Talk:Serbo-Croatian/Archive 2

Splitting the article
I agree with George D. Božović about splitting the article into two articles (with a minor change to rule out national bias) - one about the Central South Slavic diasystem and the vernacular dialects (srednjojužnoslavenski dijasustav), and one about the Serbo-Croatian literary language of 1850s-1990s (srpskohrvatski/hrvatskosrpski književni jezik in Yugoslavia). Mrcina (talk) 18:28, 11 December 2007 (UTC)


 * Disagree. - Francis Tyers · 19:03, 11 December 2007 (UTC)


 * I'm sure we've been through this before, but Serbo-Croatian is a term widely used in the linguistic literature to refer to both the (rather cumbersome) "central south slavic diasystem", and to the literary language of Yugoslavia. I'm sorry you don't like the name, but that is the way it is. I agree that the Serbo-Croatian grammar section should be expanded, there are many good free resources covering this topic. - Francis Tyers · 07:24, 12 December 2007 (UTC)


 * You say that linguistic literature refers to both topics with the same name. That is exactly why we need to split the article, regardless of the name - this is why disambiguation pages exist. I found the discussion you are referring to and all users involved (Larineso, Joy and Millosh) were in favor of the suggestion so I don't understand your objection and why you removed the split tag. Millosh pointed out the possible politically motivated repercussions (i.e. taking dialects from one language and adding them to another), but I think this could be circumvented by the name (and topic of the article) "South Slavic diasystem". Both divisions (linguistical, political, national...) and similarities (Torlak Serbian, Bulgarian and Macedonian, Kajkavian Croatian and Slovenian) would be described in the article. Mrcina (talk) 12:49, 12 December 2007 (UTC)


 * Both topics can be treated in the same article as they are one and the same. The article is about Serbo-Croatian, which will naturally include a section on the Serbo-Croatian literary standard. - Francis Tyers · 14:01, 12 December 2007 (UTC)


 * Of course we are not going to split it. Simple explanation: we are writing an encyclopedia. Encyclopedia needs an entry for a widely used term Serbo-Croatian, just like it needs entries for Bosnia and Herzegovina (which you wouldn't split into Bosnia and Herzegovina) and just like it needs Balkan sprachbund. If this were a language-study course wiki, we would've considered most appropriate course of action, but since it's an encylopedia — we write about notable and verifiable topics, like Serbo-Croatian. Cheers. -- ★ čabrilo ★ 14:14, 12 December 2007 (UTC)


 * I think splitting of this article is perhaps not necessary, but there should be an article about the Central South Slavic diasystem as well (maybe as a concept suggested by some linguists), although I would personally rather move the dialects section to the CSS diasystem article. Moreover, an article about the CSS diasystem already exists on Croatian, Romanian, French, and Hungarian Wikipedias beside the one about the Serbo-Croatian language. --George D. Božović (talk) 15:10, 12 December 2007 (UTC)


 * There is nothing to move at the moment. Besides, they refer to the same thing, and I most of the articles I read refer to serbo-croatian not central south slavic diasystem. - Francis Tyers · 15:38, 12 December 2007 (UTC)


 * Serbo-Croatian is vastly the more used term (try doing a search on your favourite article archive for "serbo-croatian" and for "central south slavic diasystem"). - Francis Tyers · 15:41, 12 December 2007 (UTC)


 * That is because Serbo-Croatian refers not only to the diasystem we are discussing, but also to one of the languages of former Yugoslavia. That language was never called Central south Slavic language. Try Serbo-Croatian diasystem: 6,720 and Central south Slavic diasystem: 6,200. That is a close one. Mrcina (talk) 09:17, 14 December 2007 (UTC)

Serbo-Croatian is spoken as a majority language in Bosnia and Hercegovina, Croatia, and Serbia and Montenegro, and as a minority language in areas in Hungary and Romania adjacent to Croatia and Serbia.²

2. Serbo-Croatian has been standardized as Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian.

4.1.2 The term “Serbo-Croatian” refers to a language which has officially been dissolved and replaced by “Serbian”, “Croatian” or “Bosnian”. Since the formal aspects of the latter languages are practically equivalent, the all-embracing label “Serbo-Croatian” is here used, the specific terms “Serbian” or “Croatian” being employed for reference to the official Serbian and Croatian standards.

There are no significant structural differences between the Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian standard languages, however (at least not yet). While socio-linguistically we definitely have three distinct languages, from the point of view of structural linguistics we are dealing with one language system.

One recent example from Tomić, O. (2006) Balkan Sprachbund Morpho-Syntactic Features (Springer).


 * The statements are fairly pedestrian and need not be discussed, but the use of terminology is clear. - Francis Tyers · 15:54, 12 December 2007 (UTC)


 * Second. No clear arguments to split. --PaxEquilibrium (talk) 17:04, 12 December 2007 (UTC)


 * The Serbo-Croatian literary standard was an official language of the former Yugoslavia. There was political pressure to minimize the differences between Serbian and Croatian languages (with the omission of many of today’s languages/dialects) and create a single language and call it Serbo-Croatian. Now the political tendencies are the opposite - we have at least 3 internationally recognized languages and some more unrecognized languages/dialects, all of them developing away from each other. Now I suggest the following: Article 1 - Serbo-Croatian a virtually extinct language and Article 2 - The Central South Slavic diasystem (AKA Serbo-Croatian) a group (not a single language as the current name would imply) of spoken and developing languages/dialects. I understand that the more used term for the proposed second article is Serbo-Croatian, but this is a misnomer and it is not politically correct. The name should reflect the contents of the article and not be left unchanged for nostalgic, sentimental or political reasons or out of inertia. This way nobody would be offended and people could focus on the linguistics rather then on politics. Please, if you have any arguments except "everybody else does it like this" state them. Mrcina (talk) 20:25, 12 December 2007 (UTC)


 * Wikipedia has a policy for setting article names. It favours the most commonly used name, not the most "politically correct". The most commonly used name is Serbo-Croatian. We do not need to change the name for political reasons. - Francis Tyers · 01:55, 13 December 2007 (UTC)

According to Naming conventions (languages) it should at least be Serbo-Croatian languages. Mrcina (talk) 10:18, 13 December 2007 (UTC)


 * Serbo-Croatian languages should redirect here certainly, but it is not the name used in the literature. - Francis Tyers · 12:09, 13 December 2007 (UTC)

The linguistic view is that there is that there is one language "Serbo-Croatian", with multiple dialects and multiple standardized versions. It's common in Wikipedia that the article on a language is the same as the one on the dialect system. We have one article, Romanian language, not Romanian language (dialect system) and Romanian language (standard language) and this is the way it should be here. bogdan (talk) 12:28, 13 December 2007 (UTC)


 * Opinions of linguists about "Serbo-Croatian" diverge, please read the article. I suggested the diasystem as a compromise that would encompass both languages and dialects, because dialects of different languages overlap. Are you really disputing that Croatian and Serbian are separate languages? Mrcina (talk) 13:22, 13 December 2007 (UTC)


 * Croatian and Serbian two different standard languages. We don't need a compromise as there is nothing to compromise between. - Francis Tyers · 13:51, 13 December 2007 (UTC)

Oh yes, there is. The compromise I am referring to are Bosnian, Montenegrin, Bunjevac and Šokac languages. And please explain to me why there isn't a Croato-Slovenian or a Macedonio-Torlako-Bulagarian language. You have just the same arguments for them as you have for Serbo-Croatian. Mrcina (talk) 15:21, 13 December 2007 (UTC)


 * Oh no there isn't! You are welcome to peruse the articles on the Hindustani language and Hindi-Urdu grammar. And I'm not making any arguments about those other articles, if you feel like arguing about them, then their talk pages, not this one is the place to be. - Francis Tyers · 18:09, 13 December 2007 (UTC)


 * Look, I don't need to argue about the differences between the languages, that article already exists. You are comparing apples to pears here because, unlike Hindustani, there was no Serbo-Croatian prior to 1850, but there were Croatian and Serbian for about 1000 years. Croatian and Serbian aren't derived from Serbo-Croatian, it's the other way around. All I'm saying is that you aren't consistent in your claims. Why apply one set of rules to one language and another set for the remaining. Why should Croatian and Serbian be considered one language and Macedonian and Bulgarian two? And why stop there, explain please (with your Hindustani example in mind) why all south Slavic languages aren't considered one? Mrcina (talk) 18:45, 13 December 2007 (UTC)


 * Those questions are better answered elsewhere. - Francis Tyers · 19:17, 13 December 2007 (UTC)

Exactly! We both know the answer and it has nothing to do with linguistics. So please, reconsider your stance. Mrcina (talk) 22:37, 13 December 2007 (UTC)

Mrcina, you don't know anything about languages. Your head is full od hatred and nobody will accept your senseless remarks. Croatian or Serbian or Bosnian is ONE LANGUAGE, all the world knows that and nobody can change that fact, neither you, neither your miserable senseless propaganda. You shouldn't put your nose in the areas you don't have a clue about. Bulgarian and Macedonian differ enough to be considered as 2 separate languages. For your big misfortune, it is not a case with Serbian or Croatian or SerboCroatian, which are one same language, and will always be one and same language.

Dear Francis Tyers, please continue with the good work and ignore all these not educated intrudors like 'Mrcina', who are doing nothing but spreading croatian nationalistic nonsense and hatred on wikipedia. Their propaganda is dying and they will all be defeated very soon. Keep up with the good work and Best Regards. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.86.127.209 (talk) 05:54, 27 March 2008 (UTC)


 * Please take your politics off this linguistics page. - Francis Tyers · 09:13, 14 December 2007 (UTC)


 * I'm not the one who brought politics into Serbian and Croatian languages. Please answer my question without politics. Why should Croatian and Serbian be considered one language and Macedonian and Bulgarian two languages? Mrcina (talk) 09:57, 14 December 2007 (UTC)


 * This is not a political question. If you are interested in the Serbian and Croatian languages you are welcome to peruse and improve their pages: Serbian language, Croatian language. - Francis Tyers · 13:45, 14 December 2007 (UTC)

Another of my $0.02, because I might have been overly vague in my first statement, and I agree that my examples were not the best ones without further explanation. We have a diverging opinion of what Serbo-Croatian language is. It is not our job to be prescriptive about this article, but it is our job to write about Serbo-Croatian language. Some see this term to refer to a standardized (i.e. literary) language, while others see it as descriptive of the language(s) spoken in Croatian, Bosnia, Serbia and Montenegro, some see it as referring to both, and we can reference all three views and dwell upon them in detail. E.g. back in the day when I had "Serbo-Croatian classes" in elementary school, the textbook said that S-C has so many dialects etc. but still prescribed a certain language. Good overview of this is given in „Srpski jezički priručnik“ (2007.) by Branislav Brborić (his tone of writing is also interesting to our discussion - although he represents all the views, he is still trying to be very persuasive at which he fails:). I'm all for having several articles about Serbo-Croatian — but when we run out of space in this one. -- ★ čabrilo ★ 10:23, 14 December 2007 (UTC)


 * Thank you. Now that we have established all that, would you have anything against a newly created article, called The South Slavic diasystem, that would contain all languages and dialects spoken in the territory of former Yugoslavia + Bulgarian, divided into western, central and eastern? Mrcina (talk) 12:24, 14 December 2007 (UTC)


 * You mean the page on South Slavic languages ? - Francis Tyers · 13:47, 14 December 2007 (UTC)


 * Yes, I see what you mean. That makes my suggestion redundant, I take it back. You still owe me an explanation thoug. Mrcina (talk) 15:00, 14 December 2007 (UTC)


 * I agree with čabrilo. Serbo-Croatian is both the literary language of 1850s-1990s, and the vernacular dialect continuum (Štokavian-Čakavian-Kajkavian). In the latter case, some linguists refer to it as Central South Slavic rather than Serbo-Croatian in order not to use any particular national or ethnic name, because it is shared between several nations and peoples. I believe, however, that Wikipedia should have articles on both, and currently it only has one "unitary" article. I myself would move the dialects section to the Central South Slavic diasystem article and leave the literary language to this one. --George D. Božović (talk) 15:15, 14 December 2007 (UTC)
 * The problem with that would be that Serbo-Croatian language would imply that it refers only to the standard language (I deliberately don't use "literary" — because much of the literature is to this day written using "old" standards), if we moved the section about dialects somewhere else. I won't propose any concrete solutions though, because I will hopefully be away from my filthy computer for the New Year's breaks so I won't be able to follow up on that. I do however consider that there is a lot of space for improvement and building upon South Slavic languages, and that it would be very hard to write about dialects and variations of Serbo-Croatian in detail without building upon the continuum that goes into Slovenian and Macedonian and Bulgarian. -- ★ čabrilo ★ 15:36, 14 December 2007 (UTC)

Phonology Examples
As I'm merely a fluent speaker of both, but not a linguist, I don't want to make any changes without verifying this, but I feel that some of the examples in the Phonology section are downright wrong.

"a" has an English approximation of bad. Pardon my ignorance of linguistic terms, but in the only way I've ever heard the word "bad" pronounced, this is completely wrong. "bad" is more of an "ea" sound. "a" in Serbo-Croatian would be more like the "a" in car IMO.

"v" is roughly similar to wait? Much as a banana is roughly similar to a pineapple? How about the "v" in carve for example?

"h" in loch? I've only ever heard "loch" pronounced with a completely silent "h". Or, more correctly, with the "ch" being more of a "k". I'd suggest "h" in help.

Again, pardon my ignorance of linguistic terms, but this is just what I noticed. As I said I have not made any edits as I don't feel I'm qualified to do so, but I encourage someone more qualified to review my suggestions and apply them as appropriate.Baggend (talk) 09:26, 22 December 2007 (UTC)


 * I think you’re right about "bad", but you are wrong about Serbo-Croatian v and h. Serbo-Croatian v is the labiodental approximant not voiced labiodental fricative, and Serbo-Croatian h is the voiceless velar fricative (like Scottish ch in loch), not voiceless glottal transition as in English. These two Serbo-Croatian sounds don’t exist in English. --George D. Božović (talk) 17:21, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

On another note: in English there is no distinction between /dʒ/ and /dʑ/ or tʃ/ and /tɕ/. Maybe this should be added, because it looks a bit confusing to represent "check" and "choose" or "eject" and "Jews" as containing different sounds, even if it is "roughly".  Balkan Fever  08:26, 24 May 2008 (UTC)

Light copyediting. Also, some questions and suggestions.
This is a very interesting article, at least as far as I read. It could use a great deal more sourcing, but overall I feel like I learned a lot reading it. I've done some light copy editing, but I've tried to avoid making any substantive changes to the material. Below are some suggestions I have for the improvement of the article which I was unable to implement because of my limited knowledge of the topic. I've also mentioned some potential problems I saw that a knowledgeable person could probably resolve. I apologize for the lengthy post, but I hope it will be useful to someone. I stopped working at "Views of linguists in the former Yugoslavia" because I ran out of time. If someone else wants to take up where I left off, that would be great!

The first paragraph says, "By extension, Kaykavian and Chakavian were often considered to be dialects (while the Torlakian dialect was never recognized in mainstream linguistics), but they were not in official use." I'm not sure what the phrase "they were not in official use" means. It seems to me that the writer could mean one of two things:


 * That linguists never "officially" recognized that these were valid dialects, or
 * That they were never given official status by any government (for educational use, for instance, or for use in government records).

If the first is what was meant, then we need a different word than "official," unless we can cite some more-or-less universally recognized organization of linguists that could bestow such a label as "official" to a dialect.

Speaking of which, this article uses the word "official" more than once in a sense that makes me uncomfortable. I've changed it wherever an alternative seemed clear to me, but it would greatly improve the article if someone with knowledge of the topic could rewrite those sections where it appears, or cite sources that justify use of the word. "Official" implies, to my understanding, the existence of some august (or at least coercive) body with the power to make such a declaration and expect that others will abide by it. Too often in this article, the existence of such a body seems uncertain. When I see this use of official in an article, I usually suspect that an author is trying, consciously or otherwise, to lend credibility to a statement of dubious reliability&mdash;something he intuitively feels must be correct, but on which he knows there is disagreement.

Could someone please translate the title "Slovanské starožitnosti" into English and place that translation in parentheses after the original?

The last sentence under "History of linguistic issues" asserted that "the Constitution of Montenegro (1992-2007) called it Serbian (Ijekavian dialect)." I have searched two online versions of the Constitution of Montenegro, admittedly in English translation (I assume the original document is not in English), and not found mention of the word "Ijekavian." I've therefore removed the last parenthetical phrase from the sentence.

&mdash;CKA3KA (Skazka) (talk) 20:23, 12 June 2008 (UTC)


 * It means "never given official status" but in a sense "never codified" (they're more like a collection of dialects than one particular dialect). Hence no confusion.
 * It should be noted, however, that dumping Chakavian, Kajkavian, Shtokavian & Torlakian onto one pile (termed whatever) which somehow leaves neighbouring Slovenian and Bulgaro-Macedonian dialects aside is inexplicable butchery with no sound linguistic arguments whatsoever.
 * You shouldn't have removed that claim, for the link content apparently changed by the time it was referenced, from U Crnoj Gori u sluzbenoj upotrebi je srpski jezik ijekavskog izgovora to U Crnoj Gori u službenoj upotrebi je Crnogorski jezik ijekavskog izgovora. So ATM the official language of Monenegro is "Ijekavian Montenegrin". --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 18:50, 14 July 2008 (UTC)

Bosniak linguists
''The majority of Bosniak linguists consider that the Serbo-Croatian language still exists and that it is based on the Bosnian idiom. A minority of Bosniak linguists think that Croats and Serbs have, historically, "misappropriated" the Bosnian language for their political and cultural agenda.''

Is there some kind of reference on this? I'd like to read those arguments since this doesn't make sense to me either way, regardless of the Serbo-Croatian language issue. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Tapir (talk • contribs) 18:52, 9 July 2008 (UTC)


 * Open up any Bosniak language apologetics book written by Halilović et al. and enjoy. Essentially, their argumentation boils down to extending the modern ausbau notion of codified 'Bosnian language standard' spatially and temporally so that the designation Bosnian also encompasses 1) the speech of all the other Slavs that occupy/have occupied the territory of Bosnia and Herzegovina 2) literature having the notion of a regional term Bosnian. This usurpation of the term Bosnian is matched by the one of the term Bosniak, which not so long ago itself denoted any citizen of Bosnia (Muslim Slav, Croat, Serb), and has nowadays gained almost exclusive "Bosnian Muslim" denotation. Now, Bosniak diaspora in Turkey calls it's language Bosniak (bošnjački), and some Bosniaks in Serbian/Montenegrin region Sandžak even call their language 'Turkish'. To the horror of Serbian linguist, Bosniak linguists appropriated the speech of Sandžak Bosniaks as "dialectal Bosnian" ^_^. With all this mind, and considering the usual meanings of "Serbo-Croatian" as a 1) Eastern and Wester variety of codified Neo-Shtokavian (in grammar/orthography books) 2) the collection of dialects spoken at the territory of present-day Croatia/B&H/Serbia/Montenegro, it's not unusual to see outburst of "Shtokavian is ours" claims in either direction, by Bosniaks (on geographical basis), Croats (earliest Shtokavian dictionaries/grammar and literature) and Serbs (final touches in standardisation of modern Croatian/Serbian under the influence of Karadžić/Vukovians). It's all the matter of a perspective and ethnogenesis one wishes to embrace. As long as we're stuck with the 19th century practice of naming languages after ethnicities, (ethnicity=language=state), there's no way to evade paradoxical claims when multiethnic states share the same dialect as a basis for their ethnicities' respective standard languages, esp. when the authors deliberately misuse the terms. --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 18:29, 14 July 2008 (UTC)

Croatian, Serbian, Bosnian and Bunjevac standards belong to CENTRAL SOUTH SLAVIC languages.
Seems like in your article's 'Chart of South Slavic languages and dialects' someone has changed the basically known fact that the politically created standards of the SerboCroatian language, such as Croatian, Serbian, Bosnian, Bunjevac, etc., they all belong to the Central South Slavic languages, and they don't belong in the same group with Slovenian language. Please correct back this in the chart, because like it is now - it gives a wrong information to the readers. It should be like it was before 'someone's intervention to fake the things', or, it should show: West South Slavic languages: Slovenian, then Central South Slavic languages: Serbian, Croatian, Bunjevac, then Eastern South Slavic languages: Macedonian, Bulgarian, etc. Regards.24.86.116.250 (talk) 05:59, 8 October 2008 (UTC)
 * In a dialectological sense, "Serbo-Croatian" or "Central South Slavic" encompasses 5 (or 4 or 6 according to some) major dialectal groupings (narječja), that themselves separated from the same language that was also ancestral to all of the Slovenian dialects. West South Slavic is a genetic node, Central South Slavic is not. The term Central South Slavic was invented by Dalibor Brozović as a politically correct replacement for the term Serbo-Croatian, which is unfortunately much too frequently used in a sense "all dialects spoken by Croats, Serbs, Bosniaks and Montenegrins". --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 10:13, 9 October 2008 (UTC)

It is obviously unfortunately just for you and a few other supporters of the opinion that Central South Slavic language system is too frequently used in a sense 'all dialects by Croats, Serbs, Bosnians and Montenegrins', but like it or not - it's the factual state of things and it should be pointed out. Although maybe Serbo-Croatian language and Slovenian language have a same ancestral language, it should be pointed that today they differ very much, that a translator is needed between a speaker of Slovenian language and a speaker of any of the Serbo-Croatian standard languages. You cannot put Slovenian and each of Central South Slavic languages together in a same division group, because the languages of the Central South Slavic diasystem: Croatian, Serbian, Bosnian, Bunjevac and Montenegrin are basically ONE language. Dalibor Brozovic was a brilliant linguist and his works on Serbo-Croatian language are widely accepted in the scientific world. Another famous linguist in this area is Dr. Ivo Pranjkovic, who openly and loudly says the fact that Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian are 3 varieties, but of ONE and SAME language. Those are the sources you should respect like all the world respects them, and base your edits on them, not to present some isolated POVs that are not supported by anyone, and that have tendencies to present the things in a wrong and non-acceptable way. Thanks.24.86.116.250 (talk) 05:13, 10 October 2008 (UTC)
 * It's unfortunate because lots of Slavists still use this "Central South Slavic" or even "South Slavic" itself, as a genetical unit comparable to e.g. East Slavic languages (all of which have sprung from Old East Slavic), because there is no "common period" in which exclusive isoglosses spread which covered only and only CSS/SS dialects. Can you find me a paper or cite a book that lists exclusive isoglosses for Kajkavian+Čakavian+Štokavian, or for West South Slavic+East South Slavic? I don't think you can, because there are none. Lots of linguists (esp. dialectologists) today are emphasizing them being purely geographical or political groupings, nothing more or less.
 * How languages "differ" proves or indicates nothing. Languages change over time, sometimes the rate of change is increased due to some political and sociological conditions. Torlakian is e.g. genetically Štokavian, though it radically differs from modern-day Štokavian dialects [more than they differ from e.g. Slovenian], has experienced lots of changes shared with Bulgaro-Macedonian dialects, that radically changed its morphology. So Torlakian is genetically much more related to modern-day Štokavian dialects, than they are to Slovenian, but it differs from them more than they do from Slovenian dialects.
 * Brozović coined the term purely to replace the usage of "SC" in a sense "a group of dialects" with a politically more correct substitute. However, as I said, it is not a genetical grouping [e.g. there are very few, if not none, isoglosses that cover South and North Čakavian dialects, let alone if you add Štokavian and Kajkavian to the pile], and it has been disputed by others. Some of the problematic viewpoints on it were raised on the Central South Slavic diasystem article, but a group of "native SC speakers" that owns SC article appears to have sacked that article's development at the beginning [the truth that refutes long-held dogmas can sometimes hurt..]. Variets relate to standard language who share the same dialectal basis; that term is inapplicable in dialectology. Understand that. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 161.53.74.66 (talk) 10:27, 10 October 2008 (UTC)

