An interesting trait of the balkan languages is the perceived link between the spelling and phonetics, resulting in the phrase "Piši kao što govoriš" / "Write as you speak"
Somewhat intelligible. If the Russian speaker is speaking slowly, one may get 20-30% of the meaning, from the Balkan side. If the people are really trying to communicate, they will probably just use English.
Balkan person here: I can (mostly) understand anyone from Eastern Europe (Slovakia, Czechia, Russia) if they speak really slowly and use basic words and phrases.
Russian is not a very phonetic language. However, unlike English, the mismatches are somewhat consistent, e.g. an adjective in masculine gender and accusative case ends with -ого (-ogo), which is pronounced (-avo/-ava), but at least it's always pronounced -avo/-ava.
No. You'll likely be able to read if it's another Cyrillic language and you'll also pick up individual words. It's similar to an English speaker reading French - they won't understand the meaning but many of the words of latin origin will stand out.
Not really. IANAL(inguist), but it sort looks like this:
Russian has progressed/evolved more than many of the other Slavic languages (due to more speakers, being a part of an empire etc.). So there are significant differences between Russian and most other Slavic languages (even the closest ones, Ukranian and Belorussian). These differences are everywhere: in word forms, tenses, stress, pronunciation etc.
Many other Slavic languages (especially Balkanian) retain a lot of forms, sounds, meanings that are archaic by Russian standards: anything from Bulgarian `ъ` sound which disappeared from Russian centuries ago, to words like `лепа` (beautiful) in Serbian which hasn't been used in Russian for over a century, to words like Polish `uroda` (beauty) which switched its meaning to mean "ugly" in Russian.
And the list goes on: locative and vocative cases exist in Serbian, haven't existed in Russian for a long time; definiteness of Macedonian and Bulgarian hasn't existed in Russian for a long time, if ever; etc. etc.
So all in all, other Slavic speakers have a higher chance and luck understanding Russian speakers, than Russian speakers other Slavik languages.
True. IIRC, some linguists say that you can still find up to 15 cases in Russian, if you look carefully. They mostly remain in some specific situations and can't be properly split into fully-fledged cases. But they are still there :)
Funnily enough, for Serbian (Croatian etc.) speakers, Russian sounds very archaic, probably due to lots of Latin, Greek, and German loan words in Serbian.
The funniest word in Russian and Serbian is "ponos". Means diarrhea in Russian but, AFAIK honour in Serbian. And, Serbian for diarrhea is "proliv", which means "strait (as in Bering's strait)" in Russian. So funny.
If you understand a little bit of any, you understand a little bit of both. That being said, Russian grammar is hard for a "Yugoslav" speaker, and people from here much rather learn English or German (or both, quite frequently) than Russian.
I'd guestimate at least 10% speaks both English or German relatively fluently, and I personally don't know anyone from here that speaks Russian fluently.
French is pretty good in my limited experience of having one way of pronouncing a written word (although I'll give you that Monsieur breaks all the rules). But for going from speech to writing it's no good. "Trois vers verts traversent vers le verre" comes to mind.
... and all Latin/Romance languages, English is the exception, Italian, Spanish, French, Portuguese and Romanian are all pronounced as they are written (or at the most with some always-the-same reading conventions).
All of those languages went through a deliberate reform where the language academy said "this is how we spell things from now on." English didn't really have that, but a bunch of dictionary writers did make changes that have stuck. In the US we can credit Noah Webster for having us drop the unpronounced "u" in "colour" or write "centre" with the kind-of-metathesis spelled out.
> Italian, Spanish, French, Portuguese and Romanian are all pronounced as they are written.
?? I dont' quite follow what you're saying. The sound 'o' can be written in French in a lot of different ways, some of them even don't even have an 'o' in them ("au", "eau", "aux" "aux" and I probably forgot some). It's notoriously difficult to write things in French just because of the discrepancy between what you hear and what you should write.
That is more like "speak as it is written" -- ie, the pronunciation derives consistently from the orthography. That is slightly different from "write as you speak" where the spelling of a word is literally speaking it slow enough so the individual sounds can be distinguished.
Not disagreeing with your overall point, most romance language have a much easier mapping from speaking -> writing than does english, but the principle of "write as you speak" is probably the simplest you can get.
(ie, the letter 'c' is used to represent different sounds in the word 'calambre', 'chorrizo', 'proyeccion'. It's not complicated to learn at all, but you still have a one -> many mapping on the letter -> sound. For languages like Serbian, it is straight up one to one.
It is not about transcribing, it is about reading/pronounciation.
By convention, in French every time you find written:
"au", "eau", "aux" "aux"
you pronounce it "o".
If you hear "o", it may be "o" or any of the above.
There may be small "nuances" like with Z in some languages that can be hard or soft (there are anyway "coded" rules - not necessarily "simple" - but only a handful of exceptions), Italian:
not even that is really true: the "s" at the end of a French word, do you pronounce it or not ? depends, and there's no real consistency. (Sorry to be picking on French, but I don't know Spanish, nor Italian)
Parent was actually referring to write as you speak, not reading.
It is true that if you happened to know French well, and you are familiar with the language writing conventions you can read the language just fine, but that's tautology.
Roughly half of the letters written in French are not pronounced, either because they come too soon in the word, or because they are followed by another letter or because they are too late in the word. Unless the next word starts with specific letter, in that case you do pronounce the ending of the previous word. Sure, for a native speaker it could be very easy to read and write, and it might be determined by very consistent set of few dozen rules, but I would say that reading or writing French is anything but straightforward.
