Bosanski jezik?

[MIYAMOTO Ken]

Hvala lijepo!

This is an excellent explanation! I really appreciate it!

Ken M.

On Fri, 13 Mar 1998 11:04:32 +0100
Alain Dawson <orfqe at nordnet.fr> wrote:

>If you  consider the historical point of view, there was a time (maybe until
>the beginning of the 19th century) when one could hardly establish a
>commonly accepted list of Slavic languages, especially in the Balkans. The
>reason was simply the lack of officially instituted languages, that is
>languages supported by States or at least organized national groups, except
>Russian, Polish and (only at the end of the 18th c.) Czech. With Panslavism,
>there has been also a tendency to consider that there is only one Slavic
>language with several dialects, and you can find some attempts to codify
>this common language as a kind of Slavic "esperanto" (e.g. Krizanic, Linde,
>Herkel', Majar-Ziljski), or by adopting one of the existing "dialects"
>(usually Russian), or by restoring Old Church Slavonic (OCS).
>The Balkans appear to be the region where establishing (official) language
>boundaries has been a maximally arbitrary effect of historical events. They
>have for a long time maintained OCS as their literary language. Meillet (in
>1918) distinguishes only 2 languages (Serbo-croat and Bulgarian) where you
>can find now 6 official norms (Bulgarian, Serbian, Croat, Bosnian, Slovene
>and Macedonian). Bulgarian has been instituted with the independance of
>Bulgaria (1878), but neighbouring Macedonian only in the titist Yugoslavia
>in 1946 (the question whether Macedonian is an independant language or a
>dialect of Bulgarian is more a political question than a purely linguistic
>one). Concerning Slovene, Meillet wrote: "it is one of those artificial
>creations used by the austrian administration to separate slavic Nations"...
>but it is now the prosperous language of a prosperous new little country.
>Now about Serbian, Croat and Bosnian. First of all, note they take place on
>a dialectal continuum. At the beginning of the 19th century, the tendency
>was to consider only one language called Illyrian, including also Slovene
>and maybe Bulgarian/Macedonian. Different norms arised, at least Serbian,
>Croat and Slovene, but they were very close to one another. The Illyrian
>movement facilitated the convergence of the Serbian and Croatian norms,
>confirmed in 1850 by the "Vienna agreement" between linguists and
>writers (the Slovenes choosed to have their own norm). But even with a
>common norm, Serbs usually called this common language Serbian, and Croats
>Croatian... the term "Serbo-croatian" appears to be a linguistic term, not
>used by ordinary people. Within the common norm, the possibility of minor
>variations was kept (ekavica/ijekavica, use of cyrillic or latin alphabet,
>vocabulary) but they could eventually not correspond to the distinction
>between Serbian and Croat (e.g. you could write Serbian either with latin or
>cyrillic letters).
>The consequence of the recent arisal of nationalisms is to reinforce the
>historical tendencies of language divergence. Each community chooses to
>encourage its linguistic specificities and rejects the specificities of the
>"enemy". To be a Serb means to use cyrillic letters and certain portions of
>the formerly common vocabulary, to be a Croat means to use latin letters and
>other portions of this vocabulary... I think yes, we witnessing the
>splitting of a
>common language into 2 (and now 3) separated languages, but it is
>important to note this splitting concerns the official norms, not the
>dialectal language which has always been variable (as any dialectal
>language) in a manner much more complicated than the State boundaries.
>
>Alain Dawson
>orfqe at nordnet.fr
>
>
>>Hello,
>>
>>Recently, I've encountered the term "bosanski jezik" several times,
>>including a title of a small disctinary. Does it mean that the dialect
>>of Serbo-Croat spoken in Bosnia is now considered as a separate language?
>>Is it a temporary phenomenon which may disappear with the future
>>development of the political situation of the former Yugoslav regions? Or
>>are we witnessing an emergence of a new Slavic language? First of all,
>>does a language called Serbo-Croat still exist? Or is it splitting into
>>Serbian, Croat, and Bosnian? How do slavicists see the current
>>linguistic situation of the region?
>>


--------------------
MIYAMOTO Ken, or Ken C. Miyamoto
Princeton, NJ, USA
Mailto:kmymt at worldnet.att.net
Mailto:ken.miyamoto at ptsem.edu (secondary)