Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, in no particular order

[Gil Rappaport]

Would I be a spoilsport if I were to suggest that the terminological problem
with identifying the language(s) formerly referred to as Serbo-Croatian is
neither strictly linguistic nor strictly political, but (gasp)
philosophical? More precisely, ontological?

How do you define identity? The issue isn't what to call the language(s),
but how many are there? Which observable forms are variants of the same
entity? Remember the classical Greek conondrum about taking a ship,
replacing each board in it, and asking when (if ever) the ship ceases to be
the same one? Or in evolutionary divergence, when do you get new species
from a common ancestor? Consider the debate about how old the human species
is: most of the debate is what should we consider `human' in the sense that
we consider ourselves `human'. More abstractly, consider the jump from
discrete to fuzzy logic, from deterministic mechanical physics to
probabilistic quantum mechanics ...

>>From this point of view the question is probably unresolvable; it is a
matter of quantifying how fine we want to make distinctions, a task which
few would want to undertake.

In practical (empiricist) terms, we could provide new definitions for use
which needn't correspond to any real notion of `truth' (often referred to in
the discussion on this wires). One could say `mutual intelligibility'
regardless of politics (so there are many `Chineses'); an applied linguist
could, I don't know, make up a test or procedure to define how much has to
be understood. Or one could say `let the speakers decide' (I am parodying
Chomsky's `let the theory decide'): if Serbs and Croats THINK they are
speaking different languages, so be it. Isn't that a little like how nations
are defined for membership in the international community? Even there there
are degrees: you could be recognized by many/some countries/organizations,
but not all.

>From MAILER-DAEMON at linguistlist.org Fri Dec 24 11:54:19 1999
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