Šeststo
I know that it may sound unbelievable, but 600 is spelled "Šeststo". Check e.g. ; there are a couple of GBook hits; see also. As for prstni, here's one reference . No such user (talk) 14:47, 28 October 2008 (UTC)


 * That is the situation now, but was it so according to the orthography books of "Serbo-Croatian" published during the Communist Yugoslavia? Croatian orthography books later introduce morpho-etymological spelling to resolve further ambiguities e.g. for -tak nouns (ledci / letci pro leci to distinguis plurals of ledak and letak). This article should deal chiefly with standard "Serbo-Croatian" of Communist Yugoslavia, not retroactively apply modern developments. If someone has a book on it, please check :P --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 15:22, 28 October 2008 (UTC)


 * No, those don't have anything to do with new stuff in Croatian orthography. These Cyrrillic searches confirm that it's so in modern Serbian as well . OK, "prstni" is kind of obscure, but šeststo is a real FAQ. No such user (talk) 10:37, 29 October 2008 (UTC)
 * Yeah, but were those spellings used in Codified SC of Communist Yugoslavia? Zocky is a Slovene who [judging from his user page] claims to be "native" speaker of SC, and seems to be quite unfamiliar with the spelling of šeststo for the cardinal 600. ^_^ --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 15:10, 29 October 2008 (UTC)


 * Because it's a common error; since it's counter-intuitive, someone has to specifically teach you that. And no, nothing has changed in Serbian standards since Yugoslavian times. Concerning seststo, nothing has changed in Croatian standard either :-). No such user (talk) 09:23, 3 November 2008 (UTC)
 * OK, I went back and checked too. Looking at books, magazines, and the internet, it seems that the overwhelmingly more usual spelling is "šesto". Google confirms this - to get rid of all the hits where "šesto" means "sixth", I looked for "šesto/šeststo tisuća/hiljada". "šesto tisuća" OR "šesto hiljada" gets 9260 hits, and "šeststo tisuća" OR "šeststo hiljada" gets 276, which suggests that "šesto" in the meaning "600" is about 40 times more common than "šeststo" in modern Serbian and Croatian. For "šesto puta" vs. "šeststo" puta, the result is 297 to 2.
 * "Šeststo" gets mostly Slovenian hits on Google, and when you limit the search to Serbia or Croatia, most hits are from dictionaries and forum discussion where people say they were astonished to see that their children's teachers correct "šesto" to "šeststo". After looking a bit more, I found that the spelling "šeststo" was introduced either in the 1960 or 1981 orthography as a disambiguation from "šesto", which was the "original" (i.e. 19th century) spelling, but as the modern usage suggests, it never really got into widespread usage (unlike other innovations, i.e. "predsednik").
 * As for the relevance of this to this article - it's misleading to say that 600 is/was spelled "šeststo" in Serbo-Croatian. Maybe we could say that some newer orthographies advised it? Zocky | picture popups 12:14, 4 November 2008 (UTC)


 * Well, a thousand times made error doesn't make it (much) less of an error. For example, googling "mi bi" or "vi bi" on several ex-yu domains gives more hits than "mi bismo" and "vi biste". BCS grammars are still prescriptive, just like Serbo-Croatian was. Still, this Cyrillic search gives a decent number of hits (I'm not sure how Google decides to do the conversion).
 * As for the relevance of the sentence, I'm not sure. It's more like an interesting piece of trivia. However, I don't see why both you and Ivan insist on "political" side of the issue, i.e. what exactly was the practice in SFR Yugoslavia and whether it differs from the current practice in B/C & S. It's merely a practical decision of orthography writers, and it only illustrated the exception to the "write as you speak" rule, which is still in force in B, C and S. No such user (talk) 15:32, 4 November 2008 (UTC)


 * If SC orthography books prescribed it, it's irrelevant to what extent people used it (as most people are incredibly illiterate when it comes to basic spelling things such as bi vs. bih/bismo.., rječnik/riječnik [200k google hits just for the latter one!] etc. What today orthography books prescribe cannot be used retroactively for "SC". Esp. in the current official (by the consitution) Croatian Babić-Finka-Moguš orthography whose entire edition was burned by the Communist just because it has Croatian in the title (and not Serbo-Croatian). The "write as speak rule" is not in practice, and never has been; that is just some old Vukovian catch-phrase folks use to propagandize how "great" phonological (not phonetical, so it's not "how you speak" in any case) orthography is. You still write ije (instead of proper ie, which is should be since the orthoepical norm prescribes it as a diphthong), ts instead of c, unassimilated consonants in lots of words (predsjednik instead of pretsjednik, gangster instead of gankster), not to mention retarded distinction between the /č/ and /ć/ that is still maintained among which there is no phonemic distinction in 99.999% words. --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 15:50, 4 November 2008 (UTC)
 * All of this is too complex, and mostly irrelevant for the issue at hand. The point is, the original spellings were "šesto" and "pretsednik", orthographies tried to change that, they succeeded with "predsednik", but not with "šeststo". If a spelling is a 100 times more common in modern sources than the alternative, it's hard to call it an error. Zocky | picture popups 16:28, 4 November 2008 (UTC)
 * Orthograpies prescribe what is proper and what is not, what is literary language and what is analphabetism [at least with regard to the concept of "standard language"; the local speech that people write is out of discussion here]. The fact that people regularly misspelled šeststo is completely irrelevant. This is not English where concepts like orthography and orthoepy don't exist, so everything what people use and write becomes "valid" some day, and enters the dictionaries. riječnik will never become valid alternative spelling of rječnik, just because it has thousands of attestations. If šeststo spelling was valid and šesto not allowed during the period of "SC proper" (1954-68), then the article could as well mention it. Or replace it with some other less disputable example excepting the "write as you speak" rule. --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 20:37, 4 November 2008 (UTC)

Inverted commas?
Would someone please explain why inverted commas ("") are used when referring to Serbo-Croatian. There may be something I'm not aware of, but I certainly hope there's a good reason. -- DIREKTOR  ( TALK ) 16:07, 4 December 2008 (UTC)
 * For the purpose of use–mention distinction when discussing the term itself, and not taking its (ambiguous and often deliberately misused) meanings for granted (SC as a set of dialects, SC as a standard language of SFRJ with two "variants", SC as an umbrella term for modern standard Serbian and Croatian, SC as a "macrolanguage" [whatever that means], SC as a historical designation for all idioms spoken by Croats, Bosniaks, Serbs, Montenegrins throughout the history etc.). It might as well be italicised (as is the usualy practice on WP for mentioned terms), but the italicisation is often used for plenty of other things (e.g. words in other languages inserted into English narrative, meanings of the terms under discussion—both of these usages of italicisation occur in this very article). Quotation marks further indicate that the quoted term under dispute, though the colloquial usage of that practice has ridiculing and pejorative connotations.
 * Such is the life of "dangerous" terms such as Serbo-Croatian, Macedonian, Illyrian.. :) --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 19:40, 4 December 2008 (UTC)

Ha, ha, some very strange "logic" in all this above, ha DIREKTOR? There's nothing to be under quotation marks when the terms Serbo-Croatian and Macedonian are used. Those are internationally recognized languages, unlike the "Croatian", "Bosnian" and "Serbian", which are just 3 variants of a SAME language. Those are the facts, and putting the factual real terms under quotation marks when it's not necessary is just another helpless attempt to promote the same fanatic and everywhere failled cro-nationalistic propaganda. Best Regards to you DIREKTOR:)). Cheers.24.86.116.250 (talk) 19:18, 21 December 2008 (UTC)

Serbo-Croatian is an ISO 639-3 recognized language
In the template of the division South Slavic languages and dialects, there's a notorious lie that Serbo-Croatian belongs to the "Deprecated or non-ISO recognized languages". Unless it's precisely said that Serbo-Croatian has just no 'ISO-1 code' at this time, this untrue statement should be changed. Serbo-Croatian is ISO-2 and ISO-3 recognized language, and it's recognized as a Macrolanguage for 'hbs', or 'Croatian/Bosnian/Serbian' (as it can be seen in the other template in the article). Happy Holidays and Cheers. 24.86.116.250 (talk) 19:31, 21 December 2008 (UTC)


 * Can you verify this? I myself am not terribly informed in linguistic matters, but if you're right the article will certainly be updated. -- DIREKTOR  ( TALK ) 20:05, 21 December 2008 (UTC)

Here's the link that verifies this:

http://www.sil.org/iso639-3/documentation.asp?id=hbs

Thanks, DIREKTOR, now you can put back the babel language templates in your file and don't be afraid of the threats you probably receive by the cro-nationalists about the template of Serbo-croatian language. Maybe Split has a few brainwashed nationalists, but standing up for the truth is more important to the case. Enjoy and be on the right side, all the intrudors of the truth will sooner or later-dissappear. Greetings.24.86.116.250 (talk) 02:15, 22 December 2008 (UTC)


 * My uninformed friend, hbs is a "macrolanguage code", and the concept of a macrolanguage is a specific jargon used by Ethnologue and not used at all in general linguistics. Real languages have what Ethnologue classifies as "individual language code", and sh as -1 is deprecated at the very link you mention (which means that in the next version of Ethnologue it will not be listed at all).
 * Ethnologue classifications as well as summarily appended "general account" they provide are full of colossal blunders and cannot possibly be used as a reliable source: apart from many other things I came to notice over the last year, and esp. pertaining to this "SC" business, they e.g. list that this "Bosnian language" Muslims invented in the 1990s has "4 million speakers", naively thinking that "Bosnian" is the language of Bosnia and Herzegovina. But then again, what level of professional competence can you except from a Christian organisation, lol. --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 07:57, 22 December 2008 (UTC)

The professional competence from a Christian Organization is much more valid than the one from someone whose nationalistic and separatistic tendencies are so obvious in all of his statements. As for the 'Bosnian language', it is a recognized language, and it has the same right to be a language as the 'Croatian language' has. And please stop hiding the unwanted text against which you don't have any arguments to fight, it's not written on your personal page and it will be reverted whenever you hide it. Cheers.:))24.86.116.250 (talk) 17:15, 22 December 2008 (UTC)

If you are continuing to remove my text that is the truth, which you cannot face because it's killing you, than it's your own problem, dude. It will always be undone in the history section of this article. Everything that is true and accepted by all serious linguists in the world is some 'Greater Serbian propaganda' for you. Go and seek a treatment for your disorder and leave other people to discuss and correct the matters of linguistics in a normal way. Can't you see that you're contributing in these articles about South Slavic languages nothing, but your senseless cro-nationalistic lies? Your 'isogloses' are the thing of the past, and you cannot apply them on today's state of the Stokavian speaking area. The people who used your ancient isogloses are NOT THE SAME people living now in this speaking area. Today's picture of this area is completely different to the one that's stuck in your mind and which you're trying to sell unsuccessfuly. After the big MIGRATIONS of the Stokavians towards the north and west caused by the Turks' conquests, nothing is same in these areas. The Stokavians from east and south spread around to Dalmatia, Lika, Slavonia, and their descents now speak the same Stokavian language like their ancestors from Serbia, Montenegro and Hercegovina. The original Cakavians whose isogloses you're trying to sell are moved far away from this area, to the north west islands in Adriatic. Those are the facts. Grow up and face the truth, because your world of marinated lies is starting to blow up. Cheers.24.86.116.250 (talk) 23:40, 22 December 2008 (UTC)

All you say in your messages with an obvious hatred towards all normal and civilized, is just a nonsense. So, stop removing my text and try to follow the policies of writting on talk pages. If you don't have arguments to argue, than better go and find some other place to spread your nationalistic quazi-theories. Until then, all the text you revert on this page will be reverted back. Cheers.24.86.116.250 (talk) 18:34, 23 December 2008 (UTC)


 * You are really starting to become a general PITA with continous removals of my comments (they "hurt" you?). Tell me my comrade, how is it going on with reading those Molise Croatian Štokavian texts I gave you, and that are more intelligible to some Čakavian speker from Brač then to your average beloved Belgrader? :D --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 23:35, 24 December 2008 (UTC)

Sorry, but the one who's becoming a PITA is you, not me. Also, I don't remember what kind of Molise Stokavian texts you gave me, but even if they were more intelligible to Cakavian, that's not the point. Nobody denies that ONCE, LONG AGO, before the Turks came in these areas, there were Cakavians living along the Adriatic as far south as Montenegro. BUT, all that HAS CHANGED, and now the picture is completely DIFFERENT. Who are Molise Croats? They are the living proof of the old Stokavian stock, who fled from the Turks. The same happened with majority of old Cakavians, who fled north and west. Their areas, again, were populated with the new Stokavians, who came from the south and east, so your 'isogloses' cannot apply here. That's so simple fact, and cannot be ignored. Now Stokavians live on the Adriatic coast as north as Rijeka, and those Stokavians are from the same origin as the Stokavians that live in Serbia, Hercegovina and Montenegro. There's NO 'western' or 'eastern' Stokavian dialect. There's only ONE STOKAVIAN dialect, which is completely same in all Stokavian areas, and the minor differences are in the variations of the old slavonic letter 'Yat' (i, ije, e). Those are the facts, all the rest is just a product of a generaly failed nationalistic propaganda with an attempt to promote new lies in purpose to create some unexisting differences between the Serbian and Croatian 'languages', lies which the vaste majority of real and serious linguists will never accept. There's no more to discuss about this, bye. Cheers.24.86.116.250 (talk) 18:20, 25 December 2008 (UTC)
 * You're just [playing] dumb now, and know very well what I'm talking about as I've gave you the link two times dude. The spread of the Štokvian speech is only minimally induced by migrations, and has much, much more to do with the koinezation (i.e. polishing the "differences" among idioms), and that what certain pan-Serb nationalists like yourself, as well as certain geniuses behind ridiculous theories such as PCT don't realise is the language spread is something completely orthogonal to "ethnical" spread. Molise Croatian is a living monument of how the state of affairs used to be—the clear-cut polarisation of Western Štokavian (Croatian) and Eastern Štokavian (Serbian, Montenegrin), Western Štokavian speeches sharing many ancient isoglosses with Čakavian and Kajkavian, and Eastern Štokavian with Torlakian. The Štokavianisation of the city of Rijeka (as well as the many other Croatian cities) is the result of urbanisation in the last 50 years, as well of the schooling and the state media all of which propagate the standard idiom, and not some ridiculous "immigration by new Štokavians" as you dumbly try to put it, fabricating history in order to support the 19h century racist equation "one people = one language" that has been nurtured in your beloved Communist Yugoslavia. You shoul send Vojo a letter of admiration, he is also a very vocal modern supporter of "all Štokavians are one people" theory. The problem is that he, like his predecessors, calls them Serbs. --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 18:44, 25 December 2008 (UTC)

By repeating the term 'dumb' you are actually presenting who you really are and show how primitive your language is, and by redirecting the topic back and back again to your beloved 'Vojo' you're just confirming how frustrated you are to face the truth. The problem is not that all the novo-Stokavians speak the same language (Serbo-Croatian), which should be the topic of our discussion, BUT, the problenm here seems to be HOW are all those speakes CALLED? Yes, you're right, Vojo calls them 'Serbs', some other people call them 'Croats', and the truth is they are - both, plus Bosnians and Montenegrins. Depending on historical circumstances and the level of brainwashing that Vatican and Austria did in the past to our South Slavic peoples, they made them feel like they are strangers to themselves. The crystal-clear product of this is you and your propaganda here, who instead of recognizing the common things that are much greater between our peoples, you're trying to look for or (Thanks God) uncuccessfuly create some unexisting differences between them. This sometimes goes very far, and might put you in a very unpleasant situation, wherever you place your 'theories'. Cheers.24.86.116.250 (talk) 19:13, 25 December 2008 (UTC)


 * Look, people, is there any way to confirm 100% one way or the other whether or not "Serbo-Croatian is an ISO 639-3 recognized language"? An official source of information? An International Organization for Standardization (ISO) website? -- DIREKTOR  ( TALK ) 23:47, 24 December 2008 (UTC)

DIREKTOR, the link I gave you above is a reliable one. You cannot find something that's 100% sure today. Greetings.


 * Ivan you're losing time with 24.86.116.250. You've seen his/her contributions. Juke-box which spits random typical communist pan-something parolas. Unbelievablablable
 * DIR, officially S-C or C-S doesn't exist anymore. What is language? What is standardazided language? Idiom (from Greek: idíôma) - definition ranges from (Sausure) language characteristic to a certain group, to (Weinreich) every linguistic system no matter how abstractive. The point is that SC/CS never really existed in reality except as an abstractive diasystem (mostly based on Neo-Stokavian). If you make little investigation you'll see in history of term how it was used during 19th and 20th century. It was never really a name of specific language strictly. There were Croatian, Serbian, Bosnian (in 19th), Montenegrin mentioned my different authors as "variances" of S-C/C-S which was presented as the language family group. It's important to notice that more or less all European standardized idioms were political issues and arbitrary decisions. Italian is standardized on "Tuscan dialect of Italian", but during Medieval it was actually an Italic idiom (by all means of its definition) different to the neighbor Venetian. One of SC/CS precursors was official srpskohrvatskoslovenački jezik ("Serbo-Croato-Slovenian language") – an arbitrary decision during unitaristic movements in Yu between 2 world wars. In SFRJ (in 70’s) the teachers in schools were preaching (by duty!) about Croatian and Serbian as 2 languages of "C-S or S-C language/language group", the titles of the school books were hrvatski ili srpski in Croatia, srpski ili hrvatski in Serbia, but books were not the same and languages/scripts were different.
 * S-C/C-S is R.I.P. and “un-ISO-ed” officially. It means that politically and linguistically it doesn’t exist anymore in the ethnologue maps of the world. However it didn’t disappear as long as it means what it really is – abstractive formation – umbrella over a few different neighbor Slavic word pools, mutually related because of its geography through centuries, not because of its origins and written forms.
 * As it always has been with languages, one arbitrary decision is replaced by other. Now you have more realistic (spoken, literacy, tradition) Cro, Ser, Bos, Mon instead of previous "Central South-Slavic-Neo-Stokavian" abstractive diasystem forced onto population of much wider speaking heritage. Stokavian is speech not language. Russian is Stokavian too, isnt’t it? Nobody have ever claimed that Russians speak S-C. It's fair that every real "idiom" (by all means of its definition) in the region gets political freedom to be based on its own basin and tradition. Only blind people can see something wrong about it. "S-C/C-S" as a term can be found now only in some western scientific articles where authors still use it by inertion and mostly as generalization and you can find it at mr/ms 24.86.116.250's page surely in large amounts where it’s presented as a holy language, almost as Sanskrit ;) Zenanarh (talk) 13:20, 31 December 2008 (UTC)

You are confused Zenanarh, and all that you wrote above is a total crap. Russian doen't have to do anything with Serbo-Croatian, except for being in the same Slavic family. Russian grammar and vocabulary are 90% different than Serbo-Croatian, and russian 'shto' doesn't have anything to do with the Stokavian dialect of Serbo-Croatian, except for it means the same (what), which is common for many slavic languages. The point is that at all levels Serbo-Croatian is ONE language with the same grammar and same 95% vocabulary, and no sick cro-nationalistic propaganda which is coming from you or anyone else will change that fact. The efforts you and some other few nationalists are making to present the things differently and look for some unexisting differences between the 2 variants of this language will fail, like they always had before you (remember your camarade A.P., and his BIG failure to separate 'serbian' from 'croatian'? The same will apply to you, today's HDZ nationalists.) You can call this language whatever you want: 'Croatian', 'Serbian', 'Bosnian', 'Dalmatian', etc, but it is going to stay basically ONE and SAME language. That's what the world recognizes and will recognize. Kapische? It's realy wasting time to repeat all these facts, so please stop with your rubbish and place it somewhere else, somewhere on your fewer and fewer cro-nationalistic forums that still haven't seased to exist.:) Cheers.24.86.116.250 (talk) 22:59, 1 January 2009 (UTC)
 * You sound like a deranged lunatic repeating like parrot "the same language" blah blah...C'mon dude it's obvious you're some kind of Serbocommunist agitator with no freaking clue what he's tanking about. Why do you think anyone here 1) cares what you think 2) thinks that your not so intelligent trollings on talkpages that has been going on for a very long period now are any kind of value-add for this article? Croatian and Serbian have never in their history been "one and the same language" except when Communists invented and enforced this imaginary "SC in two variants", and even the Štokavian dialect (it's actually a dialect grouping, stupid English is imprecise in terminology) itself is not clean genetic clade itself. Present-day apparent similarities in lexis are a result of artificial polishing efforts (mostly Serbian being copied from literary Croatian), and mutual inetelligibility means exactly nothing (e.g. modern Croats can understand 95% of 700-year old Čakavian from e.g. Povaljska listina, Vinodolski kodeks, would that mean that Čakavian and Štokavian are "one language", LOL?) As long as we have the evidence Croatian writers calling their language Croatdom with somewhat patriotic overtones, predating the "SC" for some 200-300 hundred years, your Communist propaganda means nothing and you can stick it in your...you know what. But you already proved your "knowledge" about these little facts you ignore or fail to mention. --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 11:10, 2 January 2009 (UTC)

Ha, ha, you can just DREAM of Modern Croats understanding Cakavian. NO Croatian, whose mother tongue is Stokavian can understand Cakavian without MANY difficulties, because Cakavian 'dialect' is a FOREIGN language to Stokavian 'dialect'. Yes, I am putting "dialects"(with inverted commas), because in reality they are LANGUAGES, not dialects. Cakavian and Stokavian are similar to the same extent like Spanish and Portugese are, and you know that very well. You RACIST propaganda to separate the 'Catholic-Western' from the 'Orthodox-Eastern' from the SAME BODY, i.e. Serbo-Croatian or Stokavian stock and Stokavian language is equal to a racistic deed and is going to be a big FAILURE. It was a big Failure in the time of NDH, and it will ALWAYS be a BIG FAILURE, noting else. You know that, all the world knows that and that fact is killing you. Your 'efforts' to erase Serbo-Croatian language from some of the maps on the internet, and replace it with 'Croatian', 'Bosnian' or 'Serbian' are all IN VAIN. Also, your (HDZ) senseless politics of creating some 'new pure croatian words' will never succeed, because the new words will never be accepted by the Croatian people. All these manipulations from you and your dying kind might probably have a temporary effect, but the truth and reason are coming back, the world scientists are not tolerating your dirty games any more and Serbo-Croatian as one language is coming back at more and more world Universities and serious institutions all over the world. All your 'theories' of separate Serbian from Croatian and Bosnian will go to the garbage very soon. And one more thing, please stop playing with the Communism, because Communism has nothing to do with this. AMOF, majority of today's Croats were much happier in the time of the Communism than now in your 'democracy', and this is shown by the facts from many free polls taken nowadays. The languages are what hey are, and the point of this discussion is that Stokavian 'speech' is actually ONE language, spoken by Serbs, Croats and Bosnians in their 3 politicaly created and forcibly slightly 'differentiated' 3 variants, which are 100% mutually intelligible. The facts that people from Split understand much better people from Uzice (Serbia), than some Cakavian from Pazin or some Kajkavian from Zagorje, ARE THE FACTS that you need to consider, eventhough they're killing you,:)). Everything else is just a product of your separatistic dreams which will never come true. So, call your language whatever you want, but don't spread lies that's it's something different than serbian or bosnian variants, because it's all same language. It's final time for you few cro-nationalists on wikipedia to stop dreaming and accept the reality. Acepting the fact that you speak same language with Serbs and Bosnians won't make you less 'proud Croats', and at the end of the ends, who cares who you are and what do you feel like?. Cheers.24.86.116.250 (talk) 20:35, 2 January 2009 (UTC)

Čakavian is "different language" you say? LOL. You probably haven't hear čakavica spoken in your life (granted that you are diaspora-brainwashed ignorant, you are forgiven for this particular sin). Some excerpts from Povaljska listina (y. 1250), written in Croatian Cyrillic:
 * V [jime] oca i sina i svetago duha! Lěto od roždenija gospoda našego Isuhristovo tisućno i sto i osьmdeset i [četvrto]. Bi v dni [kraja] Beli, biskupa Mikuli otokom hvarskim i bračkim Brečko knez, otokom Prvoš župan, sudja Desin, brešćik Prvoslav. Ti vsi sut dědići vladanju otočkomu. I v ti dni bi Ratko pop i koludьr služe crkvi svetago Joana u Pavljah. I bi plk brački i hvarski s knezem Brečkom na Bolu. I [nače] govoriti Ratko kalujer: »Kneže i vsi vlasteli! Molstir svetago Joana jest velik bil prežde, kako vi věste, nь je zapustil, i jego [zemje]. Tako jesьm slišal da sije zemlje ježe vi držite po Koncu, kneže i župane, jesu bili prěje svetago Joana crkve. Molju vi, vlastele, da biste je dali crkvi.

