User:Ivan Štambuk/Serbo-Croatian/Practical concerns

ICTY
Since almost all of the charged defendants are some kind of extreme nationalists, it is reasonable to assume that the language issue would sooner or later come up, as Serbs would be given documents or translations that were provided by Bosnian/Croatian translators/interpreters, with markedly "Western Serbo-Croatian" lexis and constructions, or vice versa.

Some of the defendants, like Vojislav Šešelj acted as if they don't "understand" these "foreign words", that differ themselves in some phonologically trivial details (that are very regular and intuitively grasped by all the SC speakers) from the words they are otherwise familiar with.

This was responded to Šešelj by one of the judges:

"You made some objections to the use of some words. For example, the word opći: opposed to opšti:, the word točka: as opposed to tačka: and others. I went into some details, and in my conclusion there's not the slightest doubt that this is the language you understand. We have the common roots in the Herzegovinian Serbo-Croatian language, and what we are discussing here are not dialects, not even dialects. These are variants of one and the same language. And the basic document, I am convinced that it's not only in a language you understand but also the language you are using because whenever those words mentioned by you, for example, the word for 'defence', which would be in the Croatian variant obrana: and in the Serb version odbrana: you can read the Serbian version in the indictment".

Šešelj was, of course, playing dumb. He is very smart (he was the youngest Ph.D. in Yugoslavia), wrote dozens of books, and is extremely literate. When interrogating some of the Croatian witnesses, he even mocked some of the newly-proclaimed "Croatian" words that they used (e.g. sustav, izvješće - as opposed to "Serbian" sistem, izvještaj. Actually the last one is quite bizarre case, because according to Croatian purists izvještaj is markedly "Serbianism", and the "proper Croatian" equivalent being izvješće, when in fact izvještaj is a native Slavic derivation from the verb izv(ij)estiti, and izvješće is a borrowing from Russian..)

Šešelj also made a formal appeal, which was discarded with the following explanation, which pretty much embodies the essence of the this whole "different languages" farse:

"The defendant incorrectly claims that '...the hybrid language BCS presents an obstacle to the accused prof. dr. Vojislav Šešelj, the written material in this language containing a large amount of words that are not from Serbian language, and the practical translation takes a lot of time'.[1] Before that, the defendant states that he has trouble understanding some of the words that are used by the interpreters/translators of ICTY, which is simply untrue. The defendant grew up and studied in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. During this formative years, the defendant lived, worked and studied in Ijekavian, one of the two linguistic variants of Serbo-Croatian language. The other variant of Serbo-Croatian language is Ekavian and it is prevalently used in Serbia where the defendant spent most of his adulthood. The differences in writing and the speech of Ijekavian and Ekavian are so minor, that everyone who speaks either of the linguistic variants can easily utilize the other one. Thus, the claim of the defendant that during this trial he is unable to understand written or oral arguments due to the use of certain words in Ijekavian, when written or oral translation from English to BCS is done, is absurd.

Also, insisting of the defendant on the existence of Serbian as a separate language has no firm grounding. In the linguistic sense, Serbo-Croatian cannot be split to two or more languages. Although the nationalists such as the defendant can insist on the use of 'Serbian' or 'Croatian' or 'Bosnian' language, these are merely different tags that are given to the same member of the South Slavic branch of Indo-European family of languages. The differences in spelling, syntax and pronunciation are not significant enough that 'Serbian', 'Croatian' and 'Bosnian' could be treated as separate languages. Every theoretical autonomy that exists between these so-called 'different languages' stems from ideological and political values which are, from the linguistic perspective, completely worthless. The most eminent linguist in the former Yugoslavia [Ranko Bugarski] wrote in 1994 the following:

The Serbo-Croatian language is not an exclusive property of Serbs and Croats. It is spoken in the 4 of our republics by the 4 of our nations, and by almost all of our declared Yugoslavs /.../ It would be absurd to separate special language for every single national identity at the area of former Yugoslavia[2].

In the end, as regards to the translation to 'Serbian language', the concern the defendant expressed on the possible loss of 'precious time', him being 'forced' to 'translate' the 'words of BCS' to 'Serbian language', is especially ridiculous, with the enormous amount of time (including the time that the defendant will need to prepare his own defense) which will be lost, as it is described further in the text, if the Council chooses to accept his request to have all the material handed on 'paper' and on 'Serbian language'."

