away from the country for too long) and native intuition on idioms, semantic nuance, and which officially ungrammatical things are really okay. — kwami (talk) 23:01, 12 October 2010 (UTC)

Excellent, good to know that opiniom. This summer I met some Americans and we were talking about language. As you know better than me English has a lot of words Latin origin (defence, century and many more) but they claimed the Latin has been influenced by English and not the opposite! It was unimaginably for them that the world language number 1 could be influenced by some other language. It's the true, I argued with them and became the answer "you don't know abotu my native language better than me". But, I am happy to read it's not the general opinion of native English speaker at least not of academics (this "my" Americans were not academics). But OK, I am out of subject now;) Vput I would like to read also your opinion about this. --Flopy (talk) 13:08, 13 October 2010 (UTC)

That made me laugh. I like to think that such people are a minority, at least among Americans traveling abroad, but our educational system is embarrassingly provincial. (It's amazing how many Americans can't find Mexico on a map.) I remember the astonishment of one classmate in college when the prof noted different translations of the Bible: she'd just assumed that the Bible had been written in English, and presumably that Moses & Jesus spoke English as well. Not that she was stupid, she'd simply never been exposed to the concept. — kwami (talk) 21:10, 13 October 2010 (UTC)

Proportion

This talk page has become bloated out of proportion. Trying to catch up on the latest developments, I just wasted an hour only to find out that there aren't any. Some discussions are futile and not worth getting entangled in, and this is certainly one of them. (It reminded me of the both end- and fruitless grind about John Hunyadi's ethnic origins.) What remains to be done is mainspace maintenance. Trigaranus (talk) 00:29, 14 October 2010 (UTC)

Ban notice

For your information: the aggressive anonymous user who was last posting from 78.3.27.181 (talk · contribs · WHOIS) has been topic-banned from this page and all related topics. Any edit that is recognisably by the same person (from new IPs or sock accounts) can be reverted on sight, without regard to 3RR or other limitations. Fut.Perf. ☼ 20:10, 15 October 2010 (UTC)

Language tree

The language tree was corrected to reflect the reference http://www.ethnologue.com/show_lang_family.asp?code=hrv Vodomar (talk) 10:24, 20 October 2010 (UTC)

And it was corrected back, per the discussion at Talk:Serbo-Croatian, which you have ignored. — kwami (talk) 10:31, 20 October 2010 (UTC)

BS ! The reference http://www.sil.org/iso639-3/documentation.asp?id=hbs and reference http://www.ethnologue.com/show_lang_family.asp?code=hrv do not support the claim for serbo-croatian, the only one left is David Dalby, Linguasphere (1999/2000, Linguasphere Observatory), pg. 445, 53-AAA-g, "Srpski+Hrvatski, Serbo-Croatian". So in this case it is FALSE referencing. Vodomar (talk) 10:36, 20 October 2010 (UTC)

" In brief, on purely linguistic grounds, two speech system are considered to be a dialects of the same languag if they are (predominantly) mutually intelligible. This makes Cockney and Scouse dialects of English,..... On the other hand, purely linguistic considerations can be 'outranked' by sociopolitical criteria, so that we can encounter speech systems which are mutually intelligible, but which have nonetheless been designated as separate languages. A well-recognised example is the status of Swedish, Danish and Norwegian, which are counted as separate languages despite the fact that members of the community can understand each other... A more recent example is Serbo-Croatian, formerly widely used as a language name to encompass a set of varieties used in former Yugoslavia, ... now largely replaced by names Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian" David Crystal "Language Death", Cambridge University Press, 2000, pp. 11, 12 . Vodomar (talk) 11:04, 20 October 2010 (UTC)

Speakers of the Scandanavian languages can't understand eachother "just like that". While they can make out parts of what speakers of the other languages are saying, they have considerable difficulty, especially Swedes trying to understand Danish, and will miss (i.e. cannot understand) a more or less considerable amount of what was said. Read The Contribution of Linguistic Factors to the Intelligibility of Closely Related Languages, a study that has quantified this a bit. This is in stark contrast with speakers of the Serbo-Croatian standards, who will not even always notice that the other is speaking in a different standard. Therefore any such comparison is flawed. --JorisvS (talk) 16:18, 20 October 2010 (UTC)

"Gillian Scotland

Local dialects have a lower status than standard languages. Do you think they deserve to be protected as actively as, say, Welsh or Gaelic?"

"David Crystal (Guest Speaker)

I do. The distinction between language and dialect is, after all, somewhat arbitrary. Ten years ago, in former Yugoslavia, people spoke dialects of Serbo-Croatian. Today, Serbian and Croatian are being pursued as different languages - and Bosnian, too. Some countries do actively support their dialects - in the UK, for example, we have the Yorkshire Dialect Society."

see: http://wordsmith.org/chat/dc.html . David Crystal is a well known linguist. Vodomar (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 11:23, 20 October 2010 (UTC).

I assume you're trying to make a point, but you aren't saying anything we don't already know, and it isn't particularly relevant for your argument, unless I've misunderstood what your argument is. — kwami (talk) 12:01, 20 October 2010 (UTC)

I also assuming that you are not tyring to accept the point that was made by David Crystal, you can't shoehorn Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian and Montenegrian in the same box anymore, as it is not considered valid anymore the example given were the Scandinavian languages. Whatever argument is put in front of you is disregarded, because you consider your references better than anyone else can bring up. Vodomar (talk) 21:58, 20 October 2010 (UTC)

• Sources can not be taken in a selective manner. If a source (http://www.ethnologue.com/) is acceptable for the vast majority of articles, then it should be the case with the article on the Croatian language. --Roberta F. (talk) 22:18, 20 October 2010 (UTC)

And according to Ethnologue, Croatian is Serbo-Croatian. Vodomar didn't like it, so we used a different ref. If you wish to put the Ethnologue ref back in, be my guest: it supports the existing version of the article. — kwami (talk) 22:41, 20 October 2010 (UTC)

{outdent}
The most obvious fact is that no one uses Taivo's paradigm of "non-Slovene Western South Slavic". This would mean that the Slovene language is its own category. Who would categorize it that way? Making a category for only one language?! Science has progressed, and no longer describes the language as "jugoslavjansko narječje" which would contain one called "slovensko-hrvatsko".

Ethnologue is used in the article, but partially, this is not acceptable. See: http://www.ethnologue.com/show_family.asp?subid=374-16 - Western South Slavic is not divided into two "subgroups" (two "macrolanguages").

If our learned friends would explain why the Slovene language should be separated? Maybe some dialectology would answer that? If the Slovene language can be considered one "macrolanguage" of Slovene dialects, then the Slovene language is a diasystem. Then, most surely, the Croatian language is a language based on three dialects (there are even more than three, that is also a product of "categorization"), thus a diasystem of its own.

Where ever I looked, the basic purpose is to count languages and describe them properly. Serbian is not based on the same dialect basis as other Western South Slavic languages.

The "problem" is much discontinued, and we cannot link jugoslavjansko narječje with the artificial language produced in 1954/1960 (which was never before made with such "substance" - e.g. with such mixture of words). -- Ali Pasha (talk) 02:12, 21 October 2010 (UTC)

Wikipedia:OWN

kwami, you do not own the articles Croatian language and Serbo-Croatian language. The references in Croatian Language as per the talk page (ISO and http://www.ethnologue.com/ ) should be removed as Serbo-Croatian is not in part of the branch to the Croatian language. Serbo-Croatian is listed as a macrolanguage. The references to ISO and http://www.ethnologue.com/ will be removed. The only one left will be the one supporting the argument for Serbo-Croatian. If this is reverted, then your are engaging in Wikipedia:OWN and promoting something that ISO and http://www.ethnologue.com/ do not support. Have a nice day. Vodomar (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 11:37, 20 October 2010 (UTC).