English is a mis-mash of languages which reflects the various conquering and assimilation actions between the Roman empire and 1066 in the british isles, on top of an active loaning of words.
When you have a language that's half nordic, half french, half german, with tons of words from elsewhere, the rules aren't really going to be rules. (there is of course a much more linguistically accurate way to say this)
Part germanic, part normandic, part latin and frankish is what has contributed it to be evolved into lingua franca of today. At one point in history of US formation they probably considered to have german and french to be official languages as well.
French and Catalan aren't pronounced as they are written at all. Both languages have spelling competitions/TV shows.
There is an excellent TEDx video where two linguists that are advocating for a reform of the French orthography invent a word and then write a script to list all the ways it can be spelled, following the existing rules of French spelling. The result is 240 ways to spell it.
I'm sorry but this is simply false. Example in German, "die Hose", "der Sport" - s is spoken completely differently. Also, "die Schule" - sch is spoken (almost) the same as s in Sport. In Serbian/Croatian/Bosnian if you write "s" you say "s", no matter if it's first or second or third letter or if it's surrounded by "c" or "t" or "a" or whatever.
Especially it's false in French with 17 different ways to write "e" or "o" even though it's spoken the same...
This is more generally the concept of Orthographic depth [1]
A recent study attempted to categorize languages and found English and French to be among the most opaque, Finnish and Korean to be the most transparent, and German in the middle. [2]
asterisk note: The study only looked at 14 languages.
The French result is interesting. It was fine - not great, not terrible - on the readability score, and by far the worst on writability. (The 2nd worst, English, got 3x the writability score.) That, combined with the fact that this metric was based on how much trouble a neural net had goes a long way toward explaining why my phone can do text-to-speech in French just fine, but can't take dictation to save its life.
In a dictée, you listen to a longer passage, and the challenge is to transcribe what the person wrote.
They're also used for grammar practice. In that case, the challenge is that there might be many written forms of the sentence that would be pronounced the same as what was said, but only one is grammatically correct.
French was at some point written more akin to spoken, with variations in-between writers (and sometimes in text too).
Now the orthography is hard mainly due to: (1) change in the language not reflected in the writing, (2) etymological speeling choices made on standardization and (3) latent phonological information.
Instances of (1) include graphemes likes "au" [o].
Example of (2) is "pied" with final letter here to refer to Greek "podo".
Point (3) is more complex. Take "parent" were final t is mute. Its presence makes is clear it’s related to "parental". Some with pairs like "grand" / "grande" were in the feminine form the final d is pronounced.
Edit: Tibetan alphabet is notoriously difficult, and Thai alphabet is quite hard too, so the problem exists elsewhere as well even when staying in the realm of alphabets.
The Tibetan script isn't difficult at all. You just need to learn the sound changes for the past five, six hundred years and apply them to logically arrive at "tro" for something written "bsgribs" -- but it's all very logical and clear. As my teachers made clear at university, using the Grundriss der Klassischen Tibetischen Schriftsprache and books of a similar age.
Having to learn a significant portion of the phonological/phonetic history of a language to read it is exactly something that can be considered difficult. In fact, most people don’t even know what a phonological or phonetic change is, and can’t give an example.
You might need to work on your reading comprehension. Particularly when it comes to sarcasm, or irony. I did quote my teacher verbatim, and he wasn't using neither irony nor sarcasm when calling this tour de force "easy". But I was...
You're right, it is totally alien. I still remember when I had started learning English, I was completely baffled why would somebody use double letters, or sometimes pronounce one letter one way and sometimes (same letter!) the other way...
There are no spelling bees here. We learn to read and write (with two alternate scripts, Latin and Cyrillic) in the first grade, and that's it. It's easy, unless someone has dyslexia, or a similar condition.
Balkan countries can't seem to agree on this question as well.
There's a current dispute between Bulgaria and (North) Macedonia. Basically, Bulgaria is not willing to recognize the Macedonian language, with their vice-prime-minister recently saying it's the "Esperanto language on the Balkans". They're also veto Macedonia's EU membership negotiations. It's an ongoing, heated discussion which has (unfortunately) caused hatred between the countries (North Macedonia and Bulgaria have been mostly friendly between each other in the past).
Macedonia has a large ethnic Bulgarian population by origin. The running joke of Bulgarians is that Macedonians are really Bulgarians with a fake history. It's no surprise, after the split of Yugoslavia, which had many different ethnic minorities.
Eastern Europe is a brewing pot of cultural diversity and history.
Macedonians regularly apply for Bulgarian citizenship if they can prove their origin is from Bulgaria, so as to get a backdoor into the EU, they get a Bulgarian passport. [1]
Eastern Europe / the Balkans are pretty complex. They have been ruled by The first and second Bulgarian Empires, The Byzantine Empire, the Roman Empire, and the Ottomans.
> Eastern Europe / the Balkans are pretty complex. They have been ruled by The first and second Bulgarian Empires, The Byzantine Empire, the Roman Empire, and the Ottomans.
Pretty much sums it up, but you forgot the Most Serene Republic of Venice :)
Don't forget the relationship between Italy and Albania.
Also, it might be worth noting that although influenced by the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and Albania separately broke ties with Stalin in a pretty bold move for the time.
I think this glosses over corruption in Bulgaria[1] and the fact that a lot of people got a Bulgarian passport without actually having any Bulgarian roots.
Heh - I understand this is (mostly?) in jest, and I'm not going out of my way deliberately seeking offence.
Having left the Balkans, I find it very liberating, these days, when a proposal or idea of mine gets shot down, that I don't have to wonder: "Did they think I am a liar?", "Did I not articulate it over well enough?" and the like. It is such a relief, to know - it was most likely the idea, not myself.