Stake through the heart of Balkanic linguo-nationalism, no less.

Library of Congress
On September 1st 2008 the code hrv has officially started to be used as bibliographical/library tag, as a replacement for the former scr (as an abbreviation for "Serbo-Croatian Roman"). Similarly, srp replaced the scc (="Serbo-Croatian Cyrillic" - the only division was thus by script, not by language of the text). That event has been celebrated by some of the Croatian national(istic) institutions as a date of "international recognition of the Croatian language" (Međunarodno priznanje hrvatskoga jezika - just google that term). Some pathetic pamphlets and booklets have been published, and the National and University Library even organized a contest on the "best literary and art work on the topic of international recognition of Croatian language".

One would think that, if the so-called "Croatian language" is sooo different from Bosnian/Serbian/Montenegrin, it wouldn't have needed the formal recognition in the first place, and would simply follow its own development path, this time "free of the Communist claws", that allegedly "suppressed" it.

As it turns out, Croatian nationalist psyche conceives these type of - in practical linguistic terms, completely worthless - acts, as something of extreme importance for the emancipation of the so-called "Croatian language", because it becomes another uber-argument on the "difference". Now they can say "Croatian language has the separate ISO codes from Serbian, both as an individual language and as a bibliographical unit!".

And what are the dirty details behind this absurd linguocidal act? The initiative itself became fruitful only after 18 years of lobbying, and the results came only after the Serbian side too supported the separation.

And, the official ISO 639-2/RA Change Notice, sent from Norway on the June 28th, has this sentence at the end (translated from Serbo-Croatian, I couldn't google the original):

"The data that have already been coded with scr and scc tags are still valid, and the deprecated tags will not be assigned a different value in the future."

As my favorite translator Mate Maras notes, "in practical terms this means that tens of thousands of Croatian books in the Library of Congress will forever carry the tag scc, and the users themselves will have to discover whether there is "Croatian language" hiding underneath".

Maras also describes some of his experiences, in his efforts to lobby for separate tag for "Croatian language". He thus writes:

"I raised the issue of that question in a conversation I had in the Library of Congress at the beginning of April 2000. I was invited and welcomed by the assistant of the director of the Office for catalog politics and support, who officially announced and explained the newly-introduced changes; with him was Milicent Wewerka, higher specialist for catalog politics. They've coldly told me that they see no problem at all with having the Croatian literature cataloged under scr, because that code stands for the title Croatian. When I started to raise my reasons against that symbol of drowning of Croatian language in an artificial construct that was artificially presented as some kind of supralanguage, I was told 'You can be happy that that construct has officially been obsoleted and unlisted from the list of tags. But we must also say to you that many libraries of the American universities, unfortunately, will not follow our example and the recommendation and the separation of languages. Due to human inertia and ignorance, they consider it a redundant type of work and an unnecessary expense.'"

A kind of Pyrrhic victory for the "international recognition of Croatian language", wouldn't you say.

Serbian-English dictionary 1920
Recently I've discovered on the Internet Archive a Serbian-English and English-Serbian pocket dictionary from 1920 (thus out of copyright), written by an obscure British author Louis Cahen.

Here is an excerpt from its short introduction:

"Of these three languages which form the southern division of the Slavonic languages, Slovene and Serbo-Croatian are very similar both in vocabulary and structure; on the other hand, Serbo-Croatian and Bulgarian, though they contain a large number of words common to both languages, are very dissimilar in grammar.

The Serbo-Croatian people was divided between the two, that part of it which lay more to the east and nearer Constantinople, i.e. roughly speaking the kingdoms of Serbia and Montenegro and the eastern parts of Bosnia and Hercegovina, became incorporated in the Eastern Orthodox Church at Constantinople, while that part of it which lay more to the west and nearer Rome, that is, roughly speaking, the western parts of Bosnia and Hercegovina, Dalmatia, Croatia, and Slavonia, fell under the influence of the Western or Roman Church. It thus happened that the Serbo-Croatian people, which was ethnically and linguistically one, became, from the point of view of religion and civilization, divided into two halves, which came to be differentiated and known under their old tribal names of Serbs or Serbians (Srbi) and Croats or Croatians (Hrvati).

It thus, further, has come about that their language, now generally known as Serbo-Croatian, which is essentially one and the same, is written in both alphabets, Latin and Cyrillic, while each of the other of the Slavonic languages is only written either in Latin or Cyrillic characters.