And from Vinodolski zakon (y. 1288), transcribed from Glagolitic original (to-death boring legal document, only a few lines excerpted, those containing Croatian ethnicon :D):
 * Najprvo da ako ka od crikav općinskih z Vinodola imaju se kerstiti vola ih bude kerstiti g(ospo)d(i)n biskup v koi biskupii e crikav rečena nima imiti od keršćenja rečenoga neveće vernez benetačkih soldini 40 tr 1 obed tr 1 večeru a navlašćno od onih ki učine tu crikav kerstiti. Žakan ubo ki za biskupom stoi v toi istoj crikvi zove se hrvatski malik a vlaški macarol ima za to isto posvećenje dobiti samo bolanča 15 sitnoga mletačkoga novca.
 * I nadalje zastupnik nije vjerdostojan u parnici, ako ne bi bio zaprisegnut, osim ako bi bio poslan od dvora, a tog se zastupnika zove hrvatski arsal

Muka Spasitelja našega, A dramatic piece preserved in Glagolitic MS, from y. 1556:
 * Ki je ta Bog ali človik, ki te skrisi na ovi svit, / toliku slavu stvori sebi, / da povrati dušu tebi, / da ga po tebi vsi mi znamo, / povij nam ga, molimo te?!

Muka svete Margarite, 1375, Glagolitic original:
 * Trava reste, cvate cvitak, / reste zdravje, dobar žitak; / pasite se, ovce zdrave, / zelene je dosta trave, / ne straš'te se vuka ljuta / ni ovoga moga pruta, / pas'te s mirom po tom polju / da ste site sve na volju!

See also other stuff inside: s:hr:Kategorija:Hrvatski srednji vijek. Now, few archaisms aside, and some Church Slavonicisms in lexis, morphology and writing tradition (those jers "ь" were not spoken anymore in the 13th century), this is mostly understandable to any reasonably educated and intelligent Croat. Only retarded imbecile and Serbocommunist propagandist like yourself can call it "different language". --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 09:07, 7 January 2009 (UTC)

This vocabulary only shows how retarded you are, and if you continue offending like this you'll be reported to administrators and banned. Calm down and keep your voice civilized otherwise you just prove that your IQ is equal to the IQ of a monkey. Cheers:)). —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.86.116.250 (talk) 19:06, 8 January 2009 (UTC)

Do over
Hold on, hold on... Like I said before: I can speak a few languages but I'm certainly not a linguist. However, I think this is quickly turning into a brawl and a fresh start is required. What I've been able to gather on this matter is the following:
 * ISO has indeed recognized Serbo-Croatian as an ISO 639 macrolanguage under the code hbs. I hope this isn't disputed here because it is undoubtedly so. You can find this information even on Wikipedia lists here, here, and here. I know "Wikipedia is not a source", but these articles have adequate references, and I doubt UDBA officers have infiltrated false information everywhere in a secret plot to reunite Serbs and Croats :P. Also, the term "macrolanguage" is indeed used by the ISO. -- DIREKTOR  ( TALK ) 22:39, 2 January 2009 (UTC)


 * Yes it's listed in the Ethnologue maps as a "macro-language" ISO 639 code: hbs. However this comes from the fact that previously widely spread (in use as official) term S-C/C-S was abandoned as an "idiom" and simply transfered to the macro-language level. I guess everybody understand what macro-language is. It's not "language". Observe one another macro-language group ISO 639 code: roa . West Iberian comprises Spanish and Portugese languages and subdialects and is a part of ISO 639 code: roa. Read this: Differences between Spanish and Portuguese. Have you ever heard about "Portugo-Spanish" language??? Or "Italo-Galician"??? Zenanarh (talk) 13:37, 4 January 2009 (UTC)
 * Judging from the list of these "macrolanguages" (some of which, like "Chinese language", comprise real languages that are not even closely mutually intelligible), it seems to me that the main criterion has been the genetic-dialectological, mutual intelligiblity and political-terminological. One very important thing that must be noted: Serbo-Croatian language is not a genetic-dialectal grouping (as opposed to most other listed in those macrolanguages that could be). There is no single phonological/morphological/accentological/lexical isogloss that connects all the "dialects" of this "SC" (Čakavian, Kajkavian, Štokavian, Torlakian). There are even no isoglosses that connect all Kajkavian or Čakavian idioms (hence no proto-Kajkavian or proto-Čakavian). SC is very often loosely referred to as some kind of genetic clade comparable to Old East Slavic, Bulgaro-Macedonian, Czecho-Slovak, Lechitic etc. It is not so, the efforts to connect those in a genetic sense in the last century have produced nothing, and several linguists finally explicitly voice their opinion defying this 19th-century dogma. "SC" in a dialectal sense is but a mere cluster of dialects grouped on the basis of geographic and political criteria, nothing else. Often the "SC" is treated as a some kind of "unit" comparable to Old East Slavic, Lechitic, B-M and C-S in Slavic studies, but this practice is (slowly) falling out of use, as people educate themselves. In case of Ethnologue-obviously not fast enough. --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 09:37, 7 January 2009 (UTC)

That's NOT an appropriate comparison. Portugese and Spanish are both listed in 'ISO 693 code', and there's NOT ANY ISO 693-3 "roa" language. The languages that are listed in the group of macrolanguages are : Serbo-Croatian, Persian, Albanian, Norvegian, etc., and from the definition of 'a macrolanguage' at the beginning of the article can be seen that 'Macrolanguages are covering either significantly different dialects or a net of very closely related languages'. It's so CLEAR that not any dirty manipulations with the facts can hide it. Here's an example of the Norvegian macrolanguage: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_639:nor#nor, of the Albanian macrolanguage: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_639:sqi#sqi and of Serbo-Croatian macrolanguage: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_639:hbs#hbs These 3 macrolanguages: Norvegian, Albanian and Serbo-Croatian are consisiting of a few 'individual language codes' assigned to the parts of them, as a whole language. So, Serbo-Croatian can be compared only to this type of macrolanguages, listed in the same (sub)group of ISO 693-3 Macrolanguages, not with any "roa" languages, that are NOT in the same ISO-693 (sub)group with them. These are more than good arguments that Serbo-Croatian language is ONE language, consisting of 3 'individual language codes' for Croatian, Serbian and Bosnian, and if you cannot understand this, than you should give up linguistics. But if you are PURPOSELY denying these facts covering it with some of your nationalistic 'theories', than that's something very bad for you, and you need to stay away from it. Kapische? Cheers.24.86.116.250 (talk) 20:48, 4 January 2009 (UTC)
 * Word "Capisci" is writen "Capisci" if it would mean that word in standard italian language. Word infinitive is capire which means to understend. Sufix -i means second face of singular (present indicative) and is common in such frases. Sufix -e would ment third face of singular, or speaking with respect ("Vi" in croatian language). Person which claims to comprehend ISO codes should be aware of that, no?--Čeha (razgovor) 23:01, 4 January 2009 (UTC)

Yeah, right, it's easy when having NO ARGUMENTS for the topic, to 'redirect' the discussion to some other unimportant direction. That expression I use just by habbit and I don't care about its spelling or what's the correct form of the verb 'To understand' in the Italian languages; It might be one or another, they have too many languages and spellings nowadays as well (I am not surprised why). I know Romance languages just basically and I am not interested in them at this moment; But the fact is that they (Italian peoples) also change and create old-new languages (they have MAANY 'live' examples on the other side of the Adriatic, whom they can learn it from), but - who cares. What I've seen lately in many forums, many southern Italians (writting in Napulitan or Sicilian language) avoid writing 'che' and 'chi' and put instead 'ke' or 'ki'. Who knows, maybe that way they will create some 'new spelling' innitiated by their motivation to be as much different as possible from the standard Italian. Anyhow, that's all 'deja vu' on the Eastern side of the Adriatic, where luckily that 'process' is now in a big decline. What's most important is that the topic here is about the Serbo-Croatian language, and as its native speaker I can assure everybody that all the artificial and politically created divisions and 'differences' of it, for me and for the vaste majority (99.99%) of its speakers mean nothing. It officialy has 3 variants, which are totally understandable by all its speaker's body of around 23 millions. So, it's best for all of you to stop the dirty games and manipulations around and behind this language and to accept the things and the facts like they are today, not like they were in some ancient times, when the situation in the area of this language was totally different from today's situation. Cheers.24.86.116.250 (talk) 04:09, 5 January 2009 (UTC)
 * In its past italian had option that some things could be writen with k, which means ki, ke was also used with chi, che. That option became nonexistent after ww2 because German armies which ocupied middle and northern Italy (Salo republic ) used it. It became sign of unliteral people (and also ocupators:).
 * Your thoughts about future are purely personal and as such can not be used in wiki. Because Croat and Serbian languages are similar, that doesn't mean that they are the same. Personly I get the chils when somebody from neighbourhood speaks language similar to mine and tries to convice (me or someone else) that basicly it is the same language. In the future, as every of the mentioned languages goes its own way it will probabliy differ more than english and german or french and romanian. Just a matter of time. --Čeha (razgovor) 15:29, 5 January 2009 (UTC)

Ha, ha, sweet dreams dude. First, what you wrote above about the Serbo-Croatian language is an ABSOLUTE NONSENSE, and second you're just ruining this discussion with your racistic and senseless comments. Your 'wishie-wishes' will NEVER happen, simply because Serbo-Croatian is ONE language, and the 3 variants of it will get closer and closer with all the integration process that's happening now to the countries of the West Balkans, which (for your BIG dissappointment that's killing you, HA, HA) include Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia. It will always stay one language besides all your powerless efforts to make and present some artificial differences between the 3 variants of it. That's a fact and the only languages that can differ in the near future are The Cakavian language and Kajkavian language, which are meaninglessly and totally inappropriatelly 'incorporated' into one of the variants of Serbo-Croatian language as 'dialects'. You must know that TIME IS NOT ON YOU SIDE any more and sooner or later you and all your pathetic propaganda WILL FAIL, like so many times before. It's just a matter of time for that to happen. But, of course, you can dream on your dreams and live on in your 'bubble' of illusions. Sooner or later it will blow up. Cheers.24.86.116.250 (talk) 05:00, 6 January 2009 (UTC)

Good advice ;)--Čeha (razgovor) 23:22, 7 January 2009 (UTC)

Exactly,:)). 24.86.116.250 (talk) 03:23, 8 January 2009 (UTC)


 * A question: would anyone object to the insertion of the following information:
 * "The International Organisation for Standardization (ISO) recognizes the Serbo-Croatian language as an ISO 639 macrolanguage (under the code hbs)."
 * I can't see anyone doubting the veracity of this fact, it is quite conclusively proven, is it not? -- DIREKTOR  ( TALK ) 09:06, 8 January 2009 (UTC)

Yes it is, DIREKTOR, please do insert it. Cheers.24.86.116.250 (talk) 18:47, 8 January 2009 (UTC)

Montenegrin
Keep your eyes peeled for this one. It will soon be official too. So we will all speak four languages - heck five - bulgarianized serbian is what is called macedonian. It's a real disgrace. It should not even be called serbo-croatian, that is just a post-ww2 thing that would make the croatian people feel more at home in a country with serbs, after they lost the war. Here's a little fun to help out this tense situation... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DztrX5dXmxU (LAz17 (talk) 01:29, 8 January 2009 (UTC)). Ough, it's already out. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montenegrin_language (LAz17 (talk) 01:30, 8 January 2009 (UTC)).
 * Here's a few interesting facts:
 * The Yugoslav Partisans won the war, the Chetniks got slaughtered.
 * There were more Croats than Serbs in the Partisans for the majority of the movements existence (up until the liberation of Serbia in late 1944, and the Serbian brigades formed at that time were inexperienced, of little value, and were primarily used as cannon fodder on the Syrmian front), not to mention that the leader of the movement was a Croat, and many of its high command. (this can easily be confirmed with sources)
 * The NDH did not enjoy the support of a majority of Croats, and was imposed upon the Croatian people by the enemy. This is evident from the numbers, as well as from the fact that huge swathes of Croatia that were held by the Partisans. (Arguably in the first few months there was support but that quickly fell apart after the secession of Dalmatia, the repression, the slaughters, etc, etc...)
 * If you perceive the result of WWII as being a "Serbian victory over Croats", you are way, waaaay off. I am open to the idea that Croatian, Serbian, Bosnian, and Montenegrin may be one language, but to claim that they are all in fact Serbian(!) is something I can only call "Šešeljevska politika". On that note I leave you with a link that may hep "lighten-up" the situation even further
 * To my knowledge, Macedonian is more similar to Bulgarian and has no conection with serbian (apart from being neighbouring languages and parts of the same south slavic family). "Serbia to Tokio" politics have given "Serbia size of Nokia" results so :)
 * It is normal for one normal contry to transcribe its lexical standards, and it is also normal for one nation (I think of Montenegrins here) to have a language to call it there own. And one day in the future Serbs will probably learn to distinguish it (as they learned to distinguish žlica from kašika in the past).--Čeha (razgovor) 15:12, 8 January 2009 (UTC)
 * Standard Macedonian is based on the dialect that belongs to East South Slavic group. It is very closely related to the dialect used for standard Bulgarian, though different in several important respects (in phonology and accentuation that I know of). Some isoglosses that divide those two dialects are very ancient (e.g. the different reflexes of Common Slavic */d'/ and */t'/ that have dissolved by the time of extant Old Church Slavonic writings in C9 AD). Perhaps Serb nationalist imagine Macedonian to be "Bulgarianised Serbian", or Bulgarian nationalist of it to be "Serbianised Bulgarian", but that is far from truth.. --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 18:04, 8 January 2009 (UTC)
 * The fact is that if we look at bulgarian prior to world war two we can see that there is almost nothing that separates it from Bulgarian. Furthermore, we can see that many serbs were forced to change their names to end in ski from ic in many places there. Even today there is pressure on people who say that they are serbs instead of macedonians, in macedonia. (LAz17 (talk) 19:24, 8 January 2009 (UTC)).
 * Laz are you saying that before ww2 whole of macedonians spoke Bulgarian but that all of them had serbian surnames? What does macedonian language has with serbians?
 * Where not all of macedonian surnames were forcefully serbianised after balcan wars, and Macedonia renamed in southern serbia in that period?

--Čeha (razgovor) 01:54, 9 January 2009 (UTC)
 * Ceha, get some of your facts staright. It is well known that most of the partizans were serbs. Furthermore some ninety percent of the command of the partizans was serbian. We can pull out a nice little textbook out, and lets find an article in it... well here we go... Chaim Kaufmann - Possible and Impossible Solutions to Ethnic Civil Wars...
 * quote-...In this environment, cross ethnic appeals are not likely to attract members of the other group. The yugoslav partisans in ww2 are often credited with transcending the ethnic conflict between the croatian ustasha and the serbian chetniks with an anti-german, pan-yugoslav program. In fact it did not work. Tito was a Croat, but partisan officers as well as the rank and file were virtually all Serbs and Montenegrins. Only in 1944, when German withdrawal made Partisan victory certain, did Croats begin t join the Partisans in numbers, not because they preferred a multi-ethnic Yugoslavia to a Greater Croatia, but because they preferred a multi-ethnic Yuogslavia to a Yugoslavia cleansed of Croatians....-end quote
 * I strongly suggest that you read that entire article, and no, I won't scan all 30 pages of it for you. But I understand your position. It is well known that the Croatian people have a problem with facing the past. It's not hard to figure out why, considering that poglavar pavelic was hitler's most supportive ally. (LAz17 (talk) 19:24, 8 January 2009 (UTC)).
 * Ceha, I never understood why Croats hate Serbs. Could you explain this to me? We Serbs have always been on friendly terms and it was the Croats who always caused trouble. It is my opinion that we should have some sort of bordres like the Croatian Banovina again, so that most Croats are in one nation - therefore I do not support Seselj's views. However, it is clear that the serbs are the victims of aggression, time and time again. (LAz17 (talk) 20:00, 8 January 2009 (UTC)).
 * Obvious nonsense. The author is clearly pro-Serbian in this matter and is obviously only speculating. None of the information presented here has any real backing from actual data, and confirming some of it is even unimaginable. Like that crack about the thoughts, intents, and opinions of the entire Croatian nation as a whole during 1944 and 1945. Does Mr. Kaufmann have any censi, opinion polls, actual data?
 * Could you explain why Serbs have this uncontrollable urge to militarily invade and attack Croats? Is it related to your belief that we're all in fact Serbs of different religion? Do we simply need to be reawakened as Serbs? Will you help us, please? -- DIREKTOR  ( TALK ) 20:08, 8 January 2009 (UTC)
 * You read the article if you want more information. It is available on Jstor for sure. He got his PHD from Colombia and is a tenured professor in politics-international relations. It is clearly not biased. Your problem is that you are some pro-yugoslav phanatic, fed lots of communist propaganda of brotherhood and unity, something that is a myth that never existed. (LAz17 (talk) 20:18, 8 January 2009 (UTC)).
 * Yes certanly, in Dalmatia and Istria there were virtualy no resistence (Labin's republic is the first territory in Europe where someone rebeled against fascism) against fascism and partisan actions in Croatian Zagorje, Zagreb and all the major Croat cities were made by members of Serbian majority. Also first act of armed rebellion (Sisak's brigade) didn't happend near Sisak. It happened somwhere in Serbia (at least 500 kilometers away). All of Croatians just waited as theirs country was slowly divided between Italy and Germany, Italy anexing part by part of its coast and islands. And it is almost by accident why leader of resistance in all of the countries of former Yugoslavia was a Croat. He realy wanted to be a Chinamen (they are also a hevenly people, that is clearly a serbian connection), but his genetics were bad for that.
 * For your historical I didn't heard before and as you didn't leave any of the sources or links it realy seems that he is verified in it's expertiese. As for your question, please do explain what does Yugoslavia (also Croatia) without Croats means? Genocide of that people in their's own land?
 * I am also certain that you don't know anything about treatment of Croats in first Yugoslavia, nor things which Serbs done in Croatia and Bosnia in the 90'ties. Vukovar, Dubrovnik, Škrabrnja, Kijevo, Ravno, and many others (including Srebrenica) are not places from this planet.
 * And for borders I'm pretty much certain that any nation has some border with wich it is not satisfied. History is here and it can not be changed. For example Banja Luka was planned to become a capital of NDH and now is de facto a capital of RS. There are lot of perversy in the world. However this is a wikipedia, and our personal opinion is not important about it. This is an encyclopediae. Try to act acording to that.--Čeha (razgovor) 01:54, 9 January 2009 (UTC)
 * I am acting according to that. The problem is that you are not. It is well known that the communist movement was by far the strongest in Serb areas. There was also more repression on the Serbs during the rule of the tzar, when it came to clamp down against communists. As for Tito, he spent most of his life prior to the war in Russia, if I am not mistaken. Your rebellions there I have never heard of and feel that you are making them up. It is well known who rebelled and who got slaughtered/was victim of genocide during world war two. For borders - it is well known that there are possible and impossible ideas. All ideas are possible. Having Banja Luka as the capital of Nazi Croatia is the dumbest thing I heard of, but I really would like to see some source if you have any on that. However, it is perfectly doable, if Nazi Germany remained in power. As for things that Serbs have done in the 1990s, I am very well aware of them. I have actually added numbers for how many victims there were in certain places in eastern bosnia like visegrad and gorazde. Dubrovnik was not a big even at all. What happened in dubrovnik was more propaganda than anything else. It's well known that croats burned tires to make it look like there was more destruction than there actually was. I thank you for letting me in on info about Ravno. I must admit that it is similar and smaller in scale when comapred to what croats have done to the serbs in bosnia. As for the actual first significant cleansing of the war, we all know that this was done by croats in western slavonia. The awful thing is that the UN helped too... they gave buses to help cleansing of tens of thousands of serbs in the summer of 1991, well before any war started. (LAz17 (talk) 03:59, 9 January 2009 (UTC)).
 * It seems that you have serious reality issues. Of wich tzar do you speak about?
 * There is a thing called google; this is for example of Labin Republic. I'm certain that you can also manage to google out other rebelions and resistance movements.
 * The same goes for Banja Luka . Town itself didn't have apsolute majority of any nation even in 1991, and most of the Serbs came in it after the earthquake in 1969. Before that town of Banja Luka had 30 and something percente of Serbs . Town itself was very near geographical center of NDH and some of neighbourhood municipalities (Ivanjska for example) had Croatian majority.
 * If you call bombardment of medieval town and place of UNESCO heritage nothing serious than you have problems. I'm not going to comment that.
 * About half of the population of so caled rsk was not serbian and was ethnicaly cleansed by serbs in the begining of the war. It is interesting to notice that while having all the possible advantages, army etc serbs managed to lost this war. Because of that I asume that you need redicilous theories like this with un forces (do you even know when UN came in Croatia).
 * And I'm curious with exactly what do you compare burning of Ravno?--Čeha (razgovor) 09:28, 9 January 2009 (UTC)

The man's obviously a Serb Radical or a supporter of theirs. All you have to do is listen to the good old Vojvoda Šeki teaching people history in the ICTY courtroom and you know where LAz17 comes from. According to the No.1 warmonger in the region Croats ceased to exist in the 17th century, for example. We all just need to realize we're in reality Serbs and everything would be fine... (I mean, seriously, Milošević called him a primitive warmonger, Milošević xD) -- DIREKTOR  ( TALK ) 11:37, 9 January 2009 (UTC)