Is there any question on which Balkan countries can find consensus? This is a part of the world where you have family feuds that have existed for more than 6 centuries.
Meanwhile, the big western nations that started 2 world wars, gassed 6 million people (plus some tens of thousands of soldiers in WWI), and gone to war and occupied peoples all around the globe as colonial powers, somehow managed to even pin WWI on the Balkans (as if it was the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand the cause, and not a mere pretext, the cause being western european power plays, of the same powers that were the dominant forces in the war).
The contrived Greek objection to 'Macedonia' was that the name was somehow indicative of territorial ambitions. Bulgaria was the first state to recognize independent Macedonia nearly 30 years ago which makes the bickering over whether Macedonians get to call themselves Macedonian and speak Macedonian one of the remaining zero-stakes disputes of small nations around.
>one of the remaining zero-stakes disputes of small nations around
Which is the kind of disputes big nations use to influence local policies, sell weapons, create satellite states, etc, to use for their higher-stakes disputes...
The languages and dialects in the blob referred to as 'Serbo-Croatian' are much, much more closely related to each other and generally mutually intelligible in contrast to even neighbouring languages like Slovenian and Macedonian.
And of course, many people in the Balkans speak far less related languages - Albanian, Romanian, Greek, Turkish, etc.
There’s also Kajkavian language and language of Hvar/Brač islands (lots of Italian words) which aren’t even understandable by the majority of Serbo-Croatian population.
Yeah inside of Croatia itself there's a split between the former Venetian parts and the more inland parts. I know that when I guessed "hleb" (like Russian) for bread in Split I was told that that was a word for it but would mark me as an inland Croatian speaker. I can't remember the actual bread word they used, but Wiktionary leads me to believe it might have been "kruh." Hopefully Cunningham can help me out here.
My friend's brother who studied the language at Cambridge always called it "Serbo-Croat", but "Serbo-Croatian" seems to have almost completely replaced that term over the years.
On the other side of that coin, roughly in the 90s over there people started picking frequent fights over the order of the two words. Some wanted Croat-Serbo variant (hrvatsko-srpski). Others shrugged as they were neither and didn't have a horse in the fight. But the stunning absurdity that captures living over there in the era was when Croats and Serbs demanded UN provide them with translators for negotiations. With earpieces and everything. Just months prior, they spoke the same language. In the same government buildings.
Getting translators for your preferred language is an acceptable form of government grift.
The EU intends to employ 50 people to translate EU legislation into Irish [0]. That's not something that has any direct benefits: there's no one who can read Irish legalese better than English. It does have some second-order effects: if you consider it's culturally valuable to promote and preserve the Irish language, one great way to do that is to provide well paid jobs for people who learn it.
Similar but on the regional level in Spain: valenciano (Valencia region) and catalan (Catalonia) are nearly identical dialects, but due to local pride reasons, people claim they are totally separate languages.
This does not seem to be accurate, in my experience.
I've never heard an actual speaker of the language (or of either language, if you want), claiming that they are two separate languages. If anything, there is a tension regarding certain choices in the standardization of the orthography that are sometimes claimed to be Barcelona-centric and disregard the Valencian way of speaking. This may be true, I'm not a linguist to judge; but it might certainly justify having separate entries in e.g., websites, just like one often sees for american and european spanish and french, or for brazilian and european portuguese (which nobody claims are separate languages). Anyhow, the speech in the cities Tortosa and Castelló (on both sides of the purported boundary between the languages) is nearly identical, and very different from that of, say, Barcelona or Girona.
The way you say "coffee" while understood by all sides, embeds enough information to determine your ethnicity/religion/nationality/place of birth and is weaponized for political use.
The truth is, people understand each other just fine. Pushing for giving a name to "the common language" or enumerating how many "different languages" exist has little to do with linguistics.
Years ago I saw for the first time the word "balkanization" being used by people not from the Balkans (I'm not a native English speaker). It was quite surprising.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balkanization
But they are still united by their common language. Even if they heavily deny it, and write in different letters. And call their little dialect a full blown independent language.
Semiotic slavistic researchers really need to be more politicians than researchers, it's a minefield still.
Regarding Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, Montenegrin (done in order of population size)... native speaker here. These are four names for one and the same language - in a sense that American, Canadian, British, and Australian are the same language. What one says they speak is usually indicative of the nationality they choose to belong to. Those that say they speak Serbo-Croatian are usually those that in some sense identify as Yugoslavian or "undeclared" with respect to nationality. Curiously, Yugoslavian (meaning south slavic) as a language never officially existed, although this would probably best describe it.
In ex-Yugoslavia there is a rather pronounced distinction between citizenship and nationality. In Bosnia and Herzegovina (BH) this distinction is actually enshrined into the constitution. Moreover, in BH all official documents must be translated into 3 constituent languages. As a funny example of this see how cigarette packets look in BH [1]. In all three instances they say exactly the same thing. NOTE: Cyrillic alphabet, as used in Serbia, has an isomorphic relationship to the Croatian latin alphabet (this same latin alphabet is official in the Serbian "language" too, although it is not called Croatian). To get an entertaining idea about how complicated things are in BH see [2] or [3].
> In ex-Yugoslavia there is a rather pronounced distinction between citizenship and nationality.
As a Yugoslav war refugee, this is spot on.
Small sidenote: Even if all of these languages are effectively one big "super-Balkan" language it is a _very_ divisive point from an ethnicity perspective given the number of conflicts this region has had over the centuries. While it's not my cup of tea, the reality is that people from the Balkans will often judge others from that region (both positively and negatively) based on these almost-imperceptible language differences since they signal to the listener some degree of ethnicity, nationality, socioeconomic level, and education level.