Please read WP:Dick. I have no problem with you improving the refs, only with you deleting factual information you don't like. — kwami (talk) 11:57, 20 October 2010 (UTC)

The one who really needs to be educated in not being a WP:Dick is yourself talk. Vodomar (talk) 21:53, 20 October 2010 (UTC)

An accusation of owning the article is an assumption of bad faith, generally considered impolite. Whether one needs to read WP:DICK or not, insulting the person you should be trying to convince won't get you anywhere. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]} 22:00, 20 October 2010 (UTC)

There is no assumption of bad faith, when the evidence is plentiful. Vodomar (talk) 22:06, 20 October 2010 (UTC)

The evidence is: !RR protection of the article, the constant reversions by Kwamikagami, considering other people's references as inferior even if in the vast majorirty of artiles the references are used. Disregarding other peoples opinion, and placing more value on his own then others. Look at the revision history and look at the chat history for this article, the tone the mannor.... The article can not be a one man's vission of the truth. Vodomar (talk) 22:25, 20 October 2010 (UTC)

You were editing in good faith, for a while. Until you didn't get what you wanted. But acting in good faith is still the best way to get there. — kwami (talk) 22:56, 20 October 2010 (UTC)

• I agree with Vodomar. Kwamikagami is behaving in a dicatatorial manner, inventing consensus where it does not exist. He is using a language of hate and intimidation against other contributors that do not share his views. This isn't the only article where Kwamikagami has shown intolerance. He assumed "a consensus" for instance in the case of the article Croatian grammar. Kwamikagami with his actions: placing articles under special protection, 1RR, constant reversions is in essence an abuse of administrator priviledges. --Roberta F. (talk) 22:34, 20 October 2010 (UTC)

If I've done anything inappropriate, take it to WP:ANI. I'd be curious as to what it is. — kwami (talk) 22:56, 20 October 2010 (UTC)

Kwamikagami, you don't have the basic knowledge about this topic. Your edit on Commons shows that [1]. This is assuming bad faith. That map is like Brozović's and Šimunović's work about that topic. Distribution of dialects before migrations. Kubura (talk) 23:21, 20 October 2010 (UTC)

The preponderence of the evidence supports the use of Serbo-Croatian as the name of the language that is non-Slovenian Western South Slavic. We have presented it to you in abundance over and over and over again, but you refuse to accept the scientific evidence because it does not match your nationalistic POVs, Vodomar, Roberta F., and Kubura. You have zero evidence to say that Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian are not national variants of a single dialect of a single language that is called "Serbo-Croatian" in English. You have completely misread Crystal and misinterpreted it through your own blinders. We have provided multiple scientific, linguistic reliable sources to prove it to you, but you refuse to acknowledge any of them. Indeed, you rely solely on Ethnologue and Crystal in opposition to the many, many sources that we have cited showing Serbo-Croatian as the cover term for the single language that we're discussing here. This article isn't owned by anyone, but you Croatians seek to WP:OWN it by continually reverting the accurate scientific text to your own nationalistic skewed version of reality. Vodomar, Roberta K., Kubura, meet the pot. --Taivo (talk) 23:58, 20 October 2010 (UTC)

Many, many sources" that have taken which materials as source? Taivo, start to behave nicer. You're denigrating the opponents (with "nationalistic"); that's violating of WP:ETIQ and WP:ATTACK. Also, Taivo, stop hounding me. Read WP:HOUND. Whenever and wherever I appear, you appear right after me. Especially you have a history of violation of WP:TALKNO, impersonating me. Have in mind that you also have your own personal POV that you're trying to impose here. Kubura (talk) 00:38, 21 October 2010 (UTC)

Oh, come on Kwami. I edit in good faith, I will always go with a good argument if it is substantiated well. There are differing opinions on this subject and they should be taken into consideration. What is the problem with going with ethnologue's definition of the language. It does not make the article any worse. Yes the Serbo-Croatian can be mentioned in the article and it did have an influence on the language, but it is not a defining one. There were many arguments raised about this through the talk pages of this article, if we are here to build consensus lets build it and not be destructive. Vodomar (talk) 00:02, 21 October 2010 (UTC)

You still don't understand the nature of the Ethnologue source, Vodomar. Ethnologue's editors are not specialists, they are generalists and the majority of them are Uto-Aztecan, Mayan, Arawakan, Cariban, Papuan or Austronesian specialists just pushing paper to maintain the sections on languages that they don't specialize in. Someone wrote to them and complained about "Serbo-Croatian" and without really taking a survey of the literature, they basically said, "OK", made up the term "macrolanguage" for Serbo-Croatian, and Voila!--problem solved :p All the Slavic specialists place Croatian firmly as a part of Serbo-Croatian. Crystal is also not a specialist. The Slavicists all use "Serbo-Croatian" as a node of Western South Slavic. We've provided you with multiple sources showing this. Ethnologue is useful as a fall-back position if there is not specialist literature. But in the presence of specialist literature, then we pass on using Ethnologue. This is the general practice in language articles throughout Wikipedia. --Taivo (talk) 00:07, 21 October 2010 (UTC)

Clap trap !!! Wow now you are claiming nationlaism and now placing a bunch of users in the pot, great just point the finger on the other side and start claiming some kind of a bias is nothing but an excercise in logical fallacy and ad hominem. Vodomar (talk) 00:16, 21 October 2010 (UTC)

Tavio, so Wikipedia is the only true source of knowledge and the only source of truth. I can really see where this is going Vodomar (talk) 00:20, 21 October 2010 (UTC)

The problem is that you refuse to accept any scientific linguistic references that don't agree with your POV. Kwami and I have presented multiple reliable references, but you just ignore them and rely solely on two sources written by generalists that partially fit your POV. I don't know what else to call it when you and the others willfully disregard scientific evidence. What do you want to call the blinders that you and Roberta F. and Kubura are wearing? --Taivo (talk) 00:21, 21 October 2010 (UTC)

No, Vodomar, the multiple reliable sources that Kwami and I have cited here are the basis of our comments. You just choose to ignore the evidence. --Taivo (talk) 00:23, 21 October 2010 (UTC)

Yes Ethnologue is a usefull fallback where is suits you, the same with referencing if it does not agree with your POV this is then disregarded and rubbished. To reach a consensus it is a two way street, not a one way express highway which only drives semitrailers with in your own POV written all over it. Vodomar (talk) 00:32, 21 October 2010 (UTC)

Kwamikagami has shown WP:OWN on other articles too. His possessive behaviour towards the articles resulted as vandalisms, since he was blatantly reverting to his version, e.g. here he impoverished the article about South Slavic languages. He deleted the whole referenced sections. He deleted the line about Kajkavian Ikavians, he deleted the info about New and Old Shtokavian accentuation. His version is full of nonexisting terms (e.g., he deleted "East" from "East Herzegovina" - so which one is that "Herzegovina dialect"?; e.g. he invented "ikavian subdialect of Štokavian"...). Where were his sources for those deletions and where were sources for his inventions (WP:OR) ? Kubura (talk) 00:39, 21 October 2010 (UTC)

Taivo, we're wasting our time. These people have no interest in providing sources or improving the article. You can't have a discussion with someone who refuses to listen. I had hopes for Vodomar, but he's stopped trying. Until someone makes an honest effort, we're simply filling the page with clutter. — kwami (talk) 00:43, 21 October 2010 (UTC)

Likewise ! Vodomar (talk) 01:40, 21 October 2010 (UTC)

Whither Now?

It is clear at this point that there is an impasse on what to call the language that comprises the range of mutually intelligible dialects spoken in the former Yugoslavian regions of Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia, and Montenegro. ISO 639-3 calls that language "Serbo-Croatian" and gives separate identifiers to "Bosnian", "Croatian", and "Serbian". Croatian nationalists, however, refuse to recognize "Serbo-Croatian" as a cover term for that language. No other options have been offered by the nationalists for what to call that single language. Arbitration has been mentioned. Is that the next step? As a linguist, I'm willing to compromise on some construction other than "Serbo-Croatian" as long as it is reasonable and has at least some usage in contemporary English linguistic literature. But I'm not willing to treat Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian as if they were three independent and mutually unintelligible branches of South Slavic. They are not. --Taivo (talk) 15:07, 7 October 2010 (UTC)

Actually standard ISO 639-3 is talking about hbs macrolanguage, not language per se, and hbs is actually new version of now obsolete sh identifier. Few remarks about above writing:

• mutually intelligible dialects - that can be talked about. A lot.
• Croatian nationalists - are you chauvinist or just plain POW pusher? How you dare to use derogatory terms for users who are not thinking same as you? Please check Wikipedia:Manual of Style (words to watch).
• But I'm not willing - nobody asked you what you are willing. Sources will tell how this article will look like, not any user of Wikipedia. Or at least that should be so if we will follow Five pillars of Wikipedia.

