Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian

[Marta Pirnat-Greenberg]

From:   PO2::"GREENBRG at KUHUB.CC.UKANS.EDU" "Marc L. Greenberg" 28-SEP-1995
 12:58:19.39
To:     MPIRNATG at cluster.ucs.indiana.edu
CC:
Subj:   Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian

On Thurs., Sept. 28, 1995, Robert Beard wrote:

> Indeed, I do.  The linguistis problems in differentiating 'languages' from
> 'dialects' is problem enough in my opinion without conceding that these are
> political not linguistic terms.  We can, of course, get along with three
> more linguistically irrelevant terms in our vocabularies which have to be
> explained at the beginning of every article we write if we are forced to by
> political circumstance.   But do we have to embrace it? Do we have to
> pretend that it is OK to continue the trend or should we speak out and say,
> 'Croatia', 'Bosnia' (whatever happened to 'Hercegovina'?) and 'Serbia' are
> fine but the language spoken in all three nations is the same?  You have
> still failed to explain what is wrong in this instance with the linguistic
> truth.

IMO, this reflects the kind of disembodied thinking that allows
linguists to forget that languages do not exist by themselves,
but are spoken by people.  As most people know, it matters very
much, from a sociolinguistic viewpoint, what a people's language
is called.  It's fine to recognize that Serbian, Croatian and
Bosnian are very closely related, but failing to recognize that
each has a well-elaborated standard strikes me as reflecting
ignorance.  There are objective reasons, having to do with literary
traditions, selection in planning, not to mention dialect bases,
that justify this three-way distinction (in addition to the
sociolinguistic one mentioned above).

Further, it should be realized that saying "Serbo-Croatian" implies
a stand that does not necessarily correspond well to "purely
linguistic" facts.  For example, since the Kajkavian dialect of
Croatian shares many more features with Slovene than it does with
Stokavian, should Kajkavian be called Slovene?  (Alternatively,
should Slovene be considered a dialect of Serbo-Croatian?)

 (BTW, Svein Monnesland of the East-European Institute
in Oslo gave an excellent paper 'Is there a Bosnian language?'
at the Warsaw Congress this last August.)

Best regards,

Marc
================================================================
Marc L. Greenberg                              Tel. 913/864-3313
Dept. of  Slavic Langs. & Lits.                 Fax 913/864-4298
2134 Wescoe Hall                   E-mail: m-greenberg at ukans.edu
University of Kansas
Lawrence, KS 66045-2174, USA