Guys, why are you discussing this stuff here? It's 100% offtopic for the article. Šeki's Greater Serbian "theories" should be discussed elsewhere (if it's worth discussing at all; sane person upon mere observation of 1000-page books with titles such as Rimokatolički zločinački projekat veštačke hrvatske nacije, Đavolov šegrt zločinački rimski papa Jovan Pavle Drugi, Pontifeks maksimus satanističke crkve Jovan Pavle Drugi, Antihristov namesnik zlikovački rimski papa Benedikt Šesnaesti, Vatikan glavno Satanino gnezdo, Rimska kurija večito žedna srpske krvi, Engleski pederski isprdak Toni Bler, Vašingtonski seksualni manijak Bil Klinton, Lažljiva haška pederčina Džefri Najs, Kriminalac i ratni zločinac Havijer Solana, Politički ortakluk Kurve del Ponte i Kurve del Koštunice, Hitlerovi najverniji sledbenici Helmut Kol i Hans Genšer, Pokvareni malteški pacov Karmel Agijus etc. realises that one is dealing with a lunatic.). --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 14:10, 9 January 2009 (UTC)


 * Obviously a Serb radical? Fucken insanity, that's what your statement is. Actually no, it's not insanity, it is attacks on purpose to downgrade and discredit. The slightest thing that defends serbs in any way is for you radicalism and greater serbian propaganda. I do not support seselj, or his behavior, which is EXACTLY like your peoples. He is a miserable person because he insults a lot, and you guys seem to have taken on his style of discussion/time waste. I furthermore do not support places like Knin and other croatian lands to be in Serbian borders, and so I have had radical serbs dislike me a lot. I do not even support Republika Srpska breaking off right now or in the near future. (LAz17 (talk) 21:35, 9 January 2009 (UTC)).
 * Ceha - it is not of importance which tzar, peter or aleksandar. Both of them banned the communist and socialist movements, and by the time world war two started, most of the country was owned by the west. At any rate, your labin thing is a joke - labin is in istria, not yugoslavia in 1921. I know very well about banja luka, that the town itself did not have an aposlute majority of any group. I do know however that the municipality always had a serbian majority. You see, towns were slow to form in bosnia. It is very important to look at both municipality and town, not just town. Muslims were the majority in the towns for quite some time, but that started changing when the austrians took over. Again, I ask to see some place that says that banja luka was the planned future capital of croatia. This interests me and I would like to see a link or some scan or something. Your link gives me some wikipedia bosnia/croatia and some croatian forums, not accredited sources. As for banja luka populations, we can see the following results... 1961 - 22883 serbs, total city population is 50650, so serbs are 45%. We look at 1971, and see 41297 serbs and 90831 for the city, so serbs again at 45%. The important thing to notice is that the populatoin increased by some 40,000, more than half of which were non-serbs. In 1981 there were 123937 people in the city, and 51839 were serbs... 41.82%, DECREASE. Shove your propaganda in the garbage that serbs were always increasing their numbers as recent migrants. All the groups were increasing their numbers as recent migrants. Don't worry, I have all the data from yugoslav censuses... and serbs were always the overwhemling majority in the municipality of banja luka. You next speak of RSK. It is not true that half were non-serbs. We can look at mainland krajina... and then we need to break municipalities down. Sure, we can say that there was 40% serbs, but that is worthless because you are counting people who are not in the municipalities themselves. When talking about krajina, we can divide it up into several parts. There is the eastern slavonia part, where neither serbs nor croats were a majority, and in this small part alone there were more croats than in all hte rst of rsk, in which serbs were the overwhelming majority in the last hundreds of years. Again, I say that I do not support secession, but I do not condemn serbian actions as they are a logical consequence of tudjman's fascism and extremism. What normal president could say thank god my wife is not a serb or jew like he said? As for burning of ravno, we should notice that ravno is a very small place... 200 people? Countless such small places got burned by all sides in the war. You could have included others, as troops from montenegro got some more on their way to dubrovnik. (LAz17 (talk) 21:58, 9 January 2009 (UTC)).
 * Yes, Laz is a obviously a radical (at least in their smaller edition), and this is obviously offtopic. I'll be short and this will be it.
 * Labin's Croats made first anti fascistic rebelion in whole of europe.
 * 1879 town of Banja Luka had 67,7% of muslims, 19,8 % of ortodox and 10,52% of catolics.
 * Todays municipality of Banja Luka is made of 4 previous municipalities of wich one (northern-->Ivanjska) had Croatian majority, one was expanded city itself, and the the rest two(western and southern) had Serbian majority.
 * Increse of serbian population is shown in your own numbers. In every census there is more and more serbs in the town. There percetige is lower in 1981 because of their lower natality rate. The significant raise in 1971 is because of the erthquake in 1969. Most of the flats and works in rebuilt town were given to the serbs.
 * How much people was driven out from so called "rsk" in 1991? From eastern Slavonia, western Slavonia, Slunj, Petrinja, H.Kostajnica, Glina, Benkovac, Obrovac, Kijevo ... About half of population. All Croats and not-Serbs. Anyone who condones this is .... well I'm not going to be rude:) The same goes for Ravno. The first village which was burned by Serbs in Bosnian war. --Čeha (razgovor) 00:26, 11 January 2009 (UTC)
 * Labins croats were not in Yugoslavia at the time, so I do not know what your point is. They were probably revolting against italian control which was repressive against them. For banja luka you ignore the HUGE increase of the other groups. Biased!!!! When we see non-serbs increase by more than the serbs increase, then what is that called? When in all the census data the non-serbs increase in 90% or more of the serb increase amount, then what is that called? All the groups increased!!! And just about all the towns were insignificant and small in bosnia prior to the creation of yugoslavia. Moving on... We are not talking about eastern slavonia. That is an exception and was not part of the mainland RSK - actually it was supposed to be in vojvodina in early yugoslav plans. Serbs were the overwhelming majority in the rest of RSK, and they were the most cleansed people in western slavonia even before 1995. Kijevo and such small places are not too significant, considering that they are in a place that was 90% serbian. It was much less than what the croats have done even before the war started in western slavonia. As for Bosnia, you know very well that during most of the war that serbs and croats cooperated very well. The leadership of herceg bosna was always close with the serbs and an alliance could have been extremely useful if they could have agreed on mostar. That was the reason why the federation is not a serb-croat entity, and why the other entity today is not republika bosnjaka or mahala bosnjaka. As for serbs and croats, you are a really sad example of a croat. Croats and serbs have been friends for hundreds of years, and thanks to your guys nazi sympathizing the question becomes how many more decades will it take to restore good relations. (LAz17 (talk) 02:23, 11 January 2009 (UTC)).
 * Come one guys... WP:NOTFORUM, remember? In any event no amount of discussion or empty rationalization can change the fact that Serbian rebels invaded Croat-populated territory. No amount of provocation justifies military invasion and ethnic cleansing (which the Serbs were also first to implement during the war). Calling up World War II from the deeps of time is meaningless in any knowledgable discussion, with the context so completely and incomprably different, and with Serbs being by far the most militarily potent faction. -- DIREKTOR  ( TALK ) 00:36, 11 January 2009 (UTC)
 * Much of dalmacia and croatia's coast belongs to italians. It is a fact that they were brutally cleansed out from there after world war two. Croatia has absolutely no historical claims to places such as Zadar. This is Istalian land. Second, Like I said, Serbian reaction is completely reasonable considering that they were up against a nazi leadership that wanted to cleans them and slaughter them. Fascist asshole Tudjman, who got booed at the holocaust museum and was an active holocaust dennier, could not accept so many serbs in croatia. He said that it would be okay if they were 5% er so. He started massive ethnic cleansing before the war. He's like Hitler. Responses to Hitler are okay. This meant fighting against arbitrarily made up borders that were never meant to be countries. Again, I am against the violent action, but in the circumstances I feel that it is reasonable though unfortunate. (LAz17 (talk) 02:14, 11 January 2009 (UTC)).
 * The serbs are always first ones when it comes to division of foreign land. Nor Zadar, nor Istria, nor any part of Dalmatia were not ever part of Italy since 1918 when Serbian leader (Pašić) gave Zadar to Italians (he wanted to excange it for Skadar, but lost both at the end). If you did not know italian state came into existance in 1861.
 * Most of Croatian borders were drown in 18th century, only difference in them were when Tito cut Boka Kotorska into Montenegro and Eastern Syrmia into Vojvodina (ethnical principle, but after 21 year of serbian colonisation and ethnical fixing) and gave Baranja to Croatia (it had Croatian majority and was added to first Yugoslavia because is economical backrand to Osijek). The border in Istria was mostly ethnical. Croatian lost some small villages (near Štrigova, Zavalje, itd) and did not get Bunjevačka Bačka (northern) which had croatian majority to the economical grands, when whole of Vojvodina was incomporated into Serbia as autonomus unit. What arbitrary borders do you speak about?
 * Active holocaust dennier? You mean like you serbs are denning Bosnian genocide? You were afraid and that was the reason why you used third military force in europe and made bigest ethnical cleansing since ww2? Gimme a break:)
 * Yes, Laz is a trol. Obvious thing. --Čeha (razgovor) 02:39, 11 January 2009 (UTC)
 * Laz obviously knows nothing about Croatia, something I've already noticed in other articles. Just another GreaterSerbianist representative in Wikipedia. Sick, sad and shameful. Zenanarh (talk) 09:02, 14 January 2009 (UTC)
 * Zenarh, go fuck yourself, because you know that I am not a supporter of these greater serbian things, and you say this on purpose to insult me. Now, I am not sorry at all for what I said, for you are the one that started this with your personal insults. Nazi pig! (LAz17 (talk) 17:27, 18 January 2009 (UTC)).
 * Ceha - thankfully you are more civilized than this animal here. Anyhows, where were we... the italians. True, they did not have their own state for a while, but that is totally irrelevant. The point is who was there, historically, not who had control of the land. Their people were there and that is what matters. Tito knew this very well, and that's why he cleansed out hundreds of thousands from the coast. Administrative borders that have nothing at all to do with ethnic makeup are irrelevant. Croatia did not have its own borders. What it had were administrative colonial entities, into which its people were divided into. States all around europe are based on nations. Look at Poland. Look at Norway, or ireland or other such cases... they are nation states. The reason why yugoslavia is different is because foreign powers carved up the place, like they did in africa - like no wonder there is much trouble in both africa and the former yugoslavia, because foreigners have gone in an fucked up the place, one way in doing so is by making borders that reflect their geographical interests and not the people there. Serbs have been in Eastern Srem as long as the croats, if not longer. Furthermore, croats were a small minority in baranja - it is croat settlers who went there after the war, to displace forced out germans and hungarians that resulted in a croatian majority there. I do not understand what you mean when you say active holocaust denier... that is what tudjman was, and that is a fact, regardless of all other things that you say to divert the topic. Now yes, many serbs deny any genocide in bosnia. The reason why is because those who decide stuff are solely interested in supporting only one side and not the others, so therefore they are biased. Genocide is only recognized in srebrenica, but even that is very questionable, because why are women and children left there? In genocide the goal is to eliminate the populaton, and this can not happen if the women and children are left, like they were. As for ethnic cleansing, it is well known that the serbs were the most cleansed people in the balkans in the 1990s. 400,000 in croatia, 600,000 in bosnia, 250,000 in kosovo... just add the numbers. We did not incite any war. Anyone would have done the same thing if they were in our place. The point is that we preferred to remain socialist, and this is why the west was against us, and supportive of you guys. (LAz17 (talk) 17:27, 18 January 2009 (UTC)).
 * Croatian Baranja was added to kingdom of SHS because it was (and is) economical background for Osijek. Slavs made about 1/3 of population in 1920, and 2/3 in 1961. In 1920 Croats where for 1/3 more numerous than Serbs. In 1961 Croats were more than 2/3 more numerous than Serbs. When making a border with Vojvodina Baranja went to Croatia, and northern Bačka (with Croatian majority) and middle Syrmia (banovina border. Šid with Serbian majority,after 30 years of SHS kingdom, but with numerous Croatian villages) went to Vojvodina, which latter vent to Serbia. Vojvodina which was historicaly hungarian land, went to Serbia...
 * Laz you are mixing things. If some villages in England came to have Pakistani majority, should they proclaim a new Pakistan there? Or Turks in Germany? Poland's borders are differnt from those which were in 1921. Ireland till yesterday had in it's constitution clause that it posses entire island of Ireland.
 * You speak of colonial borders, and who settled Serbs onto those areas? Wasn't that the same colonial forces which you call upon?
 * Everything came out of something (you may call previous entities colonial things, but then serbia is just a succesor of Turkish Beograd Pashaluk). There doesn't exist any state which does not have some border issues and homogeus national teritory(with possible exception of Portugal, which borders did not have major changes for the last 700 years, but still it has 200 year old issue of Olivenza with Spain).
 * Serbs started the war. They expelled 250 thousands of Croats from Croatia, from an are which they renamed into "rsk", they killed about 100 thousand (I don't know exact number) of people in BiH, and forced out numerous others. As one Croat politician said; Noone was an angel in this war, but it is clearly obvious who was the main devil. Serbs are accused for 90% of war crimes in Hague. As soon as they admit thir fault in the events (and not to pull out on those rest 10%) the sooner will things begin to normilise. Serbs had all the guns in the begining of the war. It is still a mircle how they come to lose it (at least in Croatia, in BiH Serbian defit was evaded by intervension from west which you curse in your sentences above).
 * So, while you don't have all the right data (nor trying to found the objective data) Zenarh has the right to call you a greater Serbian nationalist. You had a few days bombing by NATO in Serbia. We had a few years of war which you guys started. Think of your experience magnified a few times...
 * And in the ened, I realy don't see what all of this has with topic.--Čeha (razgovor) 22:38, 18 January 2009 (UTC)
 * The point is that we preferred to remain socialist, and this is why the west was against us, and supportive of you guys. The point is that in practice that manifested as ethnic cleansing of hundreds of thousands innocent civilians, solely on the basis of criterion of them not being ethnic Serbs. Croatia was the first/only country in the world to gain international recognition without having full sovereignty over its territory (moreover, a large part of its territory), and your genocidal quasi-state RSK was not recognised by anyone, not even your "Orthodox brethren" Russians (who happen to have quite a taste for recognising quasi-states formed on ethnic cleansing of native population, harbouring Serbian war criminals warranted by Interpol and Croatian Ministry of the Interior etc.). Surely the rest of the world has gone insane, plotting a world-wide conspiracy against Serbian "socialist system" ? You can't possibly be that naïve in the y. 2009. Wars in the 1990s were architected and orchestrated by opportunistic Serb military and intelectual elites in the 1980s, by massive brainwashing of the common people (the "sheep"), ultimately creating an atmosphere that enabled legitimisation of obvious war crimes by doing the Right Thing for "Serbdom", casting your enemies (unarmed civilians with whom you peacefully co-existed for ~ 50 years) as blood-thirsty Ustašas or džihadists (terminology abundantly used by the RTS in the 90s). Ćosić, Drašković and others "intellectuals" who helped to create this niko ne sme da nas bije climate are equally guilty as the "real" military criminals. Admittedly, the overall picture of "who'se guilty the most" tends to be obscured by Croatian and Muslim Slav' political leadership who joined the Milošević's bandwagon and seized an opportunity to steal billions of people's $$$, economically hindering all the three countries probably forever (with all the relevant finanical/economic industries owned and controlled by foreigners, everyone can stick their statehood up their arse), as well as to draw on some malign threads of the past to initiate further circles of revenge by committing crimes against the Serbs. But generally the picture is quite clear who is responsible for everything, for, you see, no Croat or Bosniak soldier set their foot within the borders of Serbia. Now you hypocritically whine about the "loss" of Kosova ignoring the fact that 15 years ago you did exactly the same thing (even worse: the exactly corresponding scenario would involve shelling Serbia from withing the territory of Kosova, like Hamas is doing to Israel these days..) --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 01:22, 19 January 2009 (UTC)

Montenegrin2
So, should we add montenegrin stuff onto here? (LAz17 (talk) 02:14, 11 January 2009 (UTC)).
 * When it gets codified (dictionaries, grammars, orthographies etc.) we can speak of the concept of Montenegrin language and its relation to the concept of Serbo-Croatian language (in either of half-a-dozen senses that term is usually vaguely (mis)used). Adding anything concrete at this moment would be very difficult due to the absence of reliable politically-uncoloured references. If you feel like writing something, please do it on the talk page first. --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 11:42, 13 January 2009 (UTC)

Comment
First of all, I notice a lot of highly personalised comments on this page, contrary to the supposed page guidelines. I also notice that while many participants are well read and possess a lot of information, they use that knowledge to promote their personal and highly politicised views. This page and discussion is hence tainted and useless from a scientific point of view because the discussion has very little objective contributions. Objective within the limits of verifiable information.

And the historically verifiable information is clear. Serbo-croatian/Croato-serbian language is one and the same language. Anyone claiming otherwise has no serious knowledge in the matter and should not be taken seriously. What goes in favour of such nonsensical discussion is that there are no standardised and unified definitions of a language, just as this discussion shows. Several posters had used these different definitions to "prove" their political views about their preferred "language". Only when we internationally agree on a standardised and unified definition of what constitutes a language and what constitutes a dialect, will we be able to finally silence political histeria about croat (what is that? croatian doesn't exist at all to start with. The name is used to describe "Hrvatski" language. Croatia was a Roman province long before Slavs came down to Adriatic, and the languages spoken back then were Ilyrian, Roman and Greek.) and serbian, and all other stokavski dialects, being different "languages.

Until then, this debate is just a politically charged rant of people who are unable to accept that the linguistic reality does not reflect their delusional desires to be "unique" and "different" from the others.

Meanwhile, the genetic research is showing how these poeople could not be wrong more. Jugoslav "people" are a mixture of two major genetic groups, namely Slavic and another, as yet not identified but according to a politolog and demographic researcher whose name escapes me right now but is quite respected and known among the serious researches, most likely Ilirians. Both groups are roughly equally spread across the Jugoslav territory, which means that the "Croats" and the Serbs" and their neighbours are all the same, just as their language.

The science holds more answers than racist and nationalist delusions many of the posters seem to be suffering from. And whether these disoriented people, that still live in their false pasts, accept the truth or not doesn't really matter because the new generations will learn the truth and will be able to accept it with more understanding and scientific approach. That is called progress and evolution. Delusions are not based on facts and as such, cannot last for long. The progress will prevail eventually.

Just as it was fun to watch you kill each other defending your "histories" and "languages", it is now fun to watch you still fighting over what doesn't exist. Your (in particular "croat", since Hrvati are the ones with the biggest complex) languages. Sadly, you Slavs yourselves prove Hitler was right when he called you destroyers of culture and society. And, boy, was he right, despite his cocaine induced paranoid schizophrenia...

59.101.14.59 (talk) 06:12, 14 January 2009 (UTC)Australian59.101.14.59 (talk) 06:12, 14 January 2009 (UTC)

Thank you for your excellent comment, Australian. It says everything. Regards and Cheers.24.86.116.250 (talk) 06:29, 14 January 2009 (UTC)

Yes, thank you for your highly objective and intelectual comment. I suppose that the next thing will be that you'll claim Dutch and low German are basicly one nation/language or that all nordic languages are basically one, Scandinavian? It is also interesting bias against Croatian (and not Serbian). But why am I arguing with a guy which gives right to Hitler and his mad schemes? Please, do stick to the topic.--Čeha (razgovor) 08:21, 14 January 2009 (UTC)
 * Well this new IP has shown complete ignorance on the matter, he/she criticizes discussion to be politicized (unfortunatelly it became in the end) in a comment which is twice more politicized from 1st to last word and immidiatelly recognised by another highly politically engaged IP throll. Celebration of stupidity and ignorance. Ceha, please avoid long discussions with Laz. We know from which extremistic ideology it comes from. Don't lose your energy for nothing. Zenanarh (talk) 08:44, 14 January 2009 (UTC)
 * Yes, it realy is futile... --Čeha (razgovor) 15:28, 14 January 2009 (UTC)

I see that the truth hurts. That is good. This australian is he, and my own wife is from Split. So it takes an ignorant to brand me as a biased towards, or against, any one Jugoslav group. The ignorance is clear from the input of the two criticisers.

You can hide in your little fantasies, but it would be a lot better to recognise that the trend in the world is going in the opposite direction. You may even learn something, instead promoting your own senseless agendas, such as new ways to spell, write and pronounce words in hrvatski language, when you have absolutely no basis for these claims, other than your political views. There was never in any serious grammar book that I had read on the subject of your language, any suggestion or reference to being accepted any of the changes you are now claiming to be Hrvatski language. Like the word gangster, that should be "ganKster" in hrvatski. To suggest this kind of change one needs to lack any scientific objectivity and ability to apply the knowledge. The english language had absolutely no inluence on jugoslav language (which in my view is a lot better summary name because it avoids putting any one -serbo, or croatian - before the other...)until after the WWII. Well after, in fact.

If anything, you need to learn your own history first in order to understand your own language. And the history is against your nonsense. One look at the daily print in Zagreb, from late 19th and early 20th century, clearly shows that the "official" spelling in Zagreb was that of czech language. Your writers of that period,the important ones, are all using stakavski, not stokavski (see August Senoa, or Xaver Sandor Djalski, npr), Hrvatski eminent intellectuals are all promoting sto/sta-kavski as a tool of connection and re-unification with the other Ilirian brothers on the territory of Jugoslavia, divided between various foreign rulers. They insisted on Ilirian roots of the people divided as Hrvati, Serbi, Bosnianci, Crnogorci and Makedonci. It is of interest that Slovenci were considered as Slavic brother people, recognising that duality which is now a subject of research around the world, except where it should be: in ex-Jugoslav states.

Suggesting between the two of you to ignore others is so typical of that hrvatski complex that I mentioned. Who does not "believe" in your dogmatic "only and true knowledge" should be ignored. Well, there's the whole world to ignore then. And there are more people there than on your little and insignificant side. So, feel free to continue convincing yourselves in your fantasy, but just so you know: linguists interested in a politics-free research are moving on. With or without you.

I do understand that any sensible discussion with alikes is futile, but it may be of interest to those willing to use their intellect positively, to know what people who have no direct interest in your petty little quarrels think. And it was not me who "gave right to Hitler". It was the two of you with your predictable reaction. Thank you for that. Now, please feel free to go back to the only thing you really know well: insulting and attacking personally those who disagree with you. I expect nothing less than more of your primitive reactions and unsolicited insults.