Please do not use rude or offensive language in future while in the same time trying to pose as mediator, thank you kindly. SpeedyGonsales (talk) 17:12, 7 October 2010 (UTC)

The problem is that there are two groups of editors involved here. There are those who are on the side of linguistic accuracy with linguistic references and there are those who are on the side of separating all things Croatian away from linkage with all things Serbian, including the term "Serbo-Croatian" or any wording that says Croatian and Serbian are differing national labels for the same language. Whatever we call the two opposing camps, the fact of the impasse remains. --Taivo (talk) 17:49, 7 October 2010 (UTC)

(edit conflict)Okay, to reword Taivo's post in a less objectionable way:

It is clear at this point that there is an impasse on what to call the macrolanguage that comprises the range of mutually intelligible varieties spoken in the former Yugoslavian regions of Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia, and Montenegro. ISO 639-3 calls that macrolanguage "Serbo-Croatian" and gives separate identifiers to "Bosnian", "Croatian", and "Serbian." A number of Croats, however, dislike "Serbo-Croatian" as a cover term for that macrolanguage but no other options have been offered by said Croats. Arbitration has been mentioned. Is that the next step? As a linguist, I have no problem with a term other than "Serbo-Croatian" as long as it has at least some usage in contemporary English linguistic literature. But, as sources say otherwise, we can't treat Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian as if they were three independent and mutually unintelligible branches of South Slavic.

— Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]} 17:51, 7 October 2010 (UTC)

Thank you, Aeusoes1. --Taivo (talk) 17:54, 7 October 2010 (UTC)

And concerning ISO 639-3, I only used that as a single example of a reliable linguistic source that uses a single name for the language that comprises Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian--there are hundreds, if not thousands, of others and most use the term "Serbo-Croatian". So don't get bound up with ISO 639-3 and whether it calls "Serbo-Croatian" a language or a macrolanguage. The point is that reliable and verifiable linguistic references use "Serbo-Croatian" as the label for the single language that comprises Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian. --Taivo (talk) 18:21, 7 October 2010 (UTC)

Is this description of the situation from the Shtovakian dialect article generally considered to be accurate by the editors here? Fainites ^barleyscribs 21:53, 7 October 2010 (UTC)

The shorter answer is to treat that description of Štokavian with caution.

The longer answer lies below.

That description is only partially accurate as it reflects a Croatian slant so as to amplify (or even worse, to make up) differences between Štokavian used by Croats and that by Bosniaks and Serbs. The questionable parts involve the place of Neo-Štokavian as the basis of modern standard Croatian and then the influence of Chakavian and Kaykavian on the standard language. That description repeats uncritically the Croatian account that Štokavian would become the basis of standard Croatian as early as the 17th century. In other words, the intellectuals/writers of the 17th century somehow had the capacity to forsee the decisive standardization efforts of the 19th century in the Balkans which arose on impulses of Romantic nationalism of the 18th century. The timelines are thus jumbled but this is the only way for linguistic history to align with the Croatian historical narrative. What's more is that the choice to create a Štokavian-standard for the Croats in the 19th century was given the decisive and effective push by the de facto leader of the Croatian national revival (Ludevit Gaj) who himself was a native speaker of a Kaykavian dialect. Expediency in countering rising Hungarian nationalism and supporting Illyrianism rather than that temporally-incoherent trajectory of language history dictated Gaj's thinking. Even afterward, there were several unsuccessful attempts to incorporate features from Chakavian or Kaykavian dialects into this emerging Neo-Štokavian standard. An example of this was an unsuccessful insistence not to codify the declension in the dative, locative and instrumental plural on the Neo-Štokavian (more precisely, Eastern Herzegovinian) model but instead on features typical of certain Chakavian and Kaykavian sub-dialects at the time. These "rebels" were sometimes called the "Ahkavians" since they wanted to maintain the distinction between the locative plural and other peripheral plural cases on the model of these non-Štokavian dialects using the ending "-ah". In contrast the Neo-Štokavian dialects had already merged the old endings for the plural in dative, locative and instrumental (-ima/-ama). Therefore the Croatian insistence of Štokavian being the "obvious" choice for Croatian standardization long before the time of Gaj, Karadžić et al. (i.e. something without a Serbian connection) fails to hold water when recalling the efforts of the "Ahkavians" for one. Their resistance and efforts show that they didn't think that Štokavian was an obvious choice as the base for Croatian standardization.

The second part that is questionable or misleading is the description's statement that the influence of Chakavian and Kaykavian on standard Croatian has been growing over the past several decades. The truth is that Chakavian and Kaykavian sub-dialects today are confined to rural settings and what is sometimes passed off as "Chakavian" or "Kaykavian" by modern educated Croats (most of whom are now no longer native speakers of Chakavian or Kaykavian) is a stereotyped form of Chakavian or Kaykavian with heavy Štokavian influence. There are festivals (e.g. poetry readings, song festivals) that attempt to elevate these dialects to more prestigious entities but outside these feel-good festivals, the dialects are under overwhelming pressure from the Neo-Štokavian standard language which thanks to the educational system and official media is held as the model for emulation and also the effective means to ensure social, educational and professional advancement in the country. Croatian language planners have expressed greater openness over the past several years to incorporate Chakavian or Kaykavian elements into the standard but so far it has been all talk and no action. Not even the wave of nationalist purism in the 1990s brought an incorporation of Chakavian and Kaykavian elements into the standard language even though the incorporation of such elements would have also achieved the same nationalist goal of differentiating the Croatian standard from the older Serbo-Croatian standard. Indeed the differences between the standard language and Chakavian and Kaykavian have been maintained or even widened since the 1990s by the reinterpretation of the "yat" reflex (i.e. regular allowance of "ie" which had previously not occurred natively as a reflex of "yat" in Ekavian, IJEkavian, Ikavian or JEkavian), use of neologisms or Štokavianized calques, and reimposition of elements last attested in Štokavian literature of the 17th century from Dubrovnik. Vput (talk) 01:37, 8 October 2010 (UTC)

There're Chakavisms and Kaykavisms that had integrated into standard Croatian long ago. Even more, Chakavian and Kaykavian are even now influencing standard Croatian language. Kubura (talk) 05:29, 8 October 2010 (UTC)

In that case, Kubura, would you be so kind as to put money where your mouth is and give unambiguous examples of features (can be lexical, phonological or morphological) of demonstrably/verifiably Chakavian or Kaykavian origin that are frequently-used AND have been codified as acceptable (i.e. "correct") in the standard (Neo-Štokavian) Croatian language of 2010? These features cannot exist in standard Bosnian or standard Serbian, otherwise claims of Chakavian and Kaykavian being exclusively part of standard Croatian are invalidated further. Vput (talk) 05:52, 8 October 2010 (UTC)

Hi, Vput. Here're some Kaykavisms that entered standard Croatian: kukac, tjedan, rubac some Chakavisms: klesar, spužva <ref>Faculty of Philosophy in Pula M. Samardžija: Raslojenost jezika (lectures)</ref><ref>[2]</ref> Kajkavisms are also vijak, puran, streha, krasan, hlače, udova, trh, skrb,... Linguist Tomo Maretić and his followers expelled all neologisms and kaykavisms from standard Croatian [3] (excerpts from the book by Miro Kačić: Jezikoslovna promišljanja), because that'd endanger "language unity" of Croats and Serbs. Čakavism is also spodoba, some all-Croatian words are now preserved mostly in Kajkavian, so one may find them as dialectism, like "podrapat" [4]. About the influences: Chakavian and Kaykavian (non) use of undetermined indefinite (corr. by Kubura Kubura (talk) 21:54, 22 October 2010 (UTC)) form of adjectives. I've read that previous month, I'll give you the source later. Remind me if I forget. Bye, Kubura (talk) 03:09, 9 October 2010 (UTC)