This has been my experience traveling in ex-Yugoslavia. It's exactly the same language, but It's difficult getting anyone to admit that for the reasons you stated. They really didn't have any interest in being grouped together in any way. Though, almost everyone I spoke with who remembered Yugoslavia said they missed it and things were better back then. It could just be rose colored glasses though.
In the article, Weinreich presents this statement as a remark of an auditor at a lecture series given between 13 December 1943 and 12 June 1944:
A teacher at a Bronx high school once appeared among the auditors. He had come to America as a child and the entire time had never heard that Yiddish had a history and could also serve for higher matters.... Once after a lecture he approached me and asked, 'What is the difference between a dialect and language?' I thought that the maskilic contempt had affected him, and tried to lead him to the right path, but he interrupted me: 'I know that, but I will give you a better definition. A language is a dialect with an army and navy.' From that very time I made sure to remember that I must convey this wonderful formulation of the social plight of Yiddish to a large audience.
I'm not a linguist but I think it would be useful to have a unifying term for these languages. If I say that I speak 4 languages at a native level, referring to the languages listed in the parent post, it's not exactly the same (to put it mildly) as someone speaking Russian, Polish, Bulgarian, and Czech at a native level, even if these languages too come from the same family.
As an anecdote, a friend once told me, that to really speak a language you must be able to understand jokes and poetry in that language. I tend to agree. With that in mind it's worth mentioning that to a great extent people from Serbia, Croatia, BH, and Montenegro listen to the same music, read the same literature, and tell the same jokes
Wikipedia calls them all Serbo-Croatian [1], more or less:
> Serbo-Croatian – also called Serbo-Croat, Serbo-Croat-Bosnian (SCB), Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian (BCS), and Bosnian-Croatian-Montenegrin-Serbian (BCMS) – is a South Slavic language and the primary language of Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Montenegro. It is a pluricentric language with four mutually intelligible standard varieties, namely Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian and Montenegrin.
There's also some story about how these all derive from Shtokavian via Eastern Herzegovinian, so those might be useful names too.
And, of course, how could we forget the Balkan sprachbund [2]!
Thats only partly true on a very broad macro level - for example someone mentioned Kajkavian, which is dialect of Croatian but sounds a lot more Slovenian :)
In fact its the dialect spoken by the majority of people in Croatia (even though Stokavian is the "official" Croatian) and sometimes argued to be more than just a dialect. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kajkavian
Personally I always found the comparison "Croatian vs. Serbian is the same as US English vs. British" a great oversimplification. It's not just an intonation or alphabet, it's also a lot more different words (that might mean the same things) than for example between the variants of English. Yes, people understand each other - but they're also attuned to all the different dialects within the "main language groups" so they actually know/learn more words for same objects (for example Croatians will be happy to list different words for bread/tomatos/etc i.e. synonyms that they might know the meaning of but don't necessarily use daily - and those different synonyms depending on the dialect might be closer to Serbian, Croatian, Slovenian, Italian, Turkish, Hungarian or old Austrian).
In a way I think this invalidates the premise of the article - that there is "a peculiar form of theater going on" and that the governments are pretending by needing court translators. If the countries are using not only different alphabets, but in part also different words (even though that other surrounding countries might somewhat understand those different words) - whats a viable alternative then?
British, American and Australian use different words too, and even have different meanings for the same words (eg. fanny, boot, thongs). Yet anybody requesting translation between these would be laughed out of court, and rightly so.
Also, doesn't your claim that BCS speakers are attuned to different dialect groups and understand their terms even further undermine the claim that there's an actual need for translation? By and large, speakers of English aren't (although thanks to Hollywood everybody knows some American), but an Aussie in NYC or a Brit in Melbourne is not going to have any real issues communicating.
Yes of course there are synonyms in all languages - but I specified "a lot more words". If you look at the link I included in my first reply under "vocabulary comparison" you'll see an example of what I mean. And thats just the biggest one - there are islands in Croatia where I (as a native speaker) might have better luck understanding Czech than the local variants.
Don't think that undermines my claim at all - they understand the words because they're familiar within the slavic language group in general (even though they might be derivations and used or spelled differently). Its like saying Italian/Spanish are the same because speakers might understand words between them. With the translation argument - you also of course have to ignore the fact that Serbia writes in cyrillic and Croatia in latin alphabet.
As a Serbian speaker from Belgrade, I'll understand a Croatian from Zagreb better than I'd understand Serbian spoken in Pirot.
Basically, the point is about what defines a language as a distinct one.
Grammar is pretty much the same with one standard preferring one form or the other (eg. infinitive vs "da" + present). Vocabulary is over 90% identical, though I am sure top 500 words in both spoken dialects have a larger discrepancy. Alphabets are different, but they are almost bijectively mapped (only differ orthographically in digraphs like NJ/Nj/nj where Cyrillic has only Њ/њ), and you may have missed it, but Serbian population actually uses Latin script for >80% of all Serbian writing.
The article mentions a push to differentiate languages further, probably most evident in Croatia in early 90s.
But three students in Bosnia speaking identical language (grammar/vocabulary thougj the script might differ) of 3 different nationalities would officially claim they speak three different languages. If you don't see the absurdity in that, that's up to you.
Yes but the article mainly focuses on the slavic languages, Serbian, Montenegrin, Croatian and Bosnian are there any more non-extinct south slavic languages that can be considered as one pluricentric language?
Slovenian is fairly close, and you can probably lump in Bulgarian and Macedonian in there as well.