Australian —Preceding unsigned comment added by 61.68.120.38 (talk) 00:15, 15 January 2009 (UTC)
 * Wikipedia is not a place for original research or ideas.
 * For someone with such an expertise, Croatian ortography has few signs which are non existent in Czech for example Ć, Đ etc...
 * It is very interestant that a majority of the persons which are for so croato-serbian language do lack higher formal education or posess it from serbian sorces.
 * No normal person would mention name of a war crime commiter responsoble for deth of milions of people in a conversation which has nothing to it. Giving right to him is a mild case for an institution.
 * Let me draw you a parallell, since you claim that you are from the other continent. It is like someone would say that Australia is a penal colony with to much interbreeding, which results in it's people being so smart.
 * Please, do read  and google a little bit before you give any future smart remarks. --Čeha (razgovor) 08:40, 15 January 2009 (UTC)


 * Yes my dear Aussie friend, I also suggest you get properly educated on the subject, by reading the non-Serb sources on the subject of what you call "Jugoslav language" (e.g. M. Kačić, R. Katičić, T. Ladan etc.). Serb propaganda machinery is very effective today as it has been in the last 150 years. In the process, you might learn that the word pravopis meant also "alphabet" in the 19th century, and not just "orthography" in its modern sense (it makes no sense to say of Croatian being written in "Czech orthography"), as well as that those "newly-invented" spellings like grješka, ne ću having centuries of literary tradition before they were officially banned (hence violantly breaking up with the literary tradition) in SFRJ under novosadski policy (It was allowed for everything that was "Croat-only" to be portrayed as "Ustasha" and banned under the separationist mask). Also you might wanna lookup well-motivated rules on exceptions on consonant assimilation - there is some in the article on Croatian WP: hr:Jednačenje po zvučnosti. Interestingly, the spelling gankster was advocated by some Serb linguists in the 1990s "orthography wars", in an alternative orthography book which eventually "lost". Unfortunatelly, manny people even today believe they're writing in "perfect, phonetic alphabet", ignoring the fact of e.g. phonemic pitch-accent being completely ignored in the offical orthography. And please do spare us of Pan-Slavic demagogy ("one language, one people"), and mentionings of words like science, knowledge on the matter, potraying your collocutors as if advocating some "politicised worldview". Croats have had enough of aborting their own ethnicon in the last 5-6 centuries in favour of all-encompassing ones like "Illyrian", "Yugoslav", "Slavic" (there was even "Serbo-Croatian nation" movement ^_^) - it always ended up at their expense, payed in blood by their Muslim and Orthodox "brethren". But then again, 95% of common people are mindless sheep that can be brainwashed to belive in anything and doing anything, so some reiteration of "Yugoslavism" might as well come some day, under different name and different supra-national sentiments (it already started under the veil of liberal capitalism which knows no borders, only $$$). --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 00:26, 16 January 2009 (UTC)

To the two,

This philosophy about hrvatski, srpski, bosanski or crnogorski languages being separate languages is the first thing that falls into the category of the "Original Research". Your support for that theory is, at best, shaky. Your knowledge of what is a language is completely distorted by your political views. I could go into a lingustical debate forever but to do so you yourselves would need to be linguists, which from what you write, I have my serious doubts about(university degree is not a guarantee of competence or objectivity. )

Instead of debating with you, a simple question for both. Which "language" is the following para written in? Warning!!! You will both fail (but you know that already, right?). This paragraph confirms that your "hrvatski language propaganda" you are trying to propagate here is simply NOT correct.

" Setala sam parkom satima. Sunce se stidljivo probijalo kroz olovne zimske oblake. Slaba kisa polako je mocila papire u vreci na mojim ledjima. Na ulazu u park je autobusna stanica. Autobusi su dolazili i odlazili, ljudi su ulazili i silazili, ali moji prijatelji nisu stizali. Sa svakim novim autobusom, moje nervoza je rasla sve vise i vise. Ako se ne pojavi niti jedna osoba, kopije policijskih dosijea ce zavrsiti u kanti za smece...Tako mi i treba. I ovako kako je igram se sa poslom, a dobar posao je danas jako tesko naci. Ako moji sefovi doznaju za ovo, ne gine mi otkaz. Ukratko, ovo mi mi definitivno nije trebalo. Da situacija bude gora, nemam nikakav izgovor ako me otkriju. A sve je pocelo sa bocom pive u studentskom restoranu. Mata Hari je dobila metak za spijunazu. "

This was written by my wife, but do not let that be of any help. Feel free to admit that the above paragraph is written in perfect colloquial hrvatski, and srpski, and bosanski, and crnogorski, without any of your newly-invented words in any of the languages, the words that never existed or are to archaic to be accepted as current and colloquial, let alone proper literary words. To disagree with that is to be total ignorant and/or politically motivated propagator of lies that simply do not exist. Like Goering, for example. But although you will repeat your linguistical "truths" until your die, you will not change the scientific facts. The facts you understand perfectly but have chosen to ignore and instead offer some "theory" which doesn't even fall under the "Original Research" category. Because your "hrvatski" or "srpski" etc "languages" simply do not exist. There are five different dialects in Hrvatska alone, and the majority speaks kajkavstina. And even there there are at least two different versions.

Since you think that Hitler was wrong, here's one from Demostenes: "People there (in Dalmatia, as it was in Roman times) are dividing themselves among themselves to the atoms..." It should sound familiar. Slavs were still long, long way away from Dalmatia then...Ilirs, however, were there.

And one last comment, to Mr. Stambuk. This is from you, so you may want to review your passionate statements next time before you write more nonsense:

"You still write ije (instead of proper ie, which is should be since the orthoepical norm prescribes it as a diphthong), ts instead of c, unassimilated consonants in lots of words (predsjednik instead of pretsjednik, gangster instead of gankster), not to mention retarded distinction between the /č/ and /ć/ that is still maintained among which there is no phonemic distinction in 99.999% words. --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 15:50, 4 November 2008 (UTC)"

As interesting as it is the rest of the above confused, and outright wrong in some comments there (ie instead of ije comment for example) I'll leave it to you to live in your fantasies, Mr. "Serbian linguist".

Australian —Preceding unsigned comment added by 61.68.55.61 (talk) 06:12, 16 January 2009 (UTC)


 * No we're not professional linguists (and neither are you), but some of us here know our science and are informed enough to be able to substantiate claims such as 1) There was never a common proto-language which encompassed all idioms spoken by Croats, Bosniaks, Serbs and Montenegrins (thus the "SC" in genetic-dialectological sense is not a valid genetic clade) 2) There was never a period, except in the Communist SFRJ, where all the people speaking this hypothetical language exhibited common cultural and literary development. Croatian writers of all three dialects exchanged dictionaries, grammars, read each other, drew on the same literary devices...completely separate from Muslim Slavs who at the time despised "vulgar" Slavic and wrote in Persian and Ottoman Turkish, and Serbian literary circles who employed mixture of Church Slavonic and Russian. Sociolinguistic criterion is much more important than the other ones, despite all the divergences and convergences that happened in the recoreded history. Hence you have in many world's languages situation that they have as one of its "dialects" idioms that are not mutually intelligible, and at the same time situation that several languages share the same (or closely-related) idiom for their standard/literary language. Try browsing ethnologue entries for Aboriginal languages who oftens share (or are at least listed to share) > 95% intelligibility, yet are assigned different ISO -3 codes. Why? Becase of the consciousness of their speakers. Tribes X and Y spoke closely related yet distinguished languages, traded, went at wars, exchanged wives..but tribe X perceives their language as X, and tribe Y as Y, and no force in the world can convince them otherwise. X speaker recognizes speaker of Y in a blink of an eye, even if it's non-obvious to the inspecting linguist. There are many other situations where different standard languages share the same dialect, but exhibit different historical literary development usually characterised by the usage of a particular script, particular cultural provenience for borrowings and literary devices, and national sentiments. Yet no one speaks of e.g. Bulgaro-Macedonian, Romano-Moldovan, Danish-Norwegian-Swedish or whatnot.
 * Your text in lexis and stylems shows some Croatian-only traits (and typical misspellings such as *dosijea), so I'd say it's Croatian. In spoken language things would be much more different, usually after the first sentence it would be obvious whether the speaker is e.g. from Belgrade or Zagreb.
 * Your feeble-minded conception of "archaic and newly-invented words" is amusing. Perhaps you didn't konw (again, read the texts of the authors I gave you above), but Communist authorites expelled these "archaic" and "newly-invented" (prevalently Šulekisms, lots of which made its way to this day, even to Serbian) words just because they were Croat-only. Despite the fact that they have centuries of literary traditions. And the story of a dictionary of "književni jezik" compiled by two Maticas that somehow managed to "ignore" all Croatian literary works from 15th-19th century .. Things like Deklaracija o hrv. knj. jeziku, signed by all prominent linguists and writers, were a natural result of such frustration and perverse tactics employed by Serb-Communist authorities to oblitarate Croatian. If people read more authors before the 20th century they'd have much less prejudice towards such words.
 * Majority in Croatia, of course, speaks some kind of variety of Štokavian. Most urban cities have their own particular idioms, in essence Štokavian but with heavy influence of Kajkavian/Čakavian substratum (e.g. Zagreb, Rijeka).
 * Yes that quote is from me, as my personal opnion is that most Croatian orthography books are neo-Communist rubbish. Vijeće za standardizaciju hrv. jezika once even propounded to write ie instead of ije but writers, journalists and lots of media immediately put it to some "Ustasha, differing-from-Serb" contexts. /č/ and /ć/ are not differed in spoken idioms of 5 biggest Croatian cities, so children need to learn the difference between them by heart in order to write proper literary language (like in Upper Sorbian which differs these 2 sounds in written language, but in no single spoken idiom; similarly, they're probably be kept for a long, long time, until someone gets the guts to erase imaginary phonemes from their beloved "phonemic" orthography"). The ridiculing of writing assimilated consonants that were not pronounced and unassimilated that were was pertaining to anomalous character of modern orthography, which should justify further changes to it. Apart from Serbian and Macedonian, there are very good reasons why all the other Slavic languages employ some kind of morphological-etymological orthography.
 * As for the "I was wrong", open up some modern grammar Croatian books and see how the pronunciation of /ije/ is prescribed by the orthoepical norm (e.g. Hrvatska gramatika by IHJJ, you can't get more official than that). Mr. "Australian lingust". --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 10:56, 16 January 2009 (UTC)

Mr. Stambuk, you have no idea who or what I am, yet you speak with absolute certainty what I am not. Yv Is there a way for you to abstain from talking nonsense? It would be highly appreciated. You and those that share your opinion, which you have conclusively demonstrated now that is pointless and based exclusively on your political orientation, not on any serious scientific knowledge or research. By the way, the books you are continuously trying to promote are known to me, and I deem them worthless because these are written by people with the same political agenda as yours - re-creating a language that has never existed. There's nothing of value in those political pamphlets you are now force-feeding your children with.

Australian —Preceding unsigned comment added by 58.170.21.228 (talk) 13:28, 16 January 2009 (UTC)
 * God save us from kangaroo experts for the foreign languages... Let me guess who you are: Serbian immigrant to Australia? Prominent member of Chetnik diaspora? An Aussie Serb married to a Croat wife, with a huge Serbo-Croatian super-plant on your balcony screaming: feed me, feed me! - a sort of very hungry plant that is supposed to save the world from frustrated Croats? Zenanarh (talk) 18:03, 16 January 2009 (UTC)


 * Look dude, if you cannot understand what I write (either because you don't understand it, cannot understand due to IQ defficiency, or just can't stand cognitive dissonance resulting in utter destruction of your Serbo-Commie worldview), that is your and yours problem only. I have given answers to all of your questions, as well as general psuedo-philosophical queries you boldly put forth in the same sentences with "strong" words such as science or politics. Empty commie propaganda with no essence inside. Show me 1 (one) relevant exclusive isogloss in phonology/lexis/morphology that charactarises this imaginary "SC" (or "Yugoslav" as you call it) in all its glorious "dialects" or STFU once and far all. Little help: You won't find nothing in all standard handbooks, and those propounded by Ivić in 1980s were all disproven as shared retentions (i.e. archaisms). --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 18:47, 16 January 2009 (UTC)

Australian, you’re just wasting your time arguing with these 3 cro-nationalists. Nobody needs to be a linguist to notice how irrational, senseless and dump their ‘theories’ are. A simple look at the article about ‘The differences between the standard Serbian/Croatian/Bosnian languages’ clearly shows that these 3 standards are basically ONE language, ‘differing’ for less than 4% in all linguistic aspects, a fact is clear like a day. That’s much less than the differences between the dialects of any single language, like Spanish or English. On the other hand, the ‘dialects’ of the ‘Croatian language’: stokavian, cakavian and kajkavian (in their today’s state) differ for more than 40% in their vocabulary, grammar and all other linguistic aspects. This is also clear like a day, and if you look at the text of the prayer ‘Pater Noster’, presented in these 3 ‘dialects’, the differences are notable from a plane to any normal person on this earth. However, you can go on and on and on arguing with these nationalists, presenting them reliable facts of the unity of the Serbo-Croatian language clear like a sunny day and accepted by all serious factors in the linguistic world, but they will always ignore that. You can go on and on showing them that ‘white is white, the black is black and that white is not black’….:)), but it’s all in vain. For their deficient intellect ‘white is black, and will always be black’. It’s probably best to let them be as they’re harmless to the linguistic science anyway. They can say anything they want, they can bark and offend people like you and me, calling us bad names, but it’s all worthless and it will only show the real them. Thanks God that nobody takes them seriously and most of the people that are reading their pathetic POVs on these pages are certainly laughing loudly at them. It’s a shame to admit, but because of guys like these few quasi ‘language experts,’ wikipedia is becoming less and less reliable source of information these days. Still, a good thing is that the article about Serbo-Croatian language is well protected by its editors and cannot be damaged by any nationalistic delusions. Regards24.86.116.250 (talk) 08:33, 17 January 2009 (UTC).


 * We "experts" know that e.g. Štokavian, Čakavian, and Kajkavian are not "dialects" but a collection of dialects (narječja), kind of super-dialects in English, and that it's impossible to write Pater Noster in "Čakavian" becase that "dialect" consists of some 5-10 vastly differing real dialects. The differences aside, those three dialects have had single literary tradition centuries before Serbs were swimming in their Slavoserbian Russian Church Slavonic streams. The fact that literary Kajkavian, Čakavian and Štokavian, a part of exclusive Croat cultural provenience, intermixed and were larglely mutually intelligible, is something you Četnikophiles can't really stand. Your "different language" rubbish fairly good reflects these Commie myths. PS: I've heavily edited lots of articles regarding this "SC" removing lots of nonsense, and this article is in no way "protected", and I'm looking forward to removing uncited rubbish in this article and adding sourced claims written by professional linguistis that dispel your pathetic myths. Just watch and cry. --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 09:39, 17 January 2009 (UTC)

We'll see who will watch and cry, and it certainly won't be the one who's telling the truth, which is too far away from your quasi 'theories'. Bye.24.86.116.250 (talk) 20:14, 17 January 2009 (UTC)

I strongly suggest that any changes to this pages that can be linked to this self-proclamed "croatian linguist" be cleaned up and monitored for his intervention. You Slavs, south Slavs in particular, are just a bunch of blood-thirsty maniacs. This "Ivan Štambuk" entity calls his national-sozialist politics whenever he's got nothing to say (which is basically constantly) and accuses everyone of being serbo-communist. What a pathetis existenc his and those who think like him. Keep this page clean of these lunatics.59.101.23.24 (talk)  06:04, 23 January 2009 (UTC)


 * I urge user 59.101.23.24 to discontinue with his unconstrucive and uncivic behaviour or he will be reported (and subsequently IP blocked) on ANI. Blod thirsty maniacs ? Nazi politics? It is going to be a very long block. --Čeha (razgovor) 08:24, 23 January 2009 (UTC)


 * Baby cries of desparate commie coward hiding behind his IP, unable to present any coherent evidence in support of his petty theories..Sorry but we cannot use Comintern's "conclusions" as some kind of evidence supportive of this fabricated hydra some call "SC". I repeat my request to you again: find me any evidence of this alleged "SC" as being a genetic-dialectological grouping of dialects (i.e. a valid genetic clade, like Bulgaro-Macedonian, Czecho-Slovak, Lechitic, East Slavic..) and we'll talk. Any excsluive isogloss in phonology/morphology/lexis..any (preferebly more then one in either of this categories). Since one has in the last century managed to find them (some desparate pan-Serbian "linguists" like Ivić have tried—and failed, as that what usually happens when you imagine something politically and try to abuse scientific method to "prove" it, like modern-day Creationism), we have nothing to discuss about. You just whine "science", "linguistics", "nationalism" when in fact you're just pathetically trying to abuse the rise od nationalism in the 1990s to legitimise your beloved "SC", reading some obsolete commie propaganda..it's not our problem that a few centuries before this monster was invented Croats have written grammars, dictionaries, and have had highly-cultivated literary language, calling their language Croatian.. No arguments, no talk. --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 11:00, 23 January 2009 (UTC)

I urge Ceha and Stambuk to discontinue their nazist and ustasha politics here because this is not the forum for their political views. Serbs, commies? Anyone who disagree with the handful of hrvats war criminals' children? You two, and others writting this politicised garbage should be banned, and in fact I have reported you for insults and attacks on anyone here who disagrees with you. If anyone, you will be the first to go. Enough is enough. You bunch do not understand that your nonsense is just not accepted anywhere outside of the circle you live in. Like this stupidity trying to show off your "knowledge": czecho-slovak. You have to be professional ignorant to say something like that. Czech and slovak are two DISTINCT languages and have VERY LITTLE in common. In fact they do not even share the words, let alone the grammar rules. Unlike serbo-croatian, or croato-serbian.

Please refrain yourselves from making comments about things you know nothing, excuse yourselves from this forum and leave the lingustics to the people who know what they are talking about. Unlike yourselves. The Australian asked all you stupid morons the valid question and none of you provided any meaningful answer. Stambuk even made himself look like the biggest idiot by babbling about how some "phrases" have something of "croat language" without specifying which ones. Some expert. The paragraph Australian gave you was the perfect example how the language is one and the same. And no matter what you say I'll teach my students that there's only one language in the backwards Balkan: croat-serbo-bosni-montenegrin. I know you few are jobless trash with nothing else to do but to hang around some cyber cafe' and spend all your time pretending you are some experts of something about the language that it isn't even "yours" exclusively. Bunch of defeated and humiliated losers.

Just go and cry somewhere else and leave the science to grown up people who have no time for your "croatisms". You are "hrvats" as Australian has correctly pointed out You are Croats just as much as I am, and I am Italian. Cheap thieves without the identity and history. Banda dei ladroni. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 59.101.23.24 (talk) 14:06, 23 January 2009 (UTC)

I have to add this one again from the ignorant Stambuk who as always simply blabbers without thinking: "Yet no one speaks of e.g. Bulgaro-Macedonian, Romano-Moldovan, Danish-Norwegian-Swedish or whatnot." And above you are asking for: alleged "SC" as being a genetic-dialectological grouping of dialects (i.e. a valid genetic clade, like Bulgaro-Macedonian, Czecho-Slovak, Lechitic, East Slavic..). I mean, make up your ignorant mind and decide to disappear before your ignorance and right-wing politics make chimanzes look like geniuses in your presence! Get some criterions and some stability in your stupidity man! Either things are, or they are not. And what is with "lecitic" and "east slavic" "languages" you know-it-all maestro? Which languages are these in your silly head?

Please...close your primitive Balkan traps and stay away from things that are domain of people not mentally damaged with your primitive hatred. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 59.101.23.24 (talk) 14:23, 23 January 2009 (UTC)


 * You ask your ignorant questions, so I answer you, again: No, modern standard Czech and Slovak are to a large extent mutually intelligible. In fact, up to until the 18th century when Middle Slovakian dialects were chosen for Slovak literary language, most Slovaks wrote in literary Czech (when not writing in German or Latin). In the 19th century there was an effort to standardise Slovak on western Slovak dialects, (which are very close to Czech, just as eastern Slovak dialects are very close to Ukrainian), but middle Slovakian prevailed in the C19 chiefly due to the "distinctivness" factor. Czech and Slovak dialects form a dialect continuum and form a genetic clade by dosens of exclusive isoglosses that separate the from Lechitic. Of course, ignorant Četnik-Serbo-Communist imbecile like yourself wouldn't know anything about it, and would rant that the alleged "SC" is "one language" and that CS are "two", despite tha fact that the former as opposed to the latter is not a valid genetic-dialectal grouping (zero common exclusive isoglosses), and that its internal dialectal divergence is an order of magnitude larger than either Czecho-Slovak, or East Slavic. The speeches of Bednja, Krk and that bastardised Štokavian of Serbia called Torlak are not mutually intelligible, you know, and pushing them out of their natural order (i.e. neighbouring dialects with which they shared many ancient isoglosses, Kajkavian with nighbouring Slovenian dialects, Torlakian with Bulgaro-Macedonian with whom it shares many isoglosses of Balkan Sprachbund) requires extraordinary lack of intelligence. Same argumentation is valid for Bulgaro-Macedonian: Bulgarian and Macedonian are overwhelmingly mutually intelligible, though they are separated by some 1000-years old sound changes.
 * If you cannot make out Croatisms in the above paragraph (that someone from Serbia would never write) then you are hardly competent enough to decide on any topics of "SC". You don't even seem to understand the difference between spoken and litarary language. As for your questions: [[Lechitic languages]] and [[East Slavic languages]], see the respective articles. They are all valid clades, as opposed to this imaginary SC which is not. There is no way to treat SC as some kind of "one system" and Bulgaro-Macedonain, Czecho-Slovak not. You can whine about it as long as you like, spit ad hominems onto me, but it won't invalidate the truthness of these factoids I mention anyone can look up in the relevant up-to-date scholarly literature. The way you "discuss" with insults and a plethora of semi-retarded logical fallacies everyone here can weed out in a nanonsecond further speaks to what miserable levels do your "arguments" fall. --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 19:46, 23 January 2009 (UTC)


 * User 59.101.23.24 has been reported on ANI . --Čeha (razgovor) 14:50, 23 January 2009 (UTC)

Ivan, you can't deny Croatian and Serbian are among the most similar languages in existance, certainly in Europe? To say that two languages are more different than they plainly appear and sound is likely POV. -- DIREKTOR  ( TALK ) 20:13, 23 January 2009 (UTC)


 * More precise answer to an unprecise question: modern standard Serbian and standard Croatian are based on the same dialect (Neoštokavian, not 100% organic speech but both stylised in almost identical manner), but different subdialects (the chief divide being the reflex of jat, and some in accentuation reflecting older divide on Western and Eastern Štokavian system). Indeed, you can loosely say that the dialect used for codification of modern literary Croatian and modern literary Serbian "is the same language", but that would be itself PoV as there is no scientific method to draw the line between the concept of a language and a dialect. What is language, but a dialect with an arym and a navy?. Dialecatally, modern literary Croatian and Serbian belong to the same "language". The problem is, the same came be said for Bulgarian and Macedonian, Hindi & Urdu, various "Persian" dialects (New Persian of Tehrani dialect vs. Dari, Tajik..) hundreds of closely-related aboriginal languages named after the tribes speaking it..Spread of phonological isoglosses (i.e. the way languages "evolve") doesn't scale with ethnicities at all. It is perfectly normal to have the situation when, resulting from a conjuction of historical circumstances, 2 or more different cultural milieus share the same dialect as the basis of their literary languages, and at the same time under the dialectal umbrella they adopt several highly divergent dialects (like Kajkavian, Čakavian, and Štokavian for Croatian) due to the reasons such as 1) national consciousness of their speakers 2) literary tradition on them connected with 1). This second point is very important, because Serbian and Crotian can be in it connected only for the century, century and a half, and before that they had completely seperate literatures for centuries (and even in the SC period one can argue that the divison along ethnical or "W/E variety" lines was strong enough to maintain separate literatures, few exceptions from mixed marriages and "converts" aside). --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 21:38, 23 January 2009 (UTC)

Nevertheless, they're more similar than other "languages" based on same dialects. I'm not talking about what they both are, I'm talking about the nearly unnoticeable differences between the two. Just because other languages based on same dialects are not so similar does not mean the exceptional similarity should be ignored here. -- DIREKTOR  ( TALK ) 22:56, 23 January 2009 (UTC)


 * Sigh. No one "ignores the similarity" here, it's just that both Serbs and Croats having chosen the same Neoštokavian idiom as a basis of their standard, literary languages (both of them having several other literary languages in the historical period) cannot and must not serve as a basis for distorisions and fabrications like those that the history of "SC" is much about. Even if you treat the concept of "SC" as a some kind of cultured Neoštokavian, it is only ~150 years old, referring to only one subdialect of Štokavian. Both written Croatian and Serbian are 1) much older than that 2) encompass the other dialects too. --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 23:27, 23 January 2009 (UTC)

Stambuk, I see that you have boned up on Miro Kacic's op-ed piece (relying on it as an objective source says more about the reader's intentions and agenda than anything else) with your mention of distortions and fabrications (BTW it's translated in part by "...delusions and distortions" but you get my drift.). What's more is that your insistence that "languages" that are so recently standardized (in linguistic timelines 150 years is not a long time - try a few hundred or even a few thousand years) using the same dialectal basis cannot be considered to be the same is as politically-motivated as the nationalist Serbs' blind adherence to Vuk Karadzic's logical fallacy that if Serbs like him speak shtokavski-iyekavski then anyone else who speaks like him must also be a Serb. It's a shame that this article reads like an apologist's defense for the untenability of Serbo-Croatian (see the article's section on linguists' viewpoints and not surprisingly the one stating the Croatian position is the most tedious and shall we say it comes off as if it's making excuses in hope of overwhelming or masking inconvenient facts (for Croatian nationalists and their supporters).

