Teaching Languages

[Thomas R. Jr. Beyer]

This is indeed a language and literatures list, but perhaps too many of
my colleagues, just as I, passed by the question without a reply because
of teh complexity of the issue. When those who know best remain silent,
what emerges are well intentioned, but less informed voices.  The
original question was a serious one, and Mr. Vaughn's reply was an
equally serious attempt at an answer.
I studied what we knew and called Serbo-Croatian at the University of
kansas twenty five years ago. I studied Croatian for six weeks at the
University of Zagreb in 1973. Croatians were adamant in distinguishing
between Croatian and Serbian as two separate languages.  The major and
immediately recognizable difference is the Serbian use of the Cyrillic
alphabet and the Croatian use of the Roman alphabet.  The differences in
vocabulary and pronunciation are not in themselves any greater than those
that separeate British and American English.  More important for the
Serbs and Croats as Genevra Gerhardt points out is religion. Serbs were
Orhtodox, Croats Roman catholics.  The history and culture of these
ethnically related Slavic peoples have tragically worked to divide rather
than unite them.
I apologize for the cursory and perhaps less than exact overview and hope
that those who continue to work in this area can enlighten us all.
Meanwhile congratulations to Mr. Vaughn for trying.
I have always found that as educators our task is to lead students from
where they are to a further spot along the path of knowledge. I hope
professor Lindstedt can contribute to that journey.

Professor Thomas Beyer
Russian Department
Middlebury College
Middlebury VT 05753 USA


On Wed, 15 Nov 1995, Jouko Lindstedt wrote:

> On Tue, 14 Nov 1995, aaron vaughn wrote:
>
> >         I lived in Slovenia for almost 2 years, and was able to speak with
> > Croatians, Serbians, and Bosnian(Muslim) refugees. My knowlege of
> > Serbo-Croatian is limited, but the only major difference that I noticed was
> > that Croatians added an j or ij to some words. This seems to be fairly
> > consistant.
> >         eg. pesem - pjesem
> >             reka  - rijeka
>
>
> This was supposed to be a linguistic and literatures list, not a place for
> layman observations about what has been described better in numerous
> reference books! And what is "pesem"? (And it is spelled "consistent"
> anyway.)
>
> 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/
>