On one hand, I'd consider it a stretch for Bulgarian/Macedonian and Bosnian/Croatian/Montenegrin/Serbian to be considered the same language.
On the other, there's also Torlakian (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torlakian_dialect), a dying dialect that's been shared between Serbians/Bulgarians/Macedonians around the border. It's considered to be a dialect of both Serbian and Bulgarian, depending on who you ask, really bluring the line between the two.
Well if i talk to somebody from croatia in germany i will call it "naš" (our language). I am from Bosnia (technically also i am a Bošnjak, which is the main ethnicity in Bosnia population-wise) and identify as a Yugoslav, but have German citizenship :)
So it is a bit difficult to explain. Especially since someone can be born in Bosnia/Croatia and be a Serb or vice versa
Yes, but at that time it was still part of Austria :) So you had a Serb born in Croatia, which legally was Austria. Doesn't get more confusing than that nationality-wise.
Well Tesla was born in 1856 - so if Croatia was Austria, then Serbia was the Ottoman Empire at the time :)
His family lived in the area of modern day Croatia for hundreds of years. Nikola visited Serbia only once for 31 hours in total.
Yeah - its totally confusing. If Nikola was not Croatian after his family living in the area of Croatia for 500 years, how is Novak Djokovic Serbian for just being born in Serbia (while his parents are from Montenegro and Croatia)? :)
Article touches on this: concept of a nation vs citizenship is a relatively new one (late 18th century with the rise of state-nations).
One can argue the usefulness of any of those distinctions, but there is going to be some genetic and some cultural part to the "nation" definition (around the Balkans, it's been the religion more than anything else to define a nation — like language, I would consider that a cultural component).
You seem to be going strictly for the geographical distinction (with time a contributing factor), but that's in opposition to how nations are defined everywhere (otherwise, it's all Croatians in Croatia today and there wouldn't exist any "Irish Americans", even with Americans being already a mash-up special nation). In Serbian people try to make the distinction by using "Srbi" and "Srbijanci" (citizens), basically Serb vs Serbians, though it is a linguistic stretch (just like we've got Bosniaks/Bošnjaci for a nation to oppose it to Bosnians/Bosanci which includes anyone from Bosnia and Herzegovina).
It is a good article, but the name is misleading. Albanian, Greek, Romanian are not Slavic languages at all. There is also Turkish, and few other minor languages spoken.
This article should be named: "What language do people in former Yugoslavian countries speak"
More than half of the Balkans are not slavic.
As for slavic languages: Croatian and Serbian are pretty much the same, and Bosnian is similar close enough. Slovenian is slightly different, then there is Bulgarian. Macedonian is just a dialect of Bulgarian language.
Non slavic languages:
Albanian - Isolate of indo-european languages (its own branch)
Greek - its own branch of indo-european languages
Romanian - Latin branch, with some Dacian (less than 2%)
Other Minor Languages: Turkish, Romani Variants, etc - (aka, i.e. not to be confused with romanian, but it is an indian origin language)
Even they might share some words, name of objects, or food dishes, A Greek, an Albanian, a Slavic, and a Romanian person will not be able to understand each other at all.
At this moment there is only one physical border we have. Planet Earth. Please work and build understanding towards ascending above all borders, both physical and mental.
I am a homo sapiens, a living being from this Universe. Born on the Planet Earth. My mother and father were also homo sapiens. Their mothers and fathers too. Several million generations before, their mothers and fathers were some types of primates, who knows.
I respect the languages my mother and father and their mothers and fathers spoke and taught me, but I do not want to be limited to those.
Therefore, I also tried to learn few other languages. To name some well-known: English. Deutsch. Italian. Basic. Pascal. C. C++. Forth. Modula II. Logo. Lisp. Fortran. Cobol. Java. Javascript. Probably few more that I don't remember :)
Some of them I only studied on paper, without any direct opportunity to apply it in real life. I studied those, just for the sake of studying.
I love to listen to people speaking in many languages and I love when people use many dialects of the same language, that are so different to each other that they barely understand themselves.
All of that sounds pretty cool, especially if your only focus on diversity is limited to the food you eat and the songs you listen to.
But the only real thing that makes it possible for people to live together is uniformity. Same language, same customs, same expectations, at least same calendar.
It seems to be absolutely laughable that people from anglophone countries nowadays love to talk about diversity when they are unable to find a common ground with their rural compatriots and all their “diverse” friends are the same middle class people grown up on Hollywood movies and Rowling books.
Native Macedonian speaker here, born and lived in the country the 1st XX years of my life, living in an English speaking country for the last YY years now. Two data points.
Episode 1. Growing up I picked up Serbian/Croatian without knowing, from comic books, movies (never synchronized, foreign movies subtitled only), songs and books. Got the surprise of my life 1st time I went to Belgrade (while in high school). I could understand everything spoken, I could read too. They could not understand a word I was speaking in Macedonian. And I spoke their language really badly, laghably so. ;-) It was funny.
When I visit my old home, I have the impression that the youth nowdays don't understand Serbian/Croatian as much as we did.
Episode 2. Sometime in the 90-s, I went to Sofia to see the city for the 1st time. I bought bunch of Computer Science books, the likes of The Art of Computer Programming and similar. Some bits I could understand, but all of the computer related words were translated in Bulgarian (from their English forms) and I had hard time following. Some works I could guess (remember the term for computer keyboard was similar to what we use for a piano keyboard), but looking up and translating sapped my enthusiasm for CS. :-)
These days sometimes when I hear "Macedonian is a dialect of Bulgarian", I give a news site like https://www.dw.com/bg/ a try, to see what I can understand. I recognize lots of words, the meaning of simpler sentences, news on current events news that I already am familiar with. Longer more complicated sentences, or themes I am not familiar with, I do struggle, to get the meaning of what is written.