Everyone in the former Yugoslavia knows that mutual intelligibility outside slangy or rural situations (i.e. formal or educated discourse) is closer to 99% because of the identity of an estimated 95% of morphology, phonology and syntax between the Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin and Serbian variants (not because of Serbian machinations in Yugoslavia as some Croats like to believe and propagate but because of the fact that that shtokavski-iyekavski dialectal basis was already being used by Bosniaks, Croats, Montenegrins and Serbs and that the then-leading Croatian linguists Budmani and Maretic succeeded in forming today's Croatian standard. Sometimes they are nowadays targets of ad hominem attacks from nationalist Croatian linguists in being derisively called misguided Shtokavian purists or fanatics of the Shtokavian cult. Today's situation in Croatia is now in reverse since nationalist/separatist linguists dominate Croatia's educational system and merely reflect the prevailing nationalist ideology of the government (it shouldn't surprise anyone that vocabulary and spelling in Croatia are heated matters because it's much easier for politicians and linguists-cum-politicians to manipulate these relatively superficial or symbolic features)

It's just too bad that people like DIREKTOR or outsiders like that Australian often get shouted down or scolded by other Croats but that's what happens when nationalists rule the roost and manage to brainwash the masses just like Milosevic did to the Serbian masses. Vput (talk) 19:11, 25 January 2009 (UTC)


 * Kačić's piece is an excellent introductory for the subject of Serbo-Četnik systematic fascistisation of Croatian literary language, written not only by a highly knowledgeable individual, but also by a professional linguist. Your severely out-of-place comparison of that work that is written in very moderate language and abundantly referenced with hundreds of illustrative examples [at least the parts I've read, partially skimming it at the library] with legendary Serb mythomania displays your extraordinary pro-Serb bias and an astonishing level of cultural relativism.


 * For interested parties, parts of that book are available online here (author of that site used to be a contributor to this project..). I'll just quote some illustrating parts for the outsiders, concerning what the above dude says to be "derisively called misguided Shtokavian purists or fanatics of the Shtokavian cult":

U Broz-Ivekovićevu rječniku (1901.) 80% natuknica uzeto je iz štokavskoga narodnoga pjesništva, narodnih priča i poslovica.

Mnoštvo je čakavskih i kajkavskih riječi kao što su npr. darežljiv, darežljivost, krstitke, imetak, podoban, poplun, priuštiti, propuh, strop, tjedan... koje se rabe u hrvatskome književnome jeziku ispušteno, kao i mnoštvo riječi iz rječnika Joakima Stullia; ispuštene su tisuće riječi jezika hrvatske književnosti. Sročitelji su smatrali da jezik Hrvata nije jezik hrvatske književnosti, nego štokavski iz pučkih pjesama, priča i poslovica. Usprkos takvoj zamisli, u predgovoru Iveković navodi da u hrvatskome opstoje tisuće riječi koje Vuk Stefanović Karadžić nije znao i nije mogao znati.

....

Tomo je Maretić uvod Hrvatskomu ili srpskomu jezičnomu savjetniku napisao ekavicom. Kritizirao je sve što se ne slaže s duhom narodnoga jezika kako ga je on shvaćao. Iz književnoga jezika izbacuje sve novotvorbe i kajkavizme jer bi književnom jedinstvu Srba I Hrvata veoma smetale. S takvim je smjernicama desetljećima stvarano takozvano jedinstvo hrvatskoga i srpskoga jezika. I razumijivo je što Maretić i njegovi sljedbenici proganjaju riječi kao glazba, isusovac, redarstvo, slovnica, časnik, povijest, knjižnica... Njegov napadaj na riječi koje su u Hrvatskoj bile uobičajene, dakle napadaj na razinu hrvatskoga jezika najizrazitije različitu od iste razine u srpskome jeziku, govori o naravi jedinstva koje se htjelo stvoriti i o temelju stajalištima koja su se poslije nerijetko izricala i prema kojima književni jezik za Hrvate počinje tek od Vuka Stefanovića Karadžića, otkad su “uzeli” svoj novoštokavski jezik od Srba. Tu su zabludnu misao nerijetko ponavljali srpski jezikoznanci, ali i mnogi drugi slavisti. Samo je posljednji razvojni stupanj ujednake hrvatskoga jezika obilježio utjecaj Vuka Stefanovića Karadžića kad se u Hrvatskoj stvorila škola koja je zastupala njegove poglede, kojoj su čeonikovali Daničić, Budmani, Broz, Iveković, Maretić i kojoj se je djelatnost protegla i u XX. stoljeće.


 * So you see, voicing an angry opinion against the careless act of dumping some 6 centuries of exclusive Croatian literary production that is by and large the pinnacle of literary productin in any Slavic language of the period (before the 19th century) in order to fabricate the concept of "štokavski narod" (either by means of Pan-Serb ideology architected by Austria-Hungarian intelligentsia, envisioned by Kopitar and put to practice by Karadžić, or by some autocratic Communist nation-annihilating machinery) is not some mindless nationalist blabbering, as you naïvely try to portray it (but don't worry, you are forgiven for your ignorance granted you accept the truth), but a voice of those that have, after a century of persecution (Croatian Spring, Declaration of Croatian language etc., not to mention pre-SFRJ state of affairs which was even worse) and politically-engineered "nations" (Yugoslavs) and "languages" (SC), finally came to freely articulate something they all latently knew very well, and felt to their very bones throughout the schooling.


 * Any sane-minded and impartial third-party, upon mere reading of just two above paragraphs, can smell that there was something terribly wrong going on, with the dropping of thousands of "rđave riječi" (as Maretić liked to term them ^_^) on the basis of the most moronic argument that one can conceive: they were not "pure enough". Much later, the dictionary of književnog srpskohrvatskog by two Maticas under the blessing of Communists and along the Novi-Sad lines used much the same well-proven methodology of "ignorance". Akademijin rječnik (the biggest dictionary in the world!) also deliberatary ignored Croatian dialectal material Gaj was sending to his "Illyrian brethren" in Belgrade, as well as thousands of "Šulekisms", which they had to accept because their "pure" language had no alternatives. Ironically, Karadžić copied thousands of lexemes to his "Srpski rječnik" (thought to be the prime example of "pure folk language") from earlier Croatian sources, so the entire effort by the Vukovians can be as well understood as a paradox of human stupidity. Sou you get e.g. for "football" Croatian having nogomet, but Serbian fudbal (I think that fudbal is the most disgusting word I've ever read in any living/dead language), but both have for "handball" rukomet. Many a Serb would be shocked how many "Ustašisms" are there in his mother tongue ^_^


 * This article's linguists' opinion section is still lacking a lot of perspective, and is something that should be dealt with. I can imagine that you find Crotian perspective "most tedious", and are more eager to accept some imaginative schemes such as 99% people in the C19 speaking pure "Ijekavian Štoakvian" (except for some 80% Croats, lol), but you must understand that we cannot simply play dumb over such complex issue and present some view as the "truth". Croatian perspective is very much argumented, and it should be mentioned in such form, as well as the complete diachronic perspective on the gensis of the concept of "SC" (in its several, all wrong, senses) language, as that concept has beeni used in several senses throughout the ages. More often then not, various "linguists" forgot to mention the state of affairs before the late/middle C19, and that the cultural elites (the culture is by definition elitistic) of Croats, Muslims and Serbs have had completely separate traditions and the development. For Serbian, the introduction of "literary Štokavian" was an ad-hoc divised trickstery of a single man, that took almost half a century to complete, and for Croats it was the convergence of over-the-centuries complementing dialects, all with abundant and glorious literature. When Marko Marulić composed his Judita "u versi haruacchi", the pinnacle of literary production of other South Slavic and East Slavic nations were some (today mostly unreadable and unintelligible without special training) Church Slavonic mantras. But I can understand that from the perspective of pan-Slavic unitarist, drawing on something like would certainly be a thorn in the eye, and it would be in the best interest to ignore such pieces and play dumb by writing a dictioanry of a "literary language" on the basis of some retarded folk songs of Kraljević Marko.


 * Modern Croatian linguistic circles are, trust me, dominated by still much Yugonostalgic apologetists who resist any kind of "radicalism", even if it's very well motivated. During the Tuđman era there were several "incidents" by some stupid folks (e.g. one of the members of the Supreme Court tried to proscribe korienski pravopis ^_^), and some unsuccessful efforts directed towards the de-Serbification of lexis (like Brodnjak's masive Razlikovni rječnik, which is mostly rubbish), but the cumulative real work over the last 15 years or so in "reinstating the lost tradition" is at the scale nowhere near the work of e.g. Bogoslav Šulek alone. A few hundreds words that were of "passive lexis" during the SC epoch gained a lot of usage and in lots of cases almost completely obsoleted the alternative "internationalisms", but that's pretty much it. No one is writing like László except for him alone (and a few other patients :) With the ever-growing stupidisation of the common people and the hard-line convervatists in charge of the official language policy, it is not likely to come anywhere in the real future either.


 * As for this "Australian" and the 24.* troll (who openly endorses Gretater Serbian politics, and has been trolling talk pages with racist nonsense for more than a year; you can see by his mere claim above of Čakavian being "separate language" that he is at the same mental frequency as Vojislav Šešelj, who in his latest work says exactly the same thing, tho for him Čakavian is "West Slavic", and Štokavian is "East Slavic" :D Poor uneducated souls..) have no interest in 1) contributing to the article 2) discussing the issue at the competent level, they just spread Serb propaganda (in more or less disguised form). They accuse everyone else of being some "Ustaša nationalists" and claim to have "science at their side", yet when I mention some linguistic issues of this SC no one answeres me. If this "SC" is "one language with 3/4 dialects", how come there is not a single isogloss in phonology/morphology/acentology/lexis/syntax/semantics that encompasses all of its "dialets"? Someone needs a serious reality check, and it is not the Croatian side, trust me. --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 00:35, 26 January 2009 (UTC)

I doubt that today's Croatian linguistic circles are as Yugonostalgic as you like to portray them, Stambuk. I remember reading about the controversy in 2004 (or was it 2006?) over Croatian orthography with the competing manuals of Babic et al. vs. that of Anic et al. Anic et al.'s work was ripped by the dominant nationalist school of Croatian linguists (then led by Babic) as being done in the spirit of Novi Sad and using Bolshevist-like hammers (i.e. crude link to the days of Tito's Yugoslavia) even though the spirit of Anic's work was descriptive and tried to distance itself from the imposition of fixed spelling norms which seemed as tyrannical as the rigidly pro-Serbian language policy of the 1930s. Furthermore, Babic's manual's insistence on using forms that were from the 17th or 18th century (reminiscent of an imaginary English language academy that would dictate that we must go back to spelling like they did just after Shakespeare's time) seemed closer to the NDH-days of "korienski pravopis" and questioned by ordinary Croats as impractical since it dictated that the new spelling should be even more divergent from how Croats used spelling to represent the sounds of a modern language. Of course to impartial outsiders and Croatophobes, any association with the NDH would also put into question Babic et al.'s motives. The underlying trend seems that if the Serbs do it (i.e. rigidly phonetic spelling), we Croats should try like hell not to do it. This approach seems to affect the distribution and treatment of European loanwords too...

As regards Kacic, his being a trained linguist should be good (from what I understand he specialized in Romance languages) but he is human and all of that professional training can't remove the ingrained nationalist bias in the educational systems of Balkan states that were part of his formation. In this case, Kacic's work about "delusions and distortions" provides a superficially scholarly basis for ideologies of nationalist Croats. What surprised me is the ad priori atmosphere that permeates a supposedly objective book which rails from the beginning about the "injustice" (or even "crimes") committed on the speech of Croats (as if the language were a walking and talking human being rather than an abstract code of communication). Just to make things clear I'm not as naive or pro-Serbian as your response presupposes (BTW this seems to be a common problem or default retort in the Balkans. If you say something against Croats, you must be a supporter of Greater Serbianism or apparatchik. If you say something against Serbs, you can only be an Ustasha or Muslim terrorist - very few people from the former Yugoslavia are capable of stepping outside the region and realizing how narrow-minded and nationalistic the atmosphere is). I've also read some stuff by Mogus, Katicic, Halilovic as well as tracts by Bugarski and Ivic and came out with the same conclusion. Each side tries hard to set up their language history to line up with nationalist lines of thought (after all, unlike in less nationalist regions, I doubt that these linguists from the Balkans would survive if they did objective studies and concluded things that contradicted nationalist political currents in their respective homelands). Therefore Kacic's opinion and venting about the discarding of 6 centuries of literary achievement probably makes him feel better and matches well with prevailing nationalist historiography, but it speaks more about the idea of trying to recreate a glorious past (BTW something endemic to nationalists and builders of national myths) rather than how Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin and Serbian are 99% mutually intelligible. Interestingly for me as the outsider, he (and those of his ilk) like to devote a lot of time to underlining the political motivations for creating Serbo-Croatian (which are fully understandable given the rise of Hungarian nationalism in the 19th century), but seems strangely mute on the political motivations supporting the dissolution of Serbo-Croatian since 1945. Funny, eh? Vput (talk) 02:47, 26 January 2009 (UTC)


 * Actually that "orthography war" produced almost nothing but a short-living smelly turd in the left-wing media who like to generally feed themselves on that kind of stuff (being spineless social parasites, what else can they do). Novosadski orthography has hundreds of idiotic issues who have been discussed at length in relevant places (don't make me rant on it here!), but the real problem in reintroducing the best spelling is that in the minds of the common people, brainwashed by the Communist "shut up and do your work" parols hard-wired in their servile brains, the opposition is to any kind of change, regardless of how legitimate or not it is. People get shocked seeing spellings such as grješka or strjelica which were sacked by the Serbo-Commies, and normally try to imagine them as some kind of "inventions" to merely differentiate from Serbian practise, failing to undarstand some 500 years of tradition it is based on (Držić, Kašić, Gundulić, Mažuranić, Preradović...even Maretić in his younger days! ^_^), and that the resolvement of currently allowed doublets greška/grješka in favour of one that is much, much more prevalent by literary evidence is not some "fabrication by Ustašoid Serbophones" ^_^. How things are going (with the Ministry's of Education's stance on the Babić-Ham-Moguš orthography which is currently just "officialy recommended" and for all educational institutions, there is little doubt on which form will prevail. The days of "Serbo-Croatian" language engineering (read: Serbification of Croatian) are long gone by, and some of the older forces with the affinity for Yugoslav-Vukovian tradition like the academic Anić (RIP) that you mention, are to become extinct or annihilated. See - Anić's Veliki rječnik is on the verge of the best Vukovian tendencies:

Zaključno se može reći da se Anić neprimjerenom razdjelbom jezičnih i izvanjezičnih odrednica upustio u osobni obračun s hrvatskim jezikom i njegovom poviješću, s normama hrvatskoga standardnoga jezika i njegovim funkcionalnim stilovima, prikazujući ih onakvima kakvi oni nisu. Sinkronijsko-dijakronijsku završenost leksičkih zapisa starih hrvatskih slovara odbacio je i relativizirao sumnjom u komunikativni status njihovih natuknica, kako bi pri definiranju pojmovlja mogao posezati za leksičkim fondom susjednih štokavskih jezika. Tako je dobio neobičnu jezičnu mješavinu, koja više nije imala veze ni s čime. Ona čudesna mreža odnosa koju uistinu slobodni jezik tka, nepovratno je nestala, a namjesto nje među koricama njegova rječnika ostao je surogat, koji se nije ni usudio definirati patvorkom ili pačinkom.
 * And the history repeats itself..
 * And the rest of your comment is just mindless rubbish...Please educated yourself on the difference between the phonetic and phonological before providing further "insights". In the meantime I suggest cogitating on the issue of why today one writes hrvatski, odčepiti or predsjednik, but at the same times ignores the difference among 25 vowels (phonemic pitch accent completely ignored in the orthography). I am really disappointed to see some 3rd-party observer so much indoctrinated with pro-Serb propaganda (or you're just "one of them hiding around ^_^), but let me get this straight once again: You must be "narrow-minded nationalist" to conclude that after things such as 1) writing the several dictionaries of the "literary language" (from Broz-Iveković, the dict. of two Maticas, to ARj) deliberately ignoring some 90% of Crotian literary heritage 2) ignoring the lexemes that were in any kind suspicious of not being "pure folk", regardless of the fact that they have wide usage, moreover calling them "barbarisms" and providing replacements no one used 3) openly Serb-assimilatory tendencies by language politics that have been going on since V.K. in varius forms, either by means of political manifests used as a basis for various Načertanijes (funny thing, I've even read that Ivić has provided Mladić/Karadžić dialectal maps to plan ethnic cleansing of Bosnia in the 1990s on the basis of "Ijekavci=Srbi" formula!?) 4) continual persecution of anything Croat-only during the 2 big Yugoslavias (little things such as burning the entire editions of books just because dared to say hrvatski instead of hrvatsko-srpski, putting people to jail just because they've used "Ustaša words" (both of those are Šulekisms, completely normal words today)) - ? And you have read Slovo o srpskom jeziku, de facto Karadžić's manifest of the 21st century, architected by Serb academia soon before NATO bombs will start to annihilate the "Third Serbian uprising" ? In every one of those epochs Croats and Croatian literay language came out as victims, so you see the "parania" was something very much normal in such circumstances. And the historiographers don't talk of "dissolution of SC" because there was never such thing as "SC", for something to dissolve it must exists. The are various perspectives from various time periods, but the bottom line is that "SC" existed more in the heads of some people then in practice, but that is something very hard to understand for people living in diaspora whose profficiency is sub-literary and who still imagine some Pan-Slavic "ethnolinguistic" states, to be dissolved in future genocides arising from the clash of ultimate cultural incompatibility of the two carrying cultures within the grand scheme. --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 21:34, 26 January 2009 (UTC)

Well, Stambuk, I wonder why you don't engage in these kinds of polemics with DIREKTOR? Does a full-blooded Croat get a free pass from your vitriol and snobbery? Does only a full-blooded Croat have the right "mindset" (or shall we say "prejudices") in order to pose questions and make comments on the silliness that went on in the former Yugoslavia?. In addition, the snobbery that members of the diaspora are somehow less qualified to make comments on language policy just confirms my comments and conclusions about the warped mentality prevalent in Balkan world-views. Somehow for people from your part of the world, it's not only a matter of what you know and what you say, but also your ethnic background that determines the worth of a discussion or debate. Kind of reminds me of Nazi denigration or disqualification of intellectuals' views during the 1930s if they originated from people who were not of the "right" ethnicity... This attitude leads to a kind of mental-inbreeding with everyone being forced into the same circles with people in each circle just repeating and reinforcing the same half-truths and defective logic among themselves. Moreover, if you had bothered to read and think objectively about what I had written, I'm not interested in reading any more of Karadzic's or Ivic's tracts as I am from Bosnian or Croatian nationalists-cum-linguists. I've read enough from them (from all sides) to get a sense that they work under the same kind of nationalist-inspired paranoia. The difference lies only in the targets. In any case, how could any RATIONAL person take Karadzic's more fanciful ideas seriously? Yet here we have Croats like you willfully dropping your rationality and falling for nationalist paranoia by taking it seriously and holding it as a sort of bogeyman and threat from Serbs. In the same way, no rational Serb should fall for Karadzic's fanciful ideas, but like you, they drop their rationality and allow themselves to get swept up by the ego-boosting nonsense those fanciful ideas carry along.

Sticking up for Croatian interests is nice and all, but making the insinuations that Croatian = good, Serbian = bad all of the time is no better or more enlightened than 24* claiming that Croatian = bad, Serbian = good all of the time. What's more is that historians (or more accurately linguist-historians) do talk about the dissolution of SC. It's just that you and many other Croats tune out and put on blinders the moment you come upon the suggestion or idea. Unlike you I can see why it's disputed and I don't denigrate to the point of wholesale rejection. I'm willing to treat it as something disputed and thus can acknowledge the different interpretations rather than blindly adhere to one interpretation over the other just because my teacher told me so in history class. We know that most Croats (you and the dominant nationalist academia, for example) deny the existence of SC, therefore you people can invoke the logic that dissolution was an impossibility. Certainly people like Mogus, Kacic, Babic and Brozovic wouldn't dare nowadays to suggest that SC had existed. On the other hand, most Serbs (Ivic or Bugarski for example) acknowledge the existence of SC, therefore they invoke the logic that dissolution of SC was not an impossibility and did actually happen. Your comments about the Croatian position make it seem as if Croats are somehow on a higher level than Serbs and thus we must discount virtually everything that the Serbs say or believe. Such monolithic adherence is foolish and will ensure that history will repeat itself. It'd be a shame to see a nice part of the world (geographically-speaking) getting ruined by bloodbaths, shellings and aerial bombings again.