My message above is example of, as Taivo said, "Kubura has contributed nothing to the discussion at Talk:Croatian language and has been disruptive on the Talk pages...". Vput, I haven't forgotten you. I've been looking for the info about that influence in my books, thinking, on which page it was, in which book, which author...but then it came to my mind that I've probably read that on the internet. You're lucky, it's the online source :). Now I have to remember where did I read that... Kubura (talk) 21:21, 19 October 2010 (UTC)

Here're the author and the article: Marija Znika: Kategorija određenosti i predikatno ime (The Category of Definiteness and Nominal Predication), magazine Jezik, Vol.53 No.1/2006, p. 16 [5] [6]. "Oblična neutralizacija odraz je povijesnoga razvoja u kojemu je, pod utjecajem raznih činitelja, oslabila opreke određeno ≠ neodređeno i na području štokavskoga narječja. Jedan od bitnih činitelja koji su pridonijeli slabljenju te opreke i u štokavskomu narječju, pa onda i hrvatskom standardu kojemu je ono osnovica, utjecaj je čakavskoga i kajkavskoga narječja u kojima nema opreke određeno ≠ neodređeno." Sorry, Vput, for waiting so long, pace of living in Croatia is much slower than in Anglosaxon world. Additionally, I was searching (see my message above), besides my everyday obligations and my private life... Anyway, I've kept my promise. Kubura (talk) 21:49, 22 October 2010 (UTC)

I've forgot the translation: "the borders between definite and indefinite were weakened also on the area of Štokavian dialect. One of important factors that contributed to that weakening... is influence of Čakavian and Kajkavian dialects, in which there's no border definite ≠ indefinite". Kubura (talk) 21:59, 25 October 2010 (UTC)

Taivo: Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia, and Montenegro are not "former Yugoslavian regions". They were consisting republics of Yugoslavia. They had the status of the state, explicitly declared in their Constitutions. Kubura (talk) 05:31, 8 October 2010 (UTC)

Republic/region, it doesn't matter what you call them. What is important is that the boundaries of these areas did not (and still do not) coincide with any dialect boundary within "Serbo-Croatian" or "Bosnian/Serbian/Croatian". You're still just tap dancing around the fact that all of these "languages" are mutually intelligible variants of a single language. What do you want to call that language? And what are your verifiable reliable sources to back that up? --Taivo (talk) 05:38, 8 October 2010 (UTC)

From the 1974 constitution of the Socialist Republic of Croatia: U Socijalističkoj Republici Hrvatskoj u javnoj je upotrebi hrvatski književni jezik – standardni oblik narodnog jezika Hrvata i Srba u Hrvatskoj, koji se naziva hrvatski ili srpski. In translation: "In the Socialist Republic of Croatia, the language of public service is the Croatian literary language - a standardized form of people's language of Croats and Serbs of Croatia, also known as Croatian or Serbian." Croatian or Serbian was another (more cumbersome) name for Serbo-Croatian. So respect the history Kubura: the notion of Croatian as a "separate language" dates back only recently in history, after the secession of the administrative region of Croatia from Yugoslavia. --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 09:19, 8 October 2010 (UTC)

Taivo, anybody among us can say "I'm the linguist.". How many books in Croatian, Bosniac, Montenegrin and Serbian have you read? How many belletristic, how many scientific from various scientific fields, how many schoolbooks in those languages? How many works in those languages have you written? How many thousands of hours have you listened or even talked in those languages? In which science magazine have you published? "Wikipedia:WikiProject Linguistics"? Why don't you challenge "nationalist" linguists from Croatia, Bosnia, Montenegro in their linguistic magazines? We'd gladly read your argumentation there. We'd gladly read when you answer the questions posed there, under the moderation of the true linguists and scientists, that require civil writing and expressing style, that don't allow etiquetting, personal attacks etc.. Or even better, challenge them in national daily newspapers from those countries. So you can enlighten those nations. Kubura (talk) 05:45, 8 October 2010 (UTC)

That's all irrelevant to the issue here, Kubura. I have asked a simple question and expect a straightforward answer. 1) There is a single language that people in various parts of the former Yugoslavia call "Serbian", "Croatian", and "Bosnian". 2) What do you want to call that language? 3) What are your scientific references to back up that name? It doesn't matter one bit whether I speak the language or you speak the language. All that matters in Wikipedia is verifiable reliable sources. If you want a scientific discussion then put up your references. Kwami and I have listed a score of references above discussing the issue. If you disagree with those sources, then where are your sources to counter? --Taivo (talk) 06:00, 8 October 2010 (UTC)

Kubura, you and many other Croats continually miss the point. Native speakers of any language/dialect/idiom/variant are only preferred when it comes to USAGE (for example, I could ask YOU how to use futur drugi when communicating - there's little contest). However these same native speakers can harbour all sorts of linguistic misconceptions because the vast majority of them lack professional training as linguists equipped to deal with, analyze or understand matters of classification, dialectology, historical linguistics or even all of the reasons WHY what they speak/write/hear is in the condition that is. By your logic, if Serbs were to declare that THEIR language/dialect/variant were IDENTICAL to Croatian, then you as a native-speaker of Croatian would have to agree with the Serbs' claim because the Serbs would argue that their native command of their language/dialect/variant makes them the ultimate judges in determining the relationship of their language/dialect/variant with others.

The nationalist linguists in the former Yugoslavia have indeed been challenged by other linguists, so there's no need to widen the fight by adding Taivo (unless that's all you want to do). A recent example of scholarly challenge has come in Prof. Robert Greenberg's book "Language and Identity in the Balkans: Serbo-Croatian and its Disintegration" (2006) which describes the outrage and complaints of Croatian linguists who were initially scandalized by the book. Greenberg exposed Balkan linguistic myths and historical developments for what they were to the dismay of Croatian linguists. In addition, they weren't happy when he discussed the degree to which nationalism has infiltrated modern Croatian philological circles nor did they like his reluctance to side with them uncritically in their idiosyncratic reinterpretation of the development of Serbo-Croatian. Vput (talk) 06:14, 8 October 2010 (UTC)

Hey, dear Vput, do you know what? I was, as I discovered, a professor of eugenics in my former life. I had all the qualifications -- I had a degree on the wall. I taught a sacred teaching: that the whites are better than the blacks and Jews. I thought I knew everything, and had the right to teach it -- though all along my conscience blamed me. But I didn't listen. And now I'm a stinking programmer, and a Jew to boot.  ;)

Forgive the way I express myself. The moral is that your linguists are heartless when they think they know better, and you oughtn't suppose that they have any right to meddle here because according to somebody's curriculum they were the best students in the world. --VKokielov (talk) 22:57, 8 October 2010 (UTC)

You are forgiven (incoherent though your analogy is). Incoherency notwithstanding, the insistence on discounting scientific rigor (I suppose this is what you mean by being "heartless") reduces any field of inquiry to nothing more than a process dependent wholly on Brownian motion or human fancy, lacking even more explanatory or predictive power. To keep on the topic of language, if the prevailing nationalist attitude of Hungarians in the 19th century would have taken precedence over the comparative linguistic analysis, then we would be saying that Hungarians speak a Turkic language, and that their language has a trivial connection to certain languages spoken in Siberia and northern Europe. Vput (talk) 23:10, 8 October 2010 (UTC)

Ah, but you see, all this would be splendid, if you were arguing about substance. From the start you are arguing about names. Again and again you say that the rest of the world calls the language Serbocroatian. So it does. What of it? When a word evokes negative emotions among certain people, isn't it common courtesy never to use it in public? Here in America we have a word like that; it starts with N and raises half the hurricanes in the Atlantic. But it's only a word. Anywhere else in the world they would raise their eyebrows at us. Shall I make a redirect with that name? if I did, what do you think would happen?

as to the nearness itself, it merits no comment save that the languages are very close -- and that not in the introduction but in the body of the text, where it can stand modestly clothed, in lieu of glaring like the naked man in Times Square. --VKokielov (talk) 01:13, 9 October 2010 (UTC)

and what you call "nationalism" -- a blanket name, make note -- is only a reaction. A reaction of force, but a reaction nonetheless. This campaign has gone on unflagging since Wikipedia began, and always the front soldiers are not those who have an excuse to defend unity -- children of mixed marriages, devoted activists of peace, ... -- but foreigners. --VKokielov (talk) 01:19, 9 October 2010 (UTC)

whaddaya know. the "N" word has its own article. hallelujah. But then let the second sentence of Serbo-Croatian language run: "the name "Serbo-Croatian" has generally been a linguist's term, with speakers of the language calling it Serbian, Croatian, or Bosnian. Then cite Lockwood, as I will do presently here. --VKokielov (talk) 01:33, 9 October 2010 (UTC)