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 166 ms ] threadRussian has progressed/evolved more than many of the other Slavic languages (due to more speakers, being a part of an empire etc.). So there are significant differences between Russian and most other Slavic languages (even the closest ones, Ukranian and Belorussian). These differences are everywhere: in word forms, tenses, stress, pronunciation etc.
Many other Slavic languages (especially Balkanian) retain a lot of forms, sounds, meanings that are archaic by Russian standards: anything from Bulgarian `ъ` sound which disappeared from Russian centuries ago, to words like `лепа` (beautiful) in Serbian which hasn't been used in Russian for over a century, to words like Polish `uroda` (beauty) which switched its meaning to mean "ugly" in Russian.
And the list goes on: locative and vocative cases exist in Serbian, haven't existed in Russian for a long time; definiteness of Macedonian and Bulgarian hasn't existed in Russian for a long time, if ever; etc. etc.
So all in all, other Slavic speakers have a higher chance and luck understanding Russian speakers, than Russian speakers other Slavik languages.
Locative example: в саду (vs о саде) Vocative example: Маш, иди сюда
I'd guestimate at least 10% speaks both English or German relatively fluently, and I personally don't know anyone from here that speaks Russian fluently.
?? I dont' quite follow what you're saying. The sound 'o' can be written in French in a lot of different ways, some of them even don't even have an 'o' in them ("au", "eau", "aux" "aux" and I probably forgot some). It's notoriously difficult to write things in French just because of the discrepancy between what you hear and what you should write.
Au in French is never pronounced as it is written (like augen in German or aulico in Italian), but always as a O
Once you know the rules it's pretty easy
Also French (like Italian, Spanish and others) have accents to help you decide how to pronounce a word
Now consider these popular examples of English inconsistencies
The bandage was wound around his leg to cover his wound.
The insurance on the invalid was invalid
I did not object to the object.
Not disagreeing with your overall point, most romance language have a much easier mapping from speaking -> writing than does english, but the principle of "write as you speak" is probably the simplest you can get.
(ie, the letter 'c' is used to represent different sounds in the word 'calambre', 'chorrizo', 'proyeccion'. It's not complicated to learn at all, but you still have a one -> many mapping on the letter -> sound. For languages like Serbian, it is straight up one to one.
Cane (dog) and cena (dinner) in Italian are two examples of soft and hard C that depend on which vowel follows the letter C.
It wasn't like that originally, Roman C sounded always like K, Caesar was pronounced Kaesar (German's Kaiser comes from it).
Than middle age came and things changed, but the pronunciation stayed consistent after that
C+a, C+o, C+u = hard C
C+e, C+i = soft C
So it's not simply about "what you write is what you get" but it's the rule that is consistently the same
Phonetically the examples above are unambiguous though
Soft c = voiceless postalover affricate
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_postalveolar_affri...
hard c = Voiceless velar plosive
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_velar_plosive
They are not exactly what you write, but they have precise phonetic symbols expressing how they sound (which is not always how they look on paper)
By convention, in French every time you find written: "au", "eau", "aux" "aux" you pronounce it "o".
If you hear "o", it may be "o" or any of the above.
There may be small "nuances" like with Z in some languages that can be hard or soft (there are anyway "coded" rules - not necessarily "simple" - but only a handful of exceptions), Italian:
http://www.attori.com/dizione/Diz11.htm
Now go to English and read aloud (say):
flier
plier
pier
tier
tire
It is true that if you happened to know French well, and you are familiar with the language writing conventions you can read the language just fine, but that's tautology.
Roughly half of the letters written in French are not pronounced, either because they come too soon in the word, or because they are followed by another letter or because they are too late in the word. Unless the next word starts with specific letter, in that case you do pronounce the ending of the previous word. Sure, for a native speaker it could be very easy to read and write, and it might be determined by very consistent set of few dozen rules, but I would say that reading or writing French is anything but straightforward.
When you have a language that's half nordic, half french, half german, with tons of words from elsewhere, the rules aren't really going to be rules. (there is of course a much more linguistically accurate way to say this)
There is an excellent TEDx video where two linguists that are advocating for a reform of the French orthography invent a word and then write a script to list all the ways it can be spelled, following the existing rules of French spelling. The result is 240 ways to spell it.
https://youtu.be/5YO7Vg1ByA8?t=266
Especially it's false in French with 17 different ways to write "e" or "o" even though it's spoken the same...
A recent study attempted to categorize languages and found English and French to be among the most opaque, Finnish and Korean to be the most transparent, and German in the middle. [2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthographic_depth
[2] https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.13321
The French result is interesting. It was fine - not great, not terrible - on the readability score, and by far the worst on writability. (The 2nd worst, English, got 3x the writability score.) That, combined with the fact that this metric was based on how much trouble a neural net had goes a long way toward explaining why my phone can do text-to-speech in French just fine, but can't take dictation to save its life.
They're also used for grammar practice. In that case, the challenge is that there might be many written forms of the sentence that would be pronounced the same as what was said, but only one is grammatically correct.
Now the orthography is hard mainly due to: (1) change in the language not reflected in the writing, (2) etymological speeling choices made on standardization and (3) latent phonological information.
Instances of (1) include graphemes likes "au" [o].
Example of (2) is "pied" with final letter here to refer to Greek "podo".
Point (3) is more complex. Take "parent" were final t is mute. Its presence makes is clear it’s related to "parental". Some with pairs like "grand" / "grande" were in the feminine form the final d is pronounced.