The Serbo-Croatian language, written in Latin characters as taught in the schools where Roman Catholics predominate, i.e. in the western part cf the Serbo-Croatian territory, is called Croatian written in Cyrillic characters as taught in the eastern Orthodox half of the Serbo-Croatian territory it is called Serbian. That is to say, the same language can be written in either alphabet."

And this was in 1920! Waaay before the Ustaše and Četnik, before the alleged "oppression" of "Croatian language" by the Communist regime (which seized power only in 1945). Croatian was simply synonymous with "Western variety of same Serbo-Croatian language written in Latin script".

And what is so curious about this "Serbian dictionary"? The fact that it contains dozens of words that are today perceives as exclusively Croatian! When on the other hand, they have quite a lot of historical usage by the Serbian writers...

For example, you can find here native Slavic month names, which are today only used by Croatian standard (sečanj, veljača, ožujak...even srpanj mr. Ullmann!), where Bosnian and Serbian use Latin-derived names Januar, Februar, Mart...

You can also find many modern exclusive standard Croatian words such as tvornica: (B/S: fabrika:), tajnik: (B/S: sekretar:), sudac: (B/S: sudija:), tisuća: (B/S hiljada:), tisak: (B/S: štampa:), knjižnica: (B/S: biblioteka:), ravnatelj: (B/S: direktor:), skrb: B/S: briga:), bačva: (B/S: bure:), cjenik: (B/S: cenovnik:), mirovina: (B/S: penzija:), kakvoća: (B/S: kvalitet:), kat: (B/S: sprat:), brzojav: (B/S: telegram:), sveučilište: (B/S: univerzitet:) and the list goes on and on.... Lots of the words listed are also sometimes used in modern standard Serbian, but have strong Croatia "pedigre" (blagdan, zemljopis, činovnik, svezak, pristojba..)

Also some in morphology. For example, today the Croatian vastly prefers the suffix -telj to form agentive nouns, as opposed to -lac that is perceived as "more Serbian". The suffix -lac is still used in thousands of words, and is not going away anytime soon (in some it's even impossible to replace it). However, this dictionary lists a number of words with -telj (often as the only ones): pobeditelj, poštovatelj, branitelj, poslužitelj, prevoditelj, razoritelj, pustošitelj, rušitelj, slušatelj, spasitelj, stvoritelj, hranitelj, tužitelj etc. - most of these have only the -lac variety in modern standard Serbian.

It appears that the "split" to the 2 literary idioms has ended up significantly impoverishing both of them...

The practical implication of this paradoxical situation is of immense importance for Wiktionary. For once, we do not focus only on modern standard idiom only, although we give it the premier treatment (in the translation tables e.g.), but also on the literary language 20 years ago, 200 years ago, whenever it was recorded. We cannot "forbid" that e.g. the word tisuća: is listed as Serbian. In fact, on its citation page I've given the attestation of the 14th century usage of that word, in of the most important medieval Serbian literary monuments.. The fact that 99% of Serbs today would use the word hiljada: instead bears no significance to us, other than the necessity of mentioning that fact in the ==Usage notes==.

I can imagine that some proud Croats would look in sheer horror if words such as mirovina, knjižnica or skrb were marked as ==Serbian==. They would prob. be even more horrified if they saw "Serbianisms" such as uslov, kašika, bezbjednost or ćutanje marked as ==Croatian==, with the CFI-passing citations of the most important Croatian writers.. (try googling some of these lexemes on Croatian Wikisource, also in inflected forms!)

What is the point? As this dictionary illustrates, it's pointless to view the separation of B/C/S through their modern-defined standards, if we have CFI in mind. 99% of those "Serbianisms" were used by top Croatian writers such as Krleža and Matoš, and a great deal of modern-day "Croatisms" were used in the historical period by Serbian writers (same is valid for Bosnian and Montenegrin too, we're just now focusing on the two "big guys"). With our rather "thin" CFI (only 3 citations by different writers), the multiplication of content would be much, much more pervasive than any modern-day analysis of the "differences" between the literary idioms would suggest.

The only solutions that comes to mind is to treat them all collectively, providing citations and comments such as "this word was used by Serbian writers until the 1950s, then it became markedly of "Western provenience", and after the 1990s its usage significantly dropped..".