Kubura, as per usual, derailing the discussion while spewing nationalist vitriol and ad hominems. Why are you not permablocked yet? --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 09:05, 8 October 2010 (UTC)

This assault and divertion of topic requires answer.
I do not tag my opponents as "nationalists", I do not accuse them for "spewing nationalist vitriol", I do not name my opponents as "PoV partisans" [7] and I do not say "sod off" [8] to my opponents. I do not tag whole wikiprojects as "nazi-pedia" [9]. I don't insult four nations on the national basis [10] "...not these ridiculous nationalist fabrications such as "Croatian language", "Serbian language" or "Bosnian language" (and soon-coming in the fall 2009 "Montenegrin language").". I do not put myself above scientific institutions by saying [11] "Vandalism by several IP address, in what appears to be several PoV pushers in Croatian academic institutions.". I do not violate WP:CRYSTAL with "Almost all of them would probably call their language srpskohrvatski, as it was officially called before 1991""[12]. I do not etiquette my opponents as "nationalist bigots" [13] (someone else was warned by admin because of that). I do not tell to co-discutant "you insolent nationalist troll" "bigoted nationalist" [14] "Proven hardline Croatian nationalist"[15]. I do not delete warnings from my talkpages (deleting 3.528 bytes of content), leaving them hidenn in archive's history [16]. I do not switch thesis, but you do call your co-discutant's words as "nationalist nonsenses" [17] for the things that were your very messages [18]. I do not blank whole referenced articles with mere redirect [19]. I do not call opponents contributions as "rubbish" [20]. I do not revert to "my" version after my opponent kindly asks me to not to do that [21] and invites me to discuss. I do not attack, and especially I do not attack after my opponent kindly asks me not to do that [22]. I do not name kind appeals as trolling [23]. Maybe I sound too biased, but even other users told you "but I think that you are treating this as a WP:BATTLEGROUND a bit too much. " [24]. I do not comprehend Wikipedia as WP:BATTLEGROUND and I do not proudly say that "Wikipedia is battleground"[25].
I do not badger every opponent of my idea on votings (with loooong messages)[26] [27] [28] [29] (how many times do you see "Ivan Štambuk"), badgering to every detail, that even the original abstainer changed attitude to oppose "So, dialog is impossible. Switching to oppose. --Millosh 13:40, 9 August 2009 (UTC) " (Millosh is steward).
Are these admins biased because they warned you on your attacking behaviour and namecalling, e.g. "When you start with "Croatian nationalist bigots, most admins just turn off and ignore you. Try looking a bit less biased in your namecalling." (Ricky81682) [30], "Please do not call other editors names, such as "troll". You can be blocked for making personal attacks by doing that" (A.B.) [31]. Or Kwamikagami: [32] "But if you can avoid calling them idiots, or other personal attacks, and maintain a professional attitude..." .
I do not accuse my opponents that they are "sockpuppeted/abused by multiple users" on discussions [33] with usual tagging as "troll". I do not name the person I find suspicious as sockpuppet (on discussions).
I do not invite/incite to ignoring of discussions by etiquetting the opponents as "trolls" [34].
I do not attack my opponents, after they answer me on the questions I've posed. Ivan did this question, my prompt answer and after that he said "Kubura you're simply trolling ..." [35].
How many ad hominems attacks WP:ATTACK, uncivility WP:CIVIL, etiquetting WP:ETIQ, violating of WP:BATTLEGROUND do you see here?
Having opposing attitude is your right. But Wikipedia in English isn't your property WP:OWN, on which you'll block your opponent that does not want to think the way you want. Wikipedia is not "permablock-per-wish" project.
After such Štambuk's behaviour (especially since recent incitation to permablock), I take very seriously the message Štambuk sent to this user, that opposed to his attitude "...trolling as usual. If I see you blocking "trolls" such as ..., you are so dead."[36]. Kubura (talk) 02:39, 9 October 2010 (UTC)

Because I do not violate WP:BLP and WP:NOT by calling the scientists cited by my opponents as "nutjobs", "ignorant", "intellectually dishonest". [37]. Kubura (talk) 03:47, 10 October 2010 (UTC)

I do not insult major national hero, pillar of national literature, and national icon of the small nation, that is so proud of that person [38] "The murderous thug Njegoš".
I do not insult every nation that is proud of its sovereign nation and state "pitiful concept of a prisonlike entity called a "sovereign nation-state""[39].
I do not hide behing anonymous "we" with "...how one "feels"...Why should we care anyway"[40].
I do not attack my opponent with words "you display a typical knee-jerk reaction of a Croatian nationalist floating in his reality distortion field bubble that we've chewed over countless time already" [41]. Kubura (talk) 04:06, 10 October 2010 (UTC)

I do not violate WP:BLP and WP:NOT by calling the scientists (cited by my opponents) as "proven history fabricators". User Aeusoes1 warned you with "you mention that Brozović, Katičić, Babić, and Laden are "proven history fabricators." What is the basis of this? How do we determine which Croatian linguists are academically dishonest nutjobs and which aren't." [42]. Kubura (talk) 04:28, 10 October 2010 (UTC)

This is a simple issue. If Slavic specialists in Croatia say X, but Slavic specialists from every other part of the world say Y, then there is a clear problem with the statements of the Croatian Slavic specialists. --Taivo (talk) 05:56, 10 October 2010 (UTC)

That doesn't really get at the heart of the issue, though. We don't say there's a problem with the Russian perspective on Joseph Stalin simply because it's different, do we?

I'm not "warning" anyone, by the way; I'm getting at the basis of statements made about Croatian scholars. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]} 17:29, 10 October 2010 (UTC)

Divided opinions =

The best option for the definition of the language is to say that there are differing opinions on this subject. This is in the spirit of wikipedia there is no right and there is no wrong. Vodomar (talk) 01:40, 21 October 2010 (UTC)

Your edit is not acceptable, Vodomar. You imply that there is some kind of even split of linguists on the matter. There isn't. The linguistic world is virtually uniform in calling the non-Slovenian Western South Slavic dialects "Serbo-Croatian". You have no scientifically sound sources to rely on for the English terminology. I consider that change to be 2RR for you today, Vodomar. Please self-revert. --Taivo (talk) 02:58, 21 October 2010 (UTC)

See: Nina Janich, Albrecht Greule, Sprachkulturen in Europa: ein internationales Handbuch pp. 135 , 267, Leopold Auburger, Die kroatische Sprache und der Serbokroatismus, Leopold Auburger, Verbmorphologie der kroatischen Standardsprache. Are some of the references. Vodomar (talk) 03:37, 21 October 2010 (UTC)

• An introduction to language and linguistics, By Ralph W. Fasold, Jeff Connor-Linton, pp 389
• South Slavic Discourse Particles, By Mirjana N. Dedaić, Mirjana Miskovic-lukovic, pp. 14

Vodomar (talk) 03:48, 21 October 2010 (UTC)

• Undoing and redoing corpus planning, By Michael G. Clyne, pp 178 - 191.

Vodomar (talk) 03:57, 21 October 2010 (UTC)

Vodomar, I've looked at these, and they contradict your stance.

• Janich 2002: Appears to be discussing SC as a state standard, not as Serbian+Croatian, but my German is pathetic, so perhaps I'm misreading it. Please quote something (or say 'line that starts with XXX') if you think I'm missing your point.
• Fasold 2006: Discusses how politics decide which varieties are declared "languages". No-one here has ever said otherwise.
• Dedaić 2010: I don't see how this contradicts the article, but just when the discussion gets started (p. 15, visible for just a second), GoogleBooks stops the preview. We'd need to know what Dedaić actually says.
• Cline 1997: He says, "Serbo-Croatian" was an attempt to give national cohesion to Serbs and Croats ... whose languages were based on the same type of variety. This is SC in the narrow sense, and everyone agrees that it's defunct. Cline is discussing "corpus planning", by which he means state planning of language standards, not at all what we're discussing here. Again, that's about Yugoslav standard SC, not about the abstand (formal) language.