Based on my understanding of hyper-ijekavianisms (e.g. pogrjeska, strjelica etc.) I know that one of the Croatian nationalist-linguists favourite targets, Ivo Pranjkovic criticized Babic et al. for including these forms to the exclusion of the (*gasp*!) ekavian forms which ordinary Croats had been using with no scruples (Babic admitted that forms such as "pogreska" and "strelica" came later and I was left to infer from his comment that Croats started using them BEFORE the Serbs or communists ruled Yugoslavia as I am certain that if the Serbian or communist bogeymen had imposed it, Babic et al. would have wasted no time in explicitly reminding the Croatian readership of that imposition)

Dismissing my comments as mindless rubbish is a bit of a cop-out on your part, but in a certain way I'm not surprised as I have been aware of the pervasive nationalist tinge that dominates the historiography, pedagogy and language planning of all of the successor states of Yugoslavia. It's no improvement over the Serbian stunting of debate by skewing discussions or research on linguistic historiography in Yugoslavia, which many Croats like you love to rub in and emphasize. Your calling me a Serb-nationalist or one who falls for Serbian propaganda is pretty inaccurate and shows that you haven't bothered to see that I am critical of the Serbs assimilating linguistic policies (may I remind you of my comments on interpreting Vuk Karadzic's "manifesto" and my earlier pointing out of his logical fallacy). However, you just confirmed my earlier point that if I question Croatian motives, I can only be a Greater Serbianist. I don't see much of a difference than if a Serb were to accuse me of being Ante Pavelic's long-lost flunky when I question Serbian motives. Your mind (and indeed those of many in the Balkans) can't fathom that all forms of nationalism skew the examination or analysis of linguistic development. How is it that Croatian purism/"exclusionism" is somehow superior or more virtuous than Serbian internationalism/"inclusionism"/merging? Vput (talk) 00:30, 27 January 2009 (UTC)


 * DIREKTOR is young and naïve, he'll learn one day ^^
 * the snobbery that members of the diaspora are somehow less qualified to make comments on language policy.. - Well, according to the 2001 census there were 328,547 "Yugoslavs" in USA alone, which prob. makes it the largest fabricated ethnicity in the world. Most of those would, I have no doubts, claim to be speaking "Serbo-Croatian" upon linguistic query, being completely brainwashed of growing up in a culture om which a "nation" is an arbitrary political construct envisioned by some "fathers", with identity crisis manifesting as some imaginary ideal of association with all the people the share the most important cultural trait - the language. From the defective pespective of an "englightened Westerner", not confined by the petty and "wrapped" nationalism as you call it, esp. the one physically incorporated into one of those politically engineerd "nations" like American, Canadian, Austrialian etc., the loss of perspective comes proportionatelly with the loss of identity, and the naiveness to suck everything served to them by the media. They simply believe whatever they've been told to, with no internal motivation for skepticism and revalorisation. As oppose to some such canonical "Yugoslav", average Balkaner Serb/Croat has lived at least thru 1-2 wars, and posses historical knowledge on the region and its inhabitants that is at least 2-3 order of magnitudes larger than that of an average "American", "Canadian", "Australian", "Swiss" or whatever these new nations are called today.. Of course, you can reinterpret every effort for individualisation and identity as some "narrow-minded wrapped Balkanic mentality", as you put it, but that would be culturally relativistic value judgement, of the same fashion you "fight" against.
 * In the same way, no rational Serb should fall for Karadzic's fanciful ideas - Uhm, last time I checked the radicals were the second largest party in Serbia, almost taking over the parliament were it not for some foreign "interventions" recently, with their president in the Hague accused of crimes against humanity and in the spare time writing Bible-sized books in which he "proves" that all Štokavians or all those having -ić surnames are Serbs. This is not some "Serb bogeyman" we imagine, this is the real thing. According to your formula, basically the entire Balkans can be said to lose "rationality" and give up for some "nationalism". If it makes you believe in the righteousness of your enlightened perspective, so be it, but here no one cares what people like think or imagine to think. It's like religious fundamentalists having more respect for a person who is believer in some faith (any faith, even if it's their "enemy faith"), than to an atheist who think all of their petty beliefs are fairy tales for children gone wild.
 * I have never claimed that "Croatian=good, Serbian=bad", and please do not insinuate things like that. I've given you a list of some colossal culturocides against Croatian language committed by various misguided fools who happened to be the ones making far-impacting decisions. In the end, someone had to take the brunt of damage in the process of fabricating a "Štokavian nation", and undisputed historical evidence shows that it was Croatian. I can assure you that the concept of "SC" in which its "Western variant" were enriched by its tremendous heritage instead of being horridly mutilated by idiots would be very much alive today. But instead, we get we have today, and from a diachronical perspective the C19/20 efforts for "standardisation" appear to be some politically engineered massacres in which Croats were to lose the most, and Serbs gain the most. The whole process was ultimately completely detrimental to the literary language that has been gloriously flourishing in all three dialects over the centuries. And abrupt cut with the past made by the Vukovians and later continued by the Communists by very devious means is no less then a first-class genocide over the language. If you cannot understand that, then I pity you. Imagine if "literary" English was reinvented in the early C20 on the basis of some primitive cockney, dictionaries completely omitting words not used by the "common people" - what can of ridicule would it look like today? Tens of thousands of learned Latinisms, coinages by Shakespeare and other wordsmiths carefully grewn by generations just going down the toilet in a work of a 2-3 censors, and moreover being proclaimed as "barbarisms" ! An illustrating excerpt from WP article on the Hungarian language, on its C19 codification process:

In the 18th century, the language was incapable of clearly expressing scientific concepts, and several writers found the vocabulary a bit scant for literary purposes. Thus, a group of writers, most notably Ferenc Kazinczy, began to compensate for these imperfections. Some words were shortened (győzedelem > győzelem 'triumph'); a number of dialectal words spread nationally (e. g. cselleng 'dawdle'); extinct words were reintroduced (dísz 'décor'); a wide range of expressions were coined using the various derivative suffixes; and some other, less frequently used methods of expanding the language were utilized. This movement was called the 'language reform' (Hungarian: nyelvújítás), and produced more than ten thousand words, many of which are used actively today. The reforms led to the installment of Hungarian as the official language over Latin in the multiethnic country in 1844.


 * In Croatian it was just the opposite - terms coined by Bogoslav Šulek (mostly modeled after the Czech efforts who had had a few decades of experience at that time of purifying their language from anomalous German loanwords) were mocked of ("Šulekizmi"), and rejected to be included in the dictionaries (ARj started to accept them later because this "Šulekisms" started to be used even by the Serbs: pojam, smjer, stroj, poredak, zbirka, obrazac, časopis.. completely "normal" words today). So unlike the progressive efforts of Hungarian, for the literary Croatian it was, ultimately, completely detrimental hindering under the most retarded theory that one should not "invent new words". You ask: How is it that Croatian purism/"exclusionism" is somehow superior or more virtuous than Serbian internationalism/"inclusionism"/merging? and the answer is int the question - how exactly is it not? Croatian language has the tradition of purism spanning for centuries (both by writers and lexicographes, the first Croatian grammar by Bartul Kašić in 1604 had a few hundred pure coinages, some of which like pozorište came to enter the Serbian today ^_^). Unlike English, which has lost its Germanic super-structure long, long time ago and contains 1000 times more lexemes (even most of the productive derivational morphology is not of Germanic origin) from Greco-Roman, Old Norse, Old French and whatnot roots then those inherited from Anglo-Saxon, more properly maintained langauges tend to be much more conservative in this respect. Servile acceptance of foreign words is a sign of language degeneracy, unmaintanability and leads to a gradual loss of identity (the opposite is also valid, when you want to delibertely sink into another "superior" culture, like Muslims of all over the world borrowing from Arabic/Persian/Turkish). All of the European classical languages are built upon centuries of tradition of drawing on their native roots. Even the Old Church Slavonic MSS. containing approx. 9500 words have some 200-400 pure coinages or calques from Ancient Greek. Most South Slavic languages have words corresponding to Croatian učenik, dostojanstvo, milosrđe, veličati, suprug, blagodariti - all of these originating from (Old) Church Slavonic, i.e. de facto neologisms coined by one person in certain point in time and diffused as a mark of cultural prestige and "higher style" in written language. This is how languags are suppose to work: men of letters master it, and coinagas that manage to spread become the part of "literary language", which then serves as the basis of a "standard language idiom".
 * As for the gr(j)eška issue - Pranjković is a blind Vukovian anti-Croat who classifies in the same shitpile as Anić and others. It is (oxy)moronic to have doublets listed in a book entitled "Orthography", but I have no doubts that Pranjković is willing to keep those as a "safe keeper" for some imaginative future times of "reintegration" into same grandiose pan-Štokavian language schemes (and then he'll shit on the ijekavian form with the same stupid arguments). Common people, common people...90% idiots who just absorb what you give them, no question asked. If you were to ask random people on the street whether e.g. svijet is a monosyllabic or disyllabic word, you'd be surprised seeing that > 98% doesn't know the correct answer (i.e. lucky guessing aside). Or how they "educatedly" pronounce imat ću as [imat ću] instead of [imaću], after being indoctrinated of having "phonetic orthography" they failed to be re-doctrinated on the atonishing amoung of exceptions where this "phonetic word" orthography is not such. But these things like gr(j)eška are trivialities, there are much more bigger problems, and the biggest problem is that such "trivialities" like the spelling of "pokriveno r", ne ću, diphtongal reflex of jat..tend to obscure the big picture, and too much energy gets wasted on the idiots instead of some capable person making a cut ignoring the "arguments" by his SC-philic opponents, and setting the path for much more radical changes. --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 02:52, 27 January 2009 (UTC)

It's funny to read your response about who was the victim and "gave more". I have heard Serbs doing the same and portraying their speech as a victim (e.g. "Why did we sell out by adopting the J in our Cyrillic alphabet?" "Why did we weaken our language by allowing Latin alphabet to gain as much currency as Cyrillic?" "Why do we have to allow ijekavian to coexist?"). I thus am wary of any Serb or Croat's clams for the higher moral ground when it comes to which side supposedly gave in more. It's almost as if everyone trips over him or herself to show the rest of the world who is hurting more in order to gain more sympathy.

It's interesting that you brought up Shakespeare because I began thinking about that while you were writing your response. It's a Eurocentric outlook (some would argue that it's a racist outlook) that puts the ancient Mediterranean world on a pedestal and a trend of 19th century nationalism to pick out or reinterpret events or traits from the supposedly glorious past. Thus it's subjective to talk about the "beauty" of Latin or Shakespearean English versus the "ugliness" or Cockney or the "vulgarity" of Canadian French as those assertions reflect ingrained or acquired cultural stereotypes rather than any objective linguistic description (e.g. morphology) or humans' hard-wired ability to use language as a tool for communication or general living. Your earnest invoking of English's "degeneracy" because of its flexibility and lack of a puristic academy can hardly be taken as more than that kind of subjective criticism. In addition, the insinuation that English is "degenerate" because of its relative flexibility and silence on treating loanwords has no bearing on the attitude or capabilities of its users. In much the same way, Croatian purism hardly makes Croats less degenerate or more innovative in other areas of human endeavour. (Although to play devil's advocate, I could somewhat maliciously argue that Croatian purism provided a handy tool for Ante Pavelic to implement his virulently anti-Serbian linguistic policy). The bottom line is that no reasonable person should associate linguistic purism with designs on radical social engineering or ability to be innovative but your association of a language's puristic tendencies (or lack thereof) with that of its speakers' mindsets gives an opening to my being able to play devil's advocate using Pavelic...

There's a reason why many outsiders still wonder at how nasty things got in Yugoslavia. Otherwise intelligent people from the Balkans still harbour nationalist mentalities that the Western Europeans, North Americans or Australians (all of whom you disparage for being ignorant of your "realities") have managed largely to push aside because they see how destructive they can be. I'm afraid that your comments put you (and probably other Croats, Serbs etc.) a world apart from these places even though Croats seem to try hard to emulate the culture of Western Europeans and want to be considered as European as the Austrians, French or Poles rather than European as the Serbs, Bulgarians and Romanians. Your comments are ironic, to say the least.

Back to Babic et al.: As far as I can tell, Babic et al.'s revival/reimposition of old spelling norms shows the national myth-building process at work in contemporary Croatian language planning. Those old literary forms from Dubrovnik of the Renaissance are now being held up as models that Croats of the 21st century are supposed to do better by emulating. A comparable example would be as if academic elitists at Oxford University would dictate with the British government's blessing that Shakespearean English is the prime model of English worth emulation because its characteristics are part of a "refined" past (as opposed to "vulgar modernisms/Americanisms") and high literary/theatrical achievement. There's little difference in purpose between the Croats' linguistic myth-building into the past via elevation of bygone forms of the Renaissance and the Serbs' elevation of forms used in Karadzic's collection of 18th or 19th century folk epics or Montenegrin ones (we all know that it's even more strange since Serbs have been educated for 150 years in ekavian rather than Karadzic's ijekavian). The idea that language is better dictated from above or an educated elite sounds like tacit approval for government interference and can even form the basis for totalitarianism. Why should the elites stop at language? Why not impose a ruling or educated elite's habits, culture or aestehtic judgments on everyone of lower social standing no matter how incongruous they are? The dictatorial possibilities are endless.

I'm NOT saying that Croats should forget or discard their past literary figures (as you are so wont or programmed to interpret) but using a figurative shoe-horn to force the old norms into modern standard Croatian is legitimately questionable. Despite your smug comment on the new "winner" of the direction of Croatian orthographic development, it remains to be seen whether it'll hold up as long as you or Babic et al. would like. No doubt that Maretic and the Croatian Vukovites of the 19th century felt that their prescriptions would rule indefinitely over Croats, government sanction and what not. Do you think that Budamani or Maretic could have then imagined that their work would be under such criticism now and even their motivations or affiliations severely questioned?

On a more serious note, your attempt at discrediting competing paths in language development by labelling them (or my reasoning) as part of the machinations of Serbs or communists/leftists sounds familiar... Ah! You sound like those nationalist Croatian linguists whom I mentioned earlier who considered Anic et al.'s spelling manual to be an extension of Bolshevik elements. Honestly, can't anyone in the Balkans think for him or herself? As Croats refused to bend over for Serbian elitists and regurgitate their half-truths, do they instead happily bend over for Croatian elitists and regurgitate their half-truths? Do I have that right? What's also surprising is your comparison using atheists and religious fundamentalists. But better that we not get into a discussion over the consequences of adhering to fundamentalism for fear of insulting more devoutly religious Wikipedians...

Again may I remind you of my conclusions of Balkan nationalist linguists' tracts including Vuk Karadzic's "Slovo o srpskom jeziku" and my even earlier pointing out of Karadzic's logical fallacy that ijekavian-speakers like him can only be Serbs. Thus labelling me as a SC-phile is highly inaccurate (I am a little surprised that 24* hasn't responded to these posts since some of my criticisms have his posts in mind too). However, your emotional rebuttal (I do admit that some of your comments on what constitutes a triviality in Croatian spelling are fascinating since a lot of people don't bother to quibble or use their limited resources to that extent) just confirmed my earlier point that the common Balkan response to attempt discrediting opponents and close a discussion prematurely is to link them to bogeymen (yes, I like this word or if you prefer, I can also call them paper tigers). It probably works in the Balkans, but it doesn't do much to people who can think without all of that static in the air. Anyway Stambuk, it's up to you if you want to respond since judging by your comments I'm not sure if any additional comments will really add to what I have posted. Vput (talk) 05:19, 27 January 2009 (UTC)


 * Serb collective psyche is deeply rooted with self-victimisation plotting theories on various conspiracies against the "Serbdom" when reinterpreting the events that occurred in the past, and in which it was always them that ultimately "suffered the most". Serbian Cyrillic is indeed one great "badge of Serbdom", and Latin script was imposed at first for the unification efforts (Skerlić's proposal of Serbs using the Latin script, and Croats adopting the Ekavian, actually a hidden plot to Serbify Croatian because Ekavian Štokavian is not native Croat), and later wholeheartedly embraced, sanctioned and proscribed by the commies in further efforts to "unify" the two languages. The practise of widely using Latin script to write Serbian today is but a mere reflection of some half a century of political engineering, chiefly popularised by the prevalence of Latin-script-oriented input media (esp. computers). Cyrillic is the only official script to write Serbian by its constitution in this moment, tho that point has much more wishful than practical/proscribal attitude. As for the adopting the letter 'j' - again this criticism came from Orthodox circles where Cyrillic script was seen a strong connection with the Greek and Russian brethren, and the introduction of an additional letter that already had the means of expression was seen as something subvertive and pro-Western. Ijekavian was dumped in favour of Ekavian because planners thought that it would be easier to assimilate ethnic Macedonians in "Southern Serbia" - territorial expansion was always a hallmark of Serbian language policies.


 * At any case, this alphabetic "sacrifices" Serbs ultimately made are nothing against the real, language sacrifices Croats made. They differ by their magnitude as the piss differs from champagne. Please don't bring this kind of petty trivialisation of the culturocide committed by the Vukovians and Communists by comparing them to sporadic whinings of the Serb Orthodox Church against the Latin script.


 * The past was not "supposedly glorious", it was glorious, and if you cannot see how the dumping of the literary language that was built by the intellectual elite for centuries is "superior" as opposed to the adoption of the lexis of some godforsaken village of the Hercegovina, then I pity you. About 99.9% of attested world's languages experienced deterioration in lexis and morphology as opposed to their ancestor centuries and thousands of years ago. Loss of inflectional endings, entire "paradigms of thought" (voices, tenses, moods) and the simplification of phonemic inventory are characteristic of every single Indo-European language today. It's amusing to see you term degenerative English language policy (i.e. the complete lack of it) as "flexibility". The fact is that coining new words in English hardly looks like an enterprise in Germanic philology today, and more like "lets combine these Romance and Greek roots and morphemes, and approximate the pronunciation in English". If English speakers cannot imagine the value the of the proper language treatment because their mother tongue has lost it some 1500 years ago when Ango-Saxons started to get drowned into expressively superior cultures, it doesn't mean that the rest of the world shares the same spineless view that itself emerged as a pathetic legitimisation and an excuse for the complete annihilation of its Germanic superstructure.


 * Your mentioning of Pavelić and language politics of NDH is pathetic, as it has nothing to do with Croatian language purism which predates it by centuries. It's pathetic too see people trying to filter the puristic tendencies that Croatian shares with other properly maintained European languages as something "fascist". You have no idea how much times I'vem heard year coined before the Pavelić was born (like zrakoplov or brzojav) to be termed as "NDH-ism", or as some deliberate "inventions to differentiate from Serbian". NDH language policies at the end did even more damage, because Commies denounced lots of words that were predating the NDH as enforced by it, hence using it to legitimise for further extermination of "Croatisms". The whole problem of NDH was in the SFRJ "solved" as some kind of collective amnesia, deeply imprinted into peoples minds, where you risked being imprisoned or killed for singing the "wrong" songs, or using the "wrong" words. I've already mentioned you Ivan Šreter - you see, there were never "Četnik words", but they were always "Ustaša words".


 * No, the people of America, Australia, Canada and a number of "Western European countries" that you mention did not "came to realize" the alleged "bad sides of nationalism", it precisely due to their complete lack of it that they abhor (and fear it). I personally cannot possible imagine how anyone could take pride in belonging to a "nation" that was invented in the last few hundred years on the basis of a criterion: a group of people that happened to have occupied the same territory, when some "father of the nation" decided to declare independence. No wonder the English language is what it is today, assimilatory of superior linguistic cultures. I can imagine how that would make you sympathise the Serb lack of puristic tendency and the blindly servile absorption of loanwords, as you clearly do, lol.


 * Babic et al.'s revival/reimposition of old spelling norms shows the national myth-building process at work in contemporary Croatian language planning. - nonsense, you have no clue what you're talking about. Have you actually read Babić's (old and new) orthography?? Babić's primary line of reasoning it get rid of stupid doublets (which something title orthography should not contain ipso facto; unless one advocates looking at the role model of degenerate languages like English with tens of thousands of worlds having dual spellings), and favouring the one more in Croatian tradition. But pathetic Babićophobes and hardline Yugocommunist agitator like Anić, Pranjković et al. still imagine a world where language policies are being dictatated by the Comintern, or at least by some Vukvian sitting in an office making a cut what is and what is not "proper Croatian" on the basis of the word's frequency in English. Babić's proposals are allmost completely benign, and those that are not in use and not "long bygone" as they were pretty much in use 50 years ago when Communists decided to make the linguicide on Croatian to please the Serbs. Your attempt to compare it to reinstatement of Shakespearean forms into modern English is pathetic, as the timeframe divergence between the Shakespearean era and the time when these "nationalist Croatian myth-building" forms were in use is 5 centuries.


 * The idea that language is better dictated from above or an educated elite sounds like tacit approval for government interference and can even form the basis for totalitarianism. - So French, German, Spanish, Italian, Hungarian, Finnish..all governed by the national institution in charge of language policies are all "totalitarian"? Please educate yourself before making such silly claims. Once again, the fact that no one "dictates" English (and no one has been, it being a mere medium for colonial expansion and Anglicisation) is a sign of its degeneracy, not some kind of "quality" you should take pride in. Like the aformenetioned Serbian lexeme I expressed by disgust of - fudbal - completely anomalous word, you can smell from a thousand miles that it is not of native Slavic origin. It is no wonder that of all the puristic tendencies in all the world's languages, Anglicisms are by far the most "attacked" ones. As opposed to the learned Greco-Latinisms which are mark of higher style, and are readily accepted as enriching, accepting Anglicisms is thought of as a sign of degeneration. I mean, fudbal, lol.


 * You sound like those nationalist Croatian linguists whom I mentioned earlier who considered Anic et al.'s spelling manual to be an extension of Bolshevik elements. - read the paper and its references I gave you above, written by serious linguists (standardologists) listing some prime examples of Serbianisms of Turkisms that Anić has put into his Veliki rječnik, and that were not in use in Crotian even in the darkest days of "Serbo-Croatian". Not to mention common Croatian-only words like veleposlanik that have more than a century of continual usage being labelled as "political neologisms" ! He is on par with Maretić and co, when it comes to raising reality distorsion shield around his arse. To put it simpley: Anić is Vukovian Croatophobic pig, and his pathetic excuses on "dictionary being descriptive" were an another mindless attempt to Serbify Croatian. And again, of course, along came Goldstein and his $$$ machinations, the dictionary that had word like like "shvatanje" being donated to schools! Anić indeed takes a seat in the "hall of fame" of Croatian linguicidists (just on the right of Maretić). Anić is discredited on the very sane scientific grounds, not because of some "Serb parania" as you naively imagine.


 * Thank you for the kinded exhortations of what constitutes a typical Balkan "mindset". In the name of all the Balkan nations (most of which are millenium+ older then your own) who take much "wrapped nationalistic" pride into their own culture, language being the most important part of it, I'd like to say that your enlightened (and pretty much typical and expected) Westerner attitude largely confirms any claims that globalisation and "melting pot" models of modern nation-building are but a synonyms for the obliteration of individuality and culture, in order to produce more and more tiny but obedient robots serving Anglo-American imperialistic goals. --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 12:09, 27 January 2009 (UTC)

After thinking about your supposedly air-tight list of countries showing that purism isn't a precursor or linked to totalitarianism or some kind of policy of dominance/assimilation I came across a few things to bear in mind.

Known purist languages such as Croatian, German, Spanish, Turkish and Farsi at different times have had their purist tendencies used or abused as an extension of totalitarian powers to vilify or deprecate perceived or real enemies (e.g. German in the Third Reich and the attempt at trying to create "Germanic" words, Legalized language abuse in the NDH, Spanish and the trampling of that "dialect", Catalan - "anti-Catalanism" was particularly notable during the reign of the dictator General Franco, Turkish and Ataturk's post-World War I purist policy favouring Old Turkic constructions or words (as in salvageable old stuff from before the early days of the Ottoman Empire) over Arabic or Persian loans, and Farsi (Persian) today under Ahmadinejad - loanwords such as "pizza" for example are proscribed and should instead be replaced by a calque.) As you know, a lot of us "degenerates" in English have a low view of purism (especially of the politically-motivated kind - did you learn about the scorn that other English=speakers heaped on G.W. Bush when he tried to convince Americans to use "freedom fries" over "french fries"?). Thus it's not an air-tight condition as you insinuate with native speakers of purist languages being less "degenerate" and more innovative or enlightened. By the same token, I'm also aware that the lack of purism (or openness or flexibility to foreign elements) isn't a very good predictor of one's domineering tendencies (real or not). For one, we already know about the Serbs' linguistic policies of the past...