Edit: Tibetan alphabet is notoriously difficult, and Thai alphabet is quite hard too, so the problem exists elsewhere as well even when staying in the realm of alphabets.
There's a current dispute between Bulgaria and (North) Macedonia. Basically, Bulgaria is not willing to recognize the Macedonian language, with their vice-prime-minister recently saying it's the "Esperanto language on the Balkans". They're also veto Macedonia's EU membership negotiations. It's an ongoing, heated discussion which has (unfortunately) caused hatred between the countries (North Macedonia and Bulgaria have been mostly friendly between each other in the past).
Eastern Europe is a brewing pot of cultural diversity and history.
Macedonians regularly apply for Bulgarian citizenship if they can prove their origin is from Bulgaria, so as to get a backdoor into the EU, they get a Bulgarian passport. [1]
Eastern Europe / the Balkans are pretty complex. They have been ruled by The first and second Bulgarian Empires, The Byzantine Empire, the Roman Empire, and the Ottomans.
[1] https://www.novinite.com/articles/112811/Bulgarian+Passports....
Pretty much sums it up, but you forgot the Most Serene Republic of Venice :)
Also, it might be worth noting that although influenced by the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and Albania separately broke ties with Stalin in a pretty bold move for the time.
1) It was already on the periphery of the SU sphere of influence, not central (unlike the unlucky Hungary, Czechoslovakia etc)
2) It was already agreed it will be 50:50 sphere of influence SU:US, at Yalta conference only couple of years back
3) In 1948 SU still lacked the atom bomb, while US already got it
4) Memory of WW2 still very fresh, would SU risk confrontation with US over far&away lands
[1] https://www.dw.com/en/bulgarian-passport-scam-officials-arre...
Funnily, the equivalent running joke in Serbia is that Macedonians are Serbs with a speech disorder.
Having left the Balkans, I find it very liberating, these days, when a proposal or idea of mine gets shot down, that I don't have to wonder: "Did they think I am a liar?", "Did I not articulate it over well enough?" and the like. It is such a relief, to know - it was most likely the idea, not myself.
Meanwhile, the big western nations that started 2 world wars, gassed 6 million people (plus some tens of thousands of soldiers in WWI), and gone to war and occupied peoples all around the globe as colonial powers, somehow managed to even pin WWI on the Balkans (as if it was the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand the cause, and not a mere pretext, the cause being western european power plays, of the same powers that were the dominant forces in the war).
Which is the kind of disputes big nations use to influence local policies, sell weapons, create satellite states, etc, to use for their higher-stakes disputes...
And of course, many people in the Balkans speak far less related languages - Albanian, Romanian, Greek, Turkish, etc.
Hleb is used probably more in Serbia than in Croatia.
It's basically a pseudo-isolate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albanian_language#Grammar
The EU intends to employ 50 people to translate EU legislation into Irish [0]. That's not something that has any direct benefits: there's no one who can read Irish legalese better than English. It does have some second-order effects: if you consider it's culturally valuable to promote and preserve the Irish language, one great way to do that is to provide well paid jobs for people who learn it.
[0] https://www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/european-...
I've never heard an actual speaker of the language (or of either language, if you want), claiming that they are two separate languages. If anything, there is a tension regarding certain choices in the standardization of the orthography that are sometimes claimed to be Barcelona-centric and disregard the Valencian way of speaking. This may be true, I'm not a linguist to judge; but it might certainly justify having separate entries in e.g., websites, just like one often sees for american and european spanish and french, or for brazilian and european portuguese (which nobody claims are separate languages). Anyhow, the speech in the cities Tortosa and Castelló (on both sides of the purported boundary between the languages) is nearly identical, and very different from that of, say, Barcelona or Girona.
The truth is, people understand each other just fine. Pushing for giving a name to "the common language" or enumerating how many "different languages" exist has little to do with linguistics.
This is also true, to an extent, for words meaning "tea".
https://qz.com/1176962/map-how-the-word-tea-spread-over-land...
After Yugoslavia fell apart, “they speak a different language” was used as an argument for creating different countries.
It predates those wars by a hundred years, originating from small independent states that emerged as Ottomans were losing control over the territory.
Semiotic slavistic researchers really need to be more politicians than researchers, it's a minefield still.
In ex-Yugoslavia there is a rather pronounced distinction between citizenship and nationality. In Bosnia and Herzegovina (BH) this distinction is actually enshrined into the constitution. Moreover, in BH all official documents must be translated into 3 constituent languages. As a funny example of this see how cigarette packets look in BH [1]. In all three instances they say exactly the same thing. NOTE: Cyrillic alphabet, as used in Serbia, has an isomorphic relationship to the Croatian latin alphabet (this same latin alphabet is official in the Serbian "language" too, although it is not called Croatian). To get an entertaining idea about how complicated things are in BH see [2] or [3].
[1] https://www.globaltobaccocontrol.org/tpackss/share-pack/pack... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KO0rEwwyB0g [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sCEYDdMue-8
As a Yugoslav war refugee, this is spot on.
Small sidenote: Even if all of these languages are effectively one big "super-Balkan" language it is a _very_ divisive point from an ethnicity perspective given the number of conflicts this region has had over the centuries. While it's not my cup of tea, the reality is that people from the Balkans will often judge others from that region (both positively and negatively) based on these almost-imperceptible language differences since they signal to the listener some degree of ethnicity, nationality, socioeconomic level, and education level.
A language is a dialect with an army.
There are, perhaps, few places where this is more true than in the Balkans. At least none come to mind.