If you'd like to proposed edits specifically supported by those refs, that would work (assuming they're relevant), but as blanket assertions I don't see how they help your argument at all. They don't appear to say anything we haven't already said. — kwami (talk) 07:12, 21 October 2010 (UTC)

Literature

Here's some literature:

• Miro Kačić (with Ljiljana Šarić; translated by Lelija Sočanac): Croatian and Serbian : delusions and distortions, Novi most, Zagreb, 1997, ISBN 953-6602-00-8
• Stjepan Babić: Hrvatski jučer i danas, Školske novine, Zagreb, 1995, ISBN 953-160-052-X
• Stjepan Babić: Hrvanja hrvatskoga : hrvatski u koštacu sa srpskim i u klinču s engleskim, Školska knjiga, Zagreb, 2004, ISBN 953-0-61428-4
• Stjepan Babić, Božidar Finka, Milan Moguš: Hrvatski pravopis, (several editions)
  
• Vladimir Brodnjak: Rječnik razlika između hrvatskoga i srpskoga jezika, Školske novine/Hrvatska sveučilišna naklada, Zagreb, 1992, ISBN 86-7457-085-2
• Dalibor Brozović_ Povijest hrvatskoga književnog i standardnoga jezika, Školska knjiga, Zagreb, 2008 (originally published in 1987, in proceedings Hrvatska književnost u evropskom kontekstu), ISBN 978-953-0-60845-0
• (ed. Ante Selak): Taj hrvatski, Školske novine, Zagreb, 1992, ISBN 86-7457-084-4
• Ranko Matasović: [43] Srpsko-hrvatski nikada nije ostvaren, jer nije postojao (very informative interview)
• Radoslav Katičić: [44] Srpski jezik nije štokavski (very informative interview)
• Radoslav Katičić: [45] Kroatologija obuhvaća kulturu kao cjelinu (very informative interview)
• Stjepan Krasić: Počelo je u Rimu - Katolička obnova i normiranje hrvatskoga jezika u XVII stoljeću, Matica hrvatska, Dubrovnik, 2009, ISBN 978-953-6316-76-2
• many interesting articles in scientific magazine Jezik (I'll add them here later)

There's more. Kubura (talk) 00:48, 21 October 2010 (UTC)

And, of course, Kubura, it's all Croatian nationalist literature and not neutral in this regard at all. In other words, it's not of any real value to determine what the language is called in English, which is all that matters here. You have no English sources beyond stretching Ethnologue to say what it doesn't. You think that Ethnologue is the best source in the world when it matches your POV, but ignore it and call it unreliable when it doesn't. Let's put it this way, Ethnologue = 1 source versus the dozen or so sources which Kwami and I have provided. So 1 versus 12? Ethnologue is edited by non-Slavicists, while the 12 are written by Slavicists. You are blinded by your POV and unable to see scientific sources. I agree with Kwami, this is pointless. You have no interest in a referenced scientifically-sound encyclopedia. Please return to the Croatian Wikipedia where you can be back with your own kind. --Taivo (talk) 02:56, 21 October 2010 (UTC)

How do we know it's "Croatian nationalist literature"? Why should we dismiss it if it is? — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]} 04:30, 21 October 2010 (UTC)

The problem, Aeusoes1, is that this is fundamentally a dispute between the Croatian political agenda and linguistic realities. A number of linguists have made that very clear in our reliable sources--that the issue of "Serbo-Croatian" isn't based on linguistics, but on Croatian politics. Since all of the above sources are Croatian, they will reflect the political nature of the issue and not the linguistic nature. They are POV by their very nature and provenance. What we need for Wikipedia are NPOV sources, that is, sources that are separate from the political issue and can honestly reflect only the linguistic issues. The advocates of removing "Serbo-Croatian" or any mention of the complete mutual intelligibility of Croatian and Serbian have no reliable NPOV sources that they can point to other than the Croatian nationalist sources. All English language sources are clear that there is a single language that comprises the non-Slovenian West South Slavic dialects and that the most common English name for that language is "Serbo-Croatian". They are clear that the division of Serbo-Croatian into "Bosnian", "Croatian", and "Serbian" is artificial and the result of national politics. --Taivo (talk) 05:16, 21 October 2010 (UTC)

It seems like you're saying any Croatian-language source must be nationalistic. In addition to the logical problems in this assumption (as well as the unjustified bias it creates), it still doesn't address why nationalistic sources would be problematic. Remember, these sources were offered as representative of that POV, not as corrections or replacements of non-Croatian sources that provide the description that you agree with.

Also, a clarification: we do not need to seek out NPOV sources, we seek out an NPOV presentation of the issue. This can include NPOV sources (which are particularly helpful when they synthesize information) but it may also include POV sources. If we're trying to access the Croatian linguists' POV on the issue (which an NPOV account would do) then looking at such sources is in order.

If it were an issue of linguists disagreeing with a lay public, it would be easy to side with language experts (this is the case with African American Vernacular English), but this is an issue amongst language experts. Dismissing the ones you disagree with because they speak Croatian and therefore must be "caught up in the politics", so far, has not been sufficiently justified to me. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]} 05:53, 21 October 2010 (UTC)

That literature is nationalist in the sense that all of those linguists above nowadays insist that "Serbo-Croatian" did not exist for one reason or another (it seems to range from an extreme view that Serbo-Croatian having never existed in the first place since it was an euphemism for the educated speech of a Serbian-dominated elite to a marginally more nuanced view that Serbo-Croatian strictly speaking didn't exist since the very term is being assumed to denote something constant and uniform. It could not have been this way because of the existence of a Western (~ "Croatian") and Eastern (~ "Serbian") variant) However this is a deliberately literal interpretation of the term since when anyone thinks about it, no language is uniform across its speech community. This ranges from "small" languages such as Slovenian which has anywhere from 20 to 40-odd sub-dialects (depending on the researcher) to pluricentric ones such as English which according to the hyper-literal interpretation shouldn't exist either since it's not uniform given all of is standard varieties (not to mention all of the uncodified dialects within a given speech community). For that matter, if we were to play by this hyper-literal view of identifying languages, then "Croatian" would be nothing more than an illusion because there's no such thing as an uniform language that's used by all people in the relevant speech-community that calls itself "Croatian". With that all said, these same Croats have no problem using "Croatian" as an umbrella term for any person using a certain sub-set of Slavonic languages/dialects of varying mutual intelligibility (be it "Modern Standard Croatian" or any of the sub-dialects of Chakavian, Kaykavian or Shtokavian) within the borders of Croatia or among a speech community that imagines itself to be "Croatian". The hyper-literal interpretation used to deny "Serbo-Croatian" is not applied to deny "Croatian". The reason for this is sociolinguistic, but sociolinguistics has had relatively little bearing in classifying languages nor has it been that useful in finding or describing languages in matters that are not a function of differences in language use as observed among several social classes in a given speech-community.

Most linguists nowadays would discard politicized or culturally-biased interpretations because in the past mixing such approaches with scientific analysis has often been shown to be faulty in the face of rigorous or repeated linguistic analysis. It may be helpful to recall the development of comparative linguistics in Hungary. Hungarians today have been demonstrated to be speaking an Uralic language that is most closely related to Mansi and Khanty which are spoken in northwestern Siberia by small groups of indigenous people. Notwithstanding the linguistic evidence, many Hungarians originally disputed the findings when they were first published in the 18th and 19th centuries because of the association of a part of their culture with that of tribes who were living in Stone-Age like conditions (indeed part of the Hungarian nationalist platform today is that Hungarian is much closer to Turkic or sometimes even Scythian and that the reason why Hungarian is considered to be an Uralic language is because the research was part of an Austrian conspiracy in the 19th century to emphasize the Hungarians' primitiveness by finding similarities between Hungarian and Khanty or Mansi). Instead, most Hungarians (and even some of their linguists) believed that the Hungarians spoke a language akin to that of the Turks or even the Mongols. This belief was based not only on certain demonstrable similarities between Hungarian and some Turko-Mongol languages but also encouraged by emphasizing the cultural association with feared Asiatic horsemen with a glorious military past. If the Hungarian nationalist point of view had prevailed among Hungarian linguistic circles, we could still be facing a disconnect today where Hungarians (helpfully boosted by their linguists' nationally-coloured studies underlining a genetic linguistic link to the languages of Turko-Mongol horsemen) would be presented as speaking a Turkic language while linguists from outside Hungary would consistently challenge their Hungarian colleagues using comparative evidence gathered in field work with people speaking Uralic languages throughout northwestern Siberia and northern Europe. This should be enough to illustrate that politics or populist mass movements don't mix very well with scientific analysis which is more concerned with finding and describing the results. Doing things a priori or trying to arrange facts to conform to a desired conclusion is not what scientists or scholars aim to do.