It's amazing how you deliberately misinterpreted my statement about purism and the NDH (you aren't a lawyer or student of law, are you?) I did NOT say or even hint that purism originated with the NDH. I know damned well that Croatian purism has been around for a few centuries before Pavelic and his thugs ever saw the light of day. On the other hand, there's no denying that the NDH abused and gave a bad name to the tradition of Croatian purism. It's no wonder that nationalist Serbs happily associate Croatian language purism with that shameful part of Croatian history because it suits them. Like you, Stambuk, they act like lawyers and take things out of context and don't bother to take a balanced view of language purism. Even *I* (the supposed "Serbophile") can say that purism actually helped increase the expressiveness of your mother tongue in some cases. For example, consider the purist and official word "odrežak" vs. colloquial "šnicel". Depending on the situation or what a Croat wants to signal, he or she has a choice from the pair... and there's nothing wrong with that.

On this subjective judgment that somehow the precursors of modern languages were better because of their complexity, it flies in the face of descriptive linguistics. What's more is that because languages are more than just markers of ethnic identity (which nationalists like to emphasize), they have to also be capable of fulfilling communicative needs for pretty banal stuff in addition to esoteric or abstract concepts such as writing manifestos on an ethnicity's destiny.

On whether the precursors are more complex (often interpreted as "superior" by purists wishing to return to an idealized concept of language from the past) is very debatable and admits no clear answer.

For example Bulgarian has lost virtually all of the declensions reconstructed for Proto-Slavic. However it somehow expanded on the old system of tenses and conjugations to the point that most other Slavs find it very foreign (for example in addition to indicative mood, it also has renarrative mood). In a certain way, the development of English and French is reminiscent of what happened in Bulgarian: elaborate verb conjugation, but almost no marking for case. If you were today to tell a Bulgarian that his or her native language is simpler or worse than the older form, he or she would probably look at you very strangely (especially taking into account to the changes in verbal conjugation and vocabulary that have happened over the last 1000 years).

Another example is with the Chinese languages. Scholars hypothesize that the precursors of Chinese languages were not tonal but did make inflections (for example using distinctions in aspiration or voicing of consonants). However the tones are hypothesized to have come about as a differentiating device because the inflections made using differences in voicing dropped as those consonants stopped being pronounced by speakers (who knows why they stopped doing it). To compensate, the elaborate system of tones came about in order to maintain (more or less) the distinctions needed to make communication reasonably clear or unambiguous. Today, no linguist could say that Old Chinese without tones is somehow superior to the daughter languages with all of their tones (up to 9 for some dialects of Cantonese).

Therefore, any criticism of "new" languages in favour of "old" ones reflects more that speaker's cultural stereotypes or desire to look to the past (glorious or not) in order to "enrich" a language. Descriptive linguists on the other hand just describe and care little about aesthetic or cultural standards which vary from one person to the next.

I haven't read Babic et al.'s work butI have browsed through it at a research library out of curiosity after having read about its latest incarnation and the associated controversy when reading some recent monographs on language planning in Croatia. Incidentally, why in hell should I read that book? It's a spelling dictionary for God's sake! Stambuk do you actually read dictionaries or spelling guides? I actually thought that we're meant to consult them or look things up in them.

The degree of emotion that emanates from your responses (labelling of Anic and Pranjkovic as belonging to a "shitpile" or bunch of communists) tell me that I've touched a nerve. Wow, I must admit that it is fascinating for this supposedly degenerate Westerner to engage in polemics with a supposedly superior Croat since I've never seen such a well-spoken one (irony here: your command of that "degenerate" English language with all of its collocations, loanwords, phrasal verbs and irregular orthography is very good) lose his cool and label anyone who doesn't agree fully with him or dominant Croatian linguists as communists or Serbian sympathizers. Your lashing out at English and the English-speaking world is kind of funny but thought-provoking. For all of its "sloppiness", English loanwords today seem to cause the most bother for language purists like you (I've never seen anyone get some worked up by a word like you have with "fudbal"). One could say that modern English is the largest importer and exporter of vocabulary. It's all in line with the great capitalist or Anglo-American imperialist scheme/conspiracy, right? (You're parting shot at the end sounds fit for an apparatchik or a Young Pioneer fresh out of an indoctrination session, if I do say so myself...)

Thanks for the laughs, Stambuk. Vput (talk) 03:54, 29 January 2009 (UTC)


 * Well, it is true that certain totalitarian regimes manipulated langauge policy in order to favour purist tendencies in language planning, but statement can hardly be generalised to the most of the world's languages. In Croatian, the 19th century tendency for newly-coined words either serving as replacements for some "unfitting" loanwords, or simply being neologisms for newly-introduced technological concepts, closely followed the model of other European languages and was i no way "totalirarian" in character. Šulek in particular didn't mind borrowing hundreds of words from Czech and Slovak (either without change, or with minor changes to suit the differences in phonological system). Slavic languages were "OK" with him, as they were largely compatible in morphology, and no Croat today (unless he knows it, of course) would imagine that words such as sustav, uloga, pojam or važan were in fact the result of coining by a single man after Czech originals. Borrowings from German, Turkish or Hungarian with their anomalous consonant clusters and endings are entirely different category (šnicl that you mention with the anomalous šn- and the syllabic word-final /l/ that was lost in Štokavian speeches centuries ago), with an important cultural trait of being imported from a language that culturally or militarily subjugated Slavs. Ottoman Turkisms in particular - reflecting a genocidal rule that took the lives of hundreds of thousands of Slavs over the 4-5 centuries, serving as a war-machinery for the Islamicisation of Europe. Perhaps Englishmen would perceive Turkisms as some "cute Orientalisms" - but that's just because they've been imported to English by some writer who happened to travel across Ottoman lands and heard it by some peasant. Were half of England converted to Islam (and the newly self-styled "Turks" started to declare as Muslims by nationality, writing English heavily infested with Perso-Arabic lexis in Arabic script), London captured after a year-old siege with half of its population starved to death, and the few hundreds thousand remaining Christians forced to pay haraç or devşirme, when they were lucky enough not to be taken as slaves to Const^H^H^H^H^HIstanbul or simply cut to pieces by raiding gangs, or being stupid enough to rebel against the blood-sucking oppressor and end up as one of the ornaments in a Skull Tower, I seriously doubt that your antipathy to those "nationalist-driven" puristic tendencies would be so extreme. You simply come from a culture that was the oppressor throughout the ages, erasing thousands of native cultures and languages (genocide against the American Indians was the greater one since Homo sapiens to neandhertals). English as an "evolving" language has become but a medium for the absorption of Greco-Roman lexis and morphology, fitting to its own phonological system. Any page of my big English-Croatian dictionary I open has 60-80% borrowings, and the whole bulk of those that even sound like being inherited from Proto-Germanic are in fact borrowed int Ango-Saxon from Old Norse or Anglo-Norman. Of all the Germanic languages, English prob. continues the least of Germanic vocabulary. If that is not a sign of cultural degeneration, I don't know what is.


 * NDH episode was even worse catastrophe for language than those brain-damaged decisions by the Vukovians, because since then 1) puristic tendencies in Croatian came to be associated exclusively with it, even though they predate it (and I get very much amused by some Serbs/Yugoslavophiles "ridiculing" the alleged NDH "Ustašisms" that were officially reintroduced in the 1990s, as many of those are used by them without even knowing it) 2) it enabled communists to further inhibit any kind of puristic policies and subconsciously marking it as something "fascist" and "unnatural". Hence people were put to jail for writing umirovljeni časnik instead of penzionisani oficir (NB., the official language of JNA was "Serbo-Croatian", even for Slovenes and Macedonians, and as we can see from this particular sample, that in practice really meant Serbian) instead of penzionisani oficir, and the only ones who were spread were the untouchables like Krleža simply because Communists were too stupid to realise what he was doing.


 * As for the odrezak vs šnicl/šnicel/šnicla - this is really bad example as the latter Germanism is sub-sub-standard and you'll never hear it in the TV or see it written in the newspapers (as opposed to other relatively interchangeable pairs such as muzika : glazba, gol : zgoditak etc.). I agree that it increases the expressiveness of language by allowing to balance the level of formalism, but unfortunately for lots of these internationalisms/borrowings there are no Slavic counterparts so the enterprise is quite limited. Pairs like this should be proscribed by some dictionary and left up to the user to choose. Left-wing media would favour one form, right-wing the other, but every one would be "OK" and everyone would be happy because they had the freedom of choice, as opposed to the NDH/SFRJ were there was none for one of those forms under the penalty of law. The ultimate winner of such "competition" would be the language itself.


 * You are, indeed, very wrong as for the nature of diachronic complexity of natural languages. I have no idea on how the Old Chinese yielded tones in modern Chinese languages (what I've read is that the question is mostly unsolved, and that tonogenesis being an areal feature of the entire region screws pretty much various interpretations of "tendencies of the system"), but since modern ones are uninflected, and today tones are used only as a lexical feature, yeah the development from Old Chinese with inflection to modern one languages without would indeed be degeneration. Bulgaro-Macedonian similarly degenerated in nominal morphology, whilst developing some new verbal inflectional categories, but generally it was degeneration from Proto-Slavic, Proto-Balto-Slavic and Proto-Indo-European which was much richer in verbal inflection. By degeneration I mean: means of expression. How do you say "to wish to cause to become" in English? In Sanskrit it would be bibhāvayiṣati (3rd person singular PAI) - simply a natural construction combining the categories of causative and desiderative. Sanskrit and Ancient Greek have very complex verbal system, with lots of "freedom", and are able to express modes of thinking which are untranslatable to primitive languages such as English (e.g. subjunctive middle-voice aorist dual - you'd need ~10 additional English constructs and it'll sound very weird to translate something expressed by one suffix in Greek). There are other languages which allow even more complex modes of refinement (on the top standing unholy creations like Ilaksh - a true monument to human intelligence). So in essence, 99% if natural languages did degenerate with respect to its ancestor (either immediate or a bit earlier in the past), and that is something noticed by the cultural elite, and committed to, for as you see Ancient Greek, Latin and Sanskrit remained for more than a thousand years languages of schooling and "clear thinking", until the rise of 19th-century romanticism and nation-building movements finally nailed them. All of them remain very productive source of new roots for European/Indic languages, as symbols of something prestigious and more developed. So it's not really some stupid "cultural stereotype" but an essence of language of being a bit more then a "channel of communication" (if it would be just that, we'd be all speaking the same language with no variance).


 * This new Babić-Ham-Moguš is a handbook + orthography dictionary. It's very concise (as opposed to the other 800+ pp. orthography books South Slavic languages have an appetite for), so it really presents an advancement. You may also check this new Badurina-Marković-Mićanović which will probably enthral you as it represents further degeneration towards Vukovianism. One wonders how did such neo-Communist pigs got installed into the capital cultural institution in Croatia (Matica hrvatska). --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 06:30, 29 January 2009 (UTC)

More of the same nonsense. You Mr. Stambuk have no idea about the history at all. You should learn first some things real historians and linguist study before pretending to be authority on anything because you are not in a position to spell so much nonsense and make yourself to appear authority on languages or history. Everything you talk about is so fanciful and so laden with errors it makes it difficult to even collect all of your errors to gether.

Since for an ignorant lie you anyone who disagrees with your personal view on croato-serbian language, I'll address some of your "intenational" stupidities (sorry, but there's no other way to flag things you so profoundly wrongly cite) Firstly, there are some decent pages even on internet about the proto-Slavic history that you will dislike, but are a result od research by people actually educated in the matter, unlike yourself:

http://www.users.bigpond.net.au/agbdesign/slavic/

and

http://www.hist.msu.ru/English/departments/Slavs/info.htm

This second link is where you can request information resulting from decades of serious studies. You will be presented with a large well evidenced and studied collection of work that indisputably shows EVOLUTION of people and languages throughout the time. And slavic languages and people are nothing of what you tend to push here. Your personal opiate is just that. No amount of your passionate delusion can change the fact that your people and the language are of slavic origins and have the slavic language that had come from the one and the same source. That the "variants" hrvats and serbs speak are one and the same language which is not even native to hrvats. The original language of hrvats is the kajkavian which is essentially ekavian. If you disagree, you are denying the largest portion of the hrvats their true origins. And just as the language, the true origin of hrvats is the slovenio-slovak. But do some research in the real body of antropological and historical research before you open your mouth to reply with more of your ignorance because your misconstructions do not make any real impact on anyone serious about research. They only make you the biggest discreditor of already discredited and degenerated wikipedia.

My earlier quotes from your text, and I know that you did understand them, were examples of your inconsistency, which is a result of your political views, not of your limited knowledge. In these examples I drew your attention on bluntly opposing and mutually excluding statements like that about Macedonian-Bulgarian. One day no one speaks of them as one group, the next they are just that in your own words. You are cheap manipulator whose only desire is to invent a language hrvvats can call their "own". The reality that nationalists like you are facing is the enormous complexity both political and linguistic. In reality there is no one language typical to either of the side. Both hrvats and serbs speak more than one variant (dialect, if we really must) of south slavic "language". Both use ekavian and ijekavian, stokavian and even ikavian. Both have the same roots. You and your nationalist comrades had a chance to elaborate the case for differences in the little paragraph I posted, but apart from the generic statement "there are some croatian traits" you couldn't come up with anything to positively identify the language used as either of the four "languages". When you realised that your position has become precarious, you resorted to insults and personal attacks, and political mantras from your nationalist books.

You are even failing to realise that you are quoting those "linguists" and "modern" grammar books that are written under political inspiration. Of course that these would confirm what you are saying. But these "modern works" are nothing more than Stalin-styled brainwashing for your own children adn are not results of some dedicated serious research.

My little paragraph still stands and is waiting for you to point out crucial differences that would demonstrate how and why would anyone want to diversify between the four politically created names for one language. "Old Slavonic" isoclades, idioms and other "big" words that so intimidate you and impress do not make any difference to anyone who, unlike you, knows what a language is, how a language is different to a dialect and how to tell de difference between the two languages.

You certainly do not know, although you debata into great lengths those "big" words, as if you actually know what they mean. Your many comments on other languages, like Greek, Chinese, english or even australian aborigines are monumental proof of your complete and utmost disregards for the verified and accepted knowledge. But such is the power of anonimity on the net, no? Every fool can pretend to be the great grand master him/her self adn get their five seconds of fame. I expect you to heavilly publish on youtube now. Take your crusade to the masses, educate them and make them believe your delusions. If they don't, well the answer is simple. They are all serbo-chetniks or communists. Problem solved. Only you are the nice one. The real victim of international serbophile conspiracy to silence you.

Australian


 * Dear Australian, you are such an ignorant. So many harsh words, ad hominems, and colossal blunders...I wonder why am I even wasting my time one someone like you? I'll simply be polite this time and completely disregard all the gibberish and personal attacks of yours (as much as they populate space, they do not constitute any kind of "proof" you know, and calling me nationalist, amateur etc. just shows how degenerate you argumentative discourse essentially is).
 * First, some stupid 19th century myths, quoting from the first page of yours:
 * All Slavs are descendants from the Proto-Slavic tribes. The Slavs of today are the branches of the Slavic tree that was spouted from the singular Proto-Slavic seed. Of course there are differences between the three Slavic groups due to gradients occurring and braches intertwining with other peoples in and around of the geographical regions in which they settled. I don't think anyone is disputing that. But the mixing of the Slavic stock with other peoples throughout their history, especially after the mass migrations, does not make the Slavic stock magically disappear into thin air does it?
 * Now, probably some of the folks around here are laughing their ass, because the above paragraph represents modern reincarnation of the 19th century Pan-Slavism. The "one people = one language" formula, I'm sure you've heard it.
 * The problem with this primitive interpretation, which even today finds its place in some obsolete history books (funny thing is that some of the sources that page quotes, like Curta:2001, provide completely opposing view - such selective quoting should be regarded as manipulation of the reader by any sane person), is that it's completely wrong. Languages and ethnicities don't scale to each other. Language is an artificial, culturological construct, whose spread is orthogonal to the "ethnical" (however you define it). Are people in South and Mid America "ethnically" Portuguese and Spanish? The spread of Indo-Aryan languages on Indian subcontinent is excellently documented in historical sources - prestigious idiom of the culturally and military more advanced caste was superimposed onto the substrate population. 900 million speakers of Indo-Aryan today are not genetical descendants of the few thousand Afthanistan tribes that migrated in the second millenium BCE to the area.
 * Exactly the same thing applies to the Slavic. 99.9% of modern Slavic speakers has with Proto-Slavs as much as 99.9% of modern English speakers has to do with Anglo-Saxons - exactly nothing. Genetics confirm this, and all the modern historiographical and linguistic evidence, highly abused in the 19th century, reinterpreted through modern perspective, only corroborates that the sudden spread of Slavic speach in the 5th-8th century was culturally imposed. According to Toporov and Ivanov - Slavic speech was a koine of the Avar khaganate in Europe. That view is endorsed by most modern linguist I've heard of (Holzer, Matasović, Dybo..), some of which like Holzer are specialised in Proto-Slavic onomastics. Read the article Balto-Slavic_languages, esp. Holzer's article in PDF at the end of the article (if you can read German). Though, given the amount of "knowledge" you presented here, I sincerely doubt you're capable of understanding most of that article (written by me). Just stick to the "plain conclusions" section, OK?
 * Genetics also confirm this: there is no "Slavic gene" today - and if there was one it is long gone in most of the populations, some proposed ones (e.g. R1a) extremely oscillating among neighbouring Slavic populations. Recently published - and the only dealing exclusively with it - genetic study on the location of Proto-Slavic Urheimat locates it to Middle Ukraine, as most Slavist predicted on the toponymics evidence (e.g. commonly cited Trubačev's analysis of the Old Slavic hydronyms, which is most dense exactly in that area). Most Croats, just as most of the other Balkanic populations, are genetically dominated by pre-Slavic cultures that were subsequently Slavicised. I mean, just look at the typical Croat from Zagorje, from the Dalmatian islands, and the typical Dinaroid type - physionomically they're completely different, and such differences are (tens of) thousands of years old, and did not happend in the last 1300 years or so. Please look up genetics study of the Balkanic (esp. Slavic populations) and realise that the remnants of the "Proto-Slavic gene" (whatever that be) are insignificant and non-existing. I can imagine how destructing this can be for some Pan-Slavic Communist dogmas of "brotherhood and unity", but what I tell you - the truth can only set you free. Differences should be respected and celebrated, not annihilated by some scientifically invalid Communist theories.
 * One interesting thing - Balto-Slavic linguistic split is usually dated to 1500-1000 BCE on the glottochronological evidence (see paper from Baltistica in the references of the BSl. article). And, since Late Proto-Indo-European cannot be younger that 4000 BCE, and the Slavic dialects began to diverge in the beginning of the 7th century (Kortlandt, Holzer etc.), it follows that the period of Balto-Slavic ethnolinguistic unity was c. millenium longer than the Proto-Slavic. Interesting perspective, huh?
 * Croats speak 3 dialects (narječje, more proper translation would be macrodialects or dialect groupings, as they themselves are not genetically valid clades, and contain some of the idioms that are not really easily mutually intelligible): Kajkavian, Čakavian and Štokavian. Of those three, the first two are spoken exclusively by the Croats, and the Štokavian is spoken also by the Serbs, and Montenegrins. Some of the subdialects of Štokavian (like Ikavian) is spoken almost exclusively by Croats, whilst some others (like Ekavian) almost exclusively by the Serbs. You mention jat - it dissolved in about a dosen different sounds in various dialects. What they teach you in your primitive handbooks is simplified. the /e/ resulting in "Ekavian Kajkavian" (there are also "non-Ekavian" Kajkavian idioms) is not the same sound as /e/ resulting in Ekavian Štokavian dialects. It's usually marked in dialectology books as "ẹ" and is said to be "open [e]" (I know what sound it is supposed to represent, but I don't know IPA, sorry). Kajkavian dialect was a part of the larger Pannonian dialect cluster that also encompasses all Slovene dialects, and Slavic spoken at the Pannonia before the arrival of Magyars. I've read recently a paper (someone's Ph.D. thesis) on the analysis of Slavic toponyms in Hungary, on what dialect they belong to - the conclusion was the Pannonian transitional of South and West Slavic, most closely related to Kajkavian and Slovenian). So I don't really comprehend what you're getting at with your "Croats only speak Kajkavian" fascism. I mean, the oldest monument of Croatian literacy - Baška tablet is written in Čakavian, and Kajakavian and Štokavian soon followed achieving the extremely developed literary culture (at least w.r.t. other South Slavic nations, dominated/hindered by Church Slavonic). I wrote a bit about Yat in Croatian if you're interested in further details (it's a bit simplified, but going into further details and quirks/exceptions would be an overkill for Wikipedia).
 * I don't know what you misunderstand about Bulgaro-Maconian I wrote. I reiterate my point here: There is no way that Bulgarian and Macedonian can be treated as different languages, and Serbian and Croatian as one. Neither in standardological, nor in genetic-dialectlogical sense. Furthermore, as opposed to Bulgarian-Macedonian area which is a genetically valid clade (there is a bunch of exclusive isoglosses that connect all of the B-M dialects, ultimately constituting East South Slavic branch), the alleged "Serbo-Croatian" area is not. No one has ever managed to find a single isogloss that connects all Kajkavian, Čakavian and Štokavian idioms (furthermore, some even add Torlakian). There wasn't any kind of "Proto-Serbo-Croatian" language. All of those dialects are equally old, descending from 8th-9th century Late Proto-Slavic. By applying methods of comparative linguistics onto them, you get the Late Proto-Slavic, not some "middle period". If you're interested into professional discussion of the issue, see Matasović's Poredbenopovijesna gramatika hrvatskoga jezika, Matica hrvatska, 2008 pp. 59-67. But Matasović is for you prob. some kind of "Ustaša-Croat nationalist", and self-declared Greater-Serbian-phile Pavle Ivić whose proposals for SC isoglosses he discusses - and ultimately dismisses as shared retentions and not common innovations - is an "objective scientist". Get real. --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 03:01, 1 February 2009 (UTC)


 * The original language of hrvats is the kajkavian which is essentially ekavian. If you disagree, you are denying the largest portion of the hrvats their true origins. And just as the language, the true origin of hrvats is the slovenio-slovak
 * Completely wrong. Regnum of Croatiae developed from last Gothic Liburnia Tarsatica state in period of alliances and wars with the Franks, from Dalmatian Principality to the Kingdom of Croatia, Dalmatia and Slavonia etc. First appearences of name Croat were all within Chakavian environment and Triangular->Angular Glagolithic script.
 * Dukes of Slavonia or Croatian Pannonia in Ljudevit's age (9th century) were in close relations with Carantanians, Bohemians, Great Moravians, Bulgarians etc... in the beginning they were in conflicts with the Croats who were ruling ex-Liburnia, but soon stepped into an union. Kajkavian was spoken in wide space of Savia and Norricum, in the eastern Alps. In 10th century Slavonia was attached to the Croatian state but Kajkavian dialect last jumped into historical Croatian literacy, a several centuries later. Even some modern states/regions in the range of south-western Pannonia bear the same name: Slovenia, Slavonia, Slovakia. Slovenian and Slovakian are very close languages.
 * The original language of the Croats was Chakavian, with vocabulary crossing Kajkavian in the north-west (towards Carantania and Pannonia) and Ikavian in the south-east (Ikavian Scakavians in the Dalmatian hinterland, B&H). 3 dialectal clouds formed a sort of vocabulary triangle: Chakavian along the coast, Kajkavian from the eastern Alps to Savia and Ikavian from southern Savia to Dalmatia. Zenanarh (talk) 12:35, 1 February 2009 (UTC)