job opportunities

[Jouko Lindstedt]

I agree that it is now ridiculous to have simultaneous interpretation to
Serbian, Bosnian and Croatian separately. In the future, the situation
at least with Serbian and Croatian may be as with Swedish and Norwegian
now: everyday conversation succeeds quite well, but in special
terminology translation is necessary.

As an administrative question, no rigid solutions are possible because (1)
a person speaking one of the three standards understands the other
standards quite well, but (2) only few teachers (including native
speakers) are competent to teach all the three standards with their
increasingly different vocabulary. Our solution is to have a syllabus of
"South Slavic languages" (saying explicitly that the primary target is
the languages of Croatia, Bosnia-Hercegovina, Serbia and Montenegro); set
literature is from the whole area, but the practical courses are "courses
of Croatian" (as our present visiting lecturer happens to be a Croat).

In the newest edition of "Hrvatska gramatika" by Baric et al., Croatian
is of course considered a language of its own, but it is said to form a
"diasystem" with Serbian (alas, no mention of Bosnian). The dialect areas
are only explained for this diasystem, not for Croatian. So there is some
room for a multi-layer approach.

Jouko Lindstedt
Department of Slavonic Languages, University of Helsinki
e-mail: Jouko.Lindstedt at Helsinki.Fi or jslindst at cc.helsinki.fi
http://www.helsinki.fi/~jslindst/