In any case, this problem is intractable for the time being. All that one can observe is that most Slavicists/linguists who were not trained in the Balkans almost always take the view that Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin and Serbian are standardized expressions of a pluricentric language called BCMS or SC. However many of these same non-Balkan Slavicists/linguists do make a clear distinction between sociolinguistic and non-sociolinguistic treatment with the latter predominating in the relevant literature. Linguists and Slavicists from the Balkans however are more likely to give pride of place to sociolinguistic considerations (which can be politicized) and so long as this is the way things will be, there will always be a disconnect between the interpretations and findings of most Balkan-trained linguists and their colleagues outside the Balkans. Vput (talk) 05:56, 21 October 2010 (UTC)

That's an interesting example, but it's a bit apples-oranges as it demonstrates the problems of a lay public rejecting the scientific analyses of language experts (as you say, it was only some of the Hungarian linguists who were part of this rejection). It's also a bit of a non-sequitor because the genetic affiliation between languages/varieties is a lot more concrete (and thereby falsifiable) than the classificatory divisions made. Moreover, the situation we have here is different in that it's nationalism influencing language experts. If we have language experts disagreeing on something that is fairly arbitrary, we can't really dismiss one set of scholars and call it NPOV (which is at issue here).

If I understand you correctly, by saying that sociolinguistics has little bearing on language classification, you mean that social factors don't influence such classification, I'd have to disagree with you. Not only are there many examples of dialect continua that are divided into groups by political borders, but I would argue that classifications may indeed start with a priori assumptions worked backwards into scientific analysis (I offered an example with Southern American English, which is now archived) and still be considered valid. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]} 17:26, 21 October 2010 (UTC)

I agree that at the "species" level, at least with languages in nation states, the nodes are as much political as anything. But here we don't have a case of a dialect continuum being divided up the way, for example, Bulgarian-Macedonian is: Serbian and Croatian are the same (sub)dialect. Although there is no objective isogloss one can draw between Macedonian and Bulgarian, at least the prototypes (prestige/standard dialects) of those putative languages are definable linguistically. This isn't possible with Serbian and Croatian because they are not defined geographically but ethnically: two people speaking the same dialect nonetheless speak different languages if they differ in ethnicity, regardless of where they live. — kwami (talk) 17:34, 21 October 2010 (UTC)

Aeusoes1, I don't completely disagree with you on this since sociolinguistics can fit in the mix but the bottom line is that it's at odds with the genetic classification which is less politicized and there is a thrust in reputable scientific endeavour to minimize or eliminate analysis that leads to a conclusion more of political convenience. Basically the sociolinguistically-based division of BCMS/SC into separate languages as B, C, M, S is then taken further to divide Western South Slavonic into 5 branches rather than 2 (i.e. Slovenian and BCMS/SC) (I can even recall someone's comment on the talk page here that Western South Slavonic is divided into 5 languages). When put against comparative linguistic evidence, mixing the sociolinguistic and genetic approach to classification yields different answers (which isn't necessarily "bad" but it does merit a note because language classification uses the genetic approach and we'd have to explain why the majority of (genetically-based) descriptions list only 2 languages while a minority of (sociolinguistically-based) descriptions list 5 languages). Mixing things in this way also implies that Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin and Serbian together arose separately from some Proto-BCMS which is refutable (at least I've yet to come across any linguist or Slavicist who seriously posits the existence of Proto-BCMS/SC). As we know genetic linguistics recognizes Chakavian, Kaykavian and Shtokavian which in turn likely arose directly from Late Common Slavonic. The notion of Proto-South-Slavonic (i.e. an ancestor common only to Bulgarian, Macedonian, BCMS/SC and Slovenian) is rather tenuous because comparative analysis has not yielded a convincing amount of isoglosses which support the existence of such a Slavonic node that is distinct from both Western and Eastern Slavonic).

On your earlier reaction to Taivo's statement that all sources from Croatian linguists are nationalist, you probably recall from my comments on Ivan Štambuk's talk page that there are Croatian linguists whose views or interpretations are less or not nationally-coloured. What Kubura did was to list sources from Croatian linguists whose conclusions fit (deliberately or not) with the Croatian nationalist contention that SC did not exist. There are relatively few Croatian linguists who challenge the above-mentioned contention. The most vocal example is Snježana Kordić but others such as Ivo Pranjković, Dubravko Škiljan and Damir Kalogjera have been more supportive of the idea of looking at BCMS as a sociolinguistic phenomenon and don't find the idea of separating BCMS into independent languages to be as clear-cut or obvious as people such as Babić, Brozović and Katičić and others have made it seem. As I mentioned earlier Škiljan and Kalogjera contributed essays in English on the matter in the compendium of essays "Language in the Former Yugoslav Lands" edited by Celia Hawkesworth and Ranko Bugarski. As I mentioned earlier it's also noteworthy that the bulk of professional linguistic opposition to SC or a Croatian connection to SC has come from linguists trained in Croatia (not that ALL of them are indeed like this as shown to greater or lesser degrees by Kordić, Pranjković, Škiljan and Kalogjera) while the bulk of linguists trained outside Croatia have never questioned the existence of SC or treated modern Croatian as anything more than a sociolinguistically-defined variant of SC. I think that this is what Taivo was alluding to in that the reasons for this instance of academic disparity depends visibly on national affiliation of the linguist involved or the allowance of nationalist reasoning to inform interpretations. Without considering the effect of Croatian nationalism (or the lack thereof) it'd be difficult to understand why Slavicists from outside the Balkans such as Wayles Browne, Thomas Magner, Robert Greenberg, Celia Hawkesworth, Ronelle Alexander and Janneke Kalsbeek among others would continue to think of Serbo-Croatian as a valid language and also apply it in studies on language without allowing it to be a prime marker of national identity. On the other hand Croatian linguists such as Babić, Brozović, Kačić, Katičić, Basić and Moguš among others in Croatia make no mention of Serbo-Croatian in this linguistic sense but rather as a code-word for "Serbian" thus evoking memories among its Croatian readership of Croatian victimization (real or imagined) at the hands of Serbs. In addition these Croatian linguists make studies on language while allowing it to be a prime marker of national identity (see Marc Greenberg's article). If you are reluctant to see nationalism as being a large problem in this dispute, how else would you explain why among linguists the distribution of conclusions on topics related to the existence of Serbo-Croatian are distributed quite visibly on the participant's national affiliation? Should we assume that non-Balkan scholars are part of some malevolent Serbian plot and that Croatian linguists such as Kordić or Pranjković are effectively committing treason? Vput (talk) 19:28, 21 October 2010 (UTC)

The other thing to consider is that if this were truly a linguistic issue, with legitimate NPOV scholars lining up on both sides, then we would be seeing the same debate over the existence of "Serbo-Croatian" occurring on the Serbian language and Bosnian language pages. But we do not. Only the Croatians take offense at having their "language" included in the non-Slovenian Western South Slavic dialect complex. That, in and of itself, strongly illustrates the fact that this is not a linguistic issue at all, but a political one. --Taivo (talk) 19:41, 21 October 2010 (UTC)

Here's some more:
Scuola superiore di interpreti e traduttori - Università di Bologna (Croatian language program 2006-2007).
This can help too. Kubura (talk) 22:00, 22 October 2010 (UTC)

Croatian linguists polemized with opponents (and their arguments) in the books and articles I've mentioned. Kubura (talk) 22:10, 22 October 2010 (UTC)

A political issue

Stjepan Babić wrote in this book (Hrvanja hrvatskoga : hrvatski u koštacu sa srpskim i u klinču s engleskim, 2004, ISBN 953-0-61428-4 ) about the political dimension of this issue on several pages. I'll try to summarize it here. Kubura (talk) 22:10, 22 October 2010 (UTC)

Why don't you also summarize what Babić wrote in his 1964 article Uklanjanje hrvatsko–srpskih jezičnih razlika "The removal of Serbo-Croatian language differences" (Jezik 11/3, p 71–77) ? Or in his 2001 book Hrvatska jezikoslovna prenja (an excerpt from page 275: Ja sam uvijek pazio što pišem pa i s obzirom na partijske smjernice. [..] Nikad nisam rekao da partija nema pravo "I always paid attention to write in accordance with the Party's guidelines. I never said that the Party was wrong"). Why only present one side of the equation, now that Babić is an ardent nationalist, and ignore what he said in the past (when he was on the payroll of the Communist party) which is completely at odds with what he is saying now? --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 14:56, 24 October 2010 (UTC)

Ivan, can you stop using your negative view of the world and painting every Croatian as a nationalist, especially the with the tone you use which borders with the extreme. Couldn't Babić be a patriot ? What would you expect if a person lived in a repressive regime, that he came out now and said what he did. What other choices did he have: exile or jail. Why be a martyr ? You should stop pointing you finger at other people and take a balanced view and look at all the facts. Your constant put downs , mockery and lack of respect are not a solid foundation for argument - action usually brings a similar style reaction from many people. Babić is not on this forum able to defend himself. Please treat everyone with respect, not with contempt ! Vodomar (talk) 20:36, 25 October 2010 (UTC)

What would you expect if a person lived in a repressive regime, that he came out now and said what he did. - Interesting that you call the former regime "repressive". How about the 1990s regime of Tuđman and his right-winging nationalists? People lost their jobs, got their homes burnt, in some cases even banished from the country or killed, simply because they were not "true Croats". Everything even remotely associated with the former regime was demonized and destroyed. Even having the wrong name or surname could get you fired or killed. This is hardly comparable to Socialist Yugoslavia where multiculturalism and tolerance was fostered - often to the extreme.

What other choices did he have: exile or jail. - Babić never claimed that he was blackmailed or forced to write that particular paper. He did it out of his own free will. He was a political opportunist at that time. Just like he is now, making money on selling patriotism to the sheeple.

Your constant put downs , mockery and lack of respect are not a solid foundation for argument - action usually brings a similar style reaction from many people. - You have no arguments so you're trying boil the entire discussion down to one particular problem - me and my style of discussion. Interesting how you were not bothered with civility when your colleagues have been posting inflammatory and downright insultive messages as IPs, or on Croatian wikipedia where I was repeatedly called "Četnik", "bolesnik", "protuhrvat", "jugounitarist" or whatever. --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 20:34, 28 October 2010 (UTC)

Štambuk hasn't properly translated Babić's words.
If text went like this, as Štambuk said, proper translation is:
Ja sam uvijek pazio što pišem pa i s obzirom na partijske smjernice.
[..] Nikad nisam rekao da partija nema pravo
= I was always watching (=being careful) what I was writing, and even with regard to Party's guidelines.
= I never said that Party was wrong.
"pa" isn't ordinary "and" (like "i"). "pa" is more like "and+unexpected/(not likely to happen)/(somehow, surprising) turn of events", "and+unexpectedly even something contrary".
This gives completely other picture: Babić wasn't playing by default according to Party's "music".
Babić he said that he was very careful when writing the texts, in order to avoid Party's anger pointed against him and all possible repercussions.
In short - Babić watched his mouth. He sometimes wrote according to Party's guidelines, if it wasn't against his personal attitudes. S rogatim se ne bodeš.
If he wanted his work to be published, and if he wanted to avoid any "disappearing" (including all his previous scientific work), as it happened to regime's opponents (remember Stalin's colleagues that disappeared from older photos!) and all yugoregime's unwanted scientists' works.
Have in mind that these were 1960's, before the Declaration and any easing of oppression. Ranković's spirit was still in the air. Kubura (talk) 21:18, 25 October 2010 (UTC)

Also, Štambuk, please, don't try to distract us from the topic here. Things are heated here, were trying to WP:COOL things down.
I'm trying to present us here the Babić's attitudes about the political dimension issue of this linguistic problem, but you're distracting us with Babić's alleged political attitudes (with mistranslations!) and congesting the talkspace with etiquetting WP:ETIQ the opponent's source.
Read WP:TROLL. "The defining characteristic of a troll in this case is not the content of the edit, but the behavior in discussing the edit, and the refusal to consider evidence (WP:IDIDNTHEARTHAT) and citations or to accept WP:CONSENSUS or compromise.".
Or this troll (Internet): "In Internet slang, a troll is someone who posts inflammatory, extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community, such as an online discussion forum, chat room, or blog, with the primary intent of provoking other users into a desired emotional response or of otherwise disrupting normal on-topic discussion.".
Please, don't disrupt. Kubura (talk) 21:53, 25 October 2010 (UTC)

You're splitting hair on irrelevant semantic details. My translation is perfectly fine. The crux of the argument that Babić was an ardent "unitarist" during the rule of Communist Party, and has published works detailing the stragety on how existing differences between the Western and Eastern Serbo-Croatian could be removed. Now he's doing just the opposite: deliberately increasing the differences, by doing stuff such as lobbying for bizarre orthographical solutions completely at odds with phonological orthography principle of Sebro-Croatian, and even making up words - wich fortunately nobody uses. He is a canonical example of an intellectual prostitute. He cannot be quoted as a reliable source because he's heavily biased and has made self-contradictory claims depending on the historical period. He can be compared to many other political konvertiti, former commies-turned-nationalist, still dominating the festering sore of Croatian political spectrum.

I'm not distracting from the topic. My remark was perfectly topical. If this were only a linguistic issue we wouldn't have been having this discussion in the first place. Language policies and and politics are heavily interwined in the case of Balkan countries. Language is an instrument of the political power to propagate a particular political ideology - in case of Babić et al. - to artificially increase the number of differences with respect to Croatian. Babić has on several occasions repeated his claims that he is doing exatly that. That practice has however fallen out of use in the civilized world many decades/centuries ago and is perceived as something primitive and manipulating, if not outrightly fascist. For an overview of poltically-induced manipulation of the notion of language and nation, I refer you to Snježana Kordić's recent book [46] where many of the common myths are meticulously debunked and exposed. --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 20:21, 28 October 2010 (UTC)

Kordić got (in)direct answers from several Croatian linguists, from Croat hardliner linguists to Croat softsoftliner linguists (yes, twice written "soft"!). Even before her book was published. I'll try to find and summarize them. Kubura (talk) 04:23, 29 October 2010 (UTC)

A political issue (2)

Let's focus on the topic. The political dimension in this issue.
The political background when the term "Serbo-Croatian" was coined.
When it was used for the first time? Was that in political forums?
Political dimension is also why was etimological ortography abandoned in parts of Croatia that were in Hungarian-ruled part of Austria-Hungary. That was because the fonological ortography was introduced and in Croat schools in parts of Croatia that were in Austrian-ruled part of Austria-Hungary and in jointly ruled Bosnia-Herzegovina. Insisting on the etimological one meant cementing the dismemberment of Croat national corpse.
Austria and Hungary were in the privileged position; Austrian and Hungarian authorities were showing strong aggressive assimilating policy; Croatian language was seriously endangered, as well as other Slavic languages and peoples in the Monarchy. For that reason, part of Croats have searched the ally among the Serbs and Serbia, hoping that Slavic block in Austria-Hungary would be enstrengthened that way.
Also, why have Macedonians decided to develop their own standard, and not to use the Bulgarian or the Serbian language? Why they chose the dialects that are more different/distant from the Bulgarian?
Babić in his book "Hrvanja hrvatskoga" on p. 122-123 explains why is literary language always the political choice (Književni je jezik uvijek politički izbor). Kubura (talk) 04:18, 29 October 2010 (UTC)