A teacher at a Bronx high school once appeared among the auditors. He had come to America as a child and the entire time had never heard that Yiddish had a history and could also serve for higher matters.... Once after a lecture he approached me and asked, 'What is the difference between a dialect and language?' I thought that the maskilic contempt had affected him, and tried to lead him to the right path, but he interrupted me: 'I know that, but I will give you a better definition. A language is a dialect with an army and navy.' From that very time I made sure to remember that I must convey this wonderful formulation of the social plight of Yiddish to a large audience.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with_a...
As an anecdote, a friend once told me, that to really speak a language you must be able to understand jokes and poetry in that language. I tend to agree. With that in mind it's worth mentioning that to a great extent people from Serbia, Croatia, BH, and Montenegro listen to the same music, read the same literature, and tell the same jokes
> Serbo-Croatian – also called Serbo-Croat, Serbo-Croat-Bosnian (SCB), Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian (BCS), and Bosnian-Croatian-Montenegrin-Serbian (BCMS) – is a South Slavic language and the primary language of Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Montenegro. It is a pluricentric language with four mutually intelligible standard varieties, namely Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian and Montenegrin.
There's also some story about how these all derive from Shtokavian via Eastern Herzegovinian, so those might be useful names too.
And, of course, how could we forget the Balkan sprachbund [2]!
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serbo-Croatian
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balkan_sprachbund
In fact its the dialect spoken by the majority of people in Croatia (even though Stokavian is the "official" Croatian) and sometimes argued to be more than just a dialect. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kajkavian
Personally I always found the comparison "Croatian vs. Serbian is the same as US English vs. British" a great oversimplification. It's not just an intonation or alphabet, it's also a lot more different words (that might mean the same things) than for example between the variants of English. Yes, people understand each other - but they're also attuned to all the different dialects within the "main language groups" so they actually know/learn more words for same objects (for example Croatians will be happy to list different words for bread/tomatos/etc i.e. synonyms that they might know the meaning of but don't necessarily use daily - and those different synonyms depending on the dialect might be closer to Serbian, Croatian, Slovenian, Italian, Turkish, Hungarian or old Austrian).
In a way I think this invalidates the premise of the article - that there is "a peculiar form of theater going on" and that the governments are pretending by needing court translators. If the countries are using not only different alphabets, but in part also different words (even though that other surrounding countries might somewhat understand those different words) - whats a viable alternative then?
Also, doesn't your claim that BCS speakers are attuned to different dialect groups and understand their terms even further undermine the claim that there's an actual need for translation? By and large, speakers of English aren't (although thanks to Hollywood everybody knows some American), but an Aussie in NYC or a Brit in Melbourne is not going to have any real issues communicating.
Don't think that undermines my claim at all - they understand the words because they're familiar within the slavic language group in general (even though they might be derivations and used or spelled differently). Its like saying Italian/Spanish are the same because speakers might understand words between them. With the translation argument - you also of course have to ignore the fact that Serbia writes in cyrillic and Croatia in latin alphabet.
Basically, the point is about what defines a language as a distinct one.
Grammar is pretty much the same with one standard preferring one form or the other (eg. infinitive vs "da" + present). Vocabulary is over 90% identical, though I am sure top 500 words in both spoken dialects have a larger discrepancy. Alphabets are different, but they are almost bijectively mapped (only differ orthographically in digraphs like NJ/Nj/nj where Cyrillic has only Њ/њ), and you may have missed it, but Serbian population actually uses Latin script for >80% of all Serbian writing.
The article mentions a push to differentiate languages further, probably most evident in Croatia in early 90s.
But three students in Bosnia speaking identical language (grammar/vocabulary thougj the script might differ) of 3 different nationalities would officially claim they speak three different languages. If you don't see the absurdity in that, that's up to you.
South-slavic, is it not?
This article should be nammed: "What language do people in former Yougoslavian countries speak"
More than half of the Balkans are no slavic.
On one hand, I'd consider it a stretch for Bulgarian/Macedonian and Bosnian/Croatian/Montenegrin/Serbian to be considered the same language.
On the other, there's also Torlakian (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torlakian_dialect), a dying dialect that's been shared between Serbians/Bulgarians/Macedonians around the border. It's considered to be a dialect of both Serbian and Bulgarian, depending on who you ask, really bluring the line between the two.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Slavonic
For the pronunciation it is much closer to serbocroatian than bulgarian of today which seems strange.
So it is a bit difficult to explain. Especially since someone can be born in Bosnia/Croatia and be a Serb or vice versa
A famous historical example of this would be Nikola Tesla, no?
His family lived in the area of modern day Croatia for hundreds of years. Nikola visited Serbia only once for 31 hours in total.
Yeah - its totally confusing. If Nikola was not Croatian after his family living in the area of Croatia for 500 years, how is Novak Djokovic Serbian for just being born in Serbia (while his parents are from Montenegro and Croatia)? :)
One can argue the usefulness of any of those distinctions, but there is going to be some genetic and some cultural part to the "nation" definition (around the Balkans, it's been the religion more than anything else to define a nation — like language, I would consider that a cultural component).
You seem to be going strictly for the geographical distinction (with time a contributing factor), but that's in opposition to how nations are defined everywhere (otherwise, it's all Croatians in Croatia today and there wouldn't exist any "Irish Americans", even with Americans being already a mash-up special nation). In Serbian people try to make the distinction by using "Srbi" and "Srbijanci" (citizens), basically Serb vs Serbians, though it is a linguistic stretch (just like we've got Bosniaks/Bošnjaci for a nation to oppose it to Bosnians/Bosanci which includes anyone from Bosnia and Herzegovina).
This article should be named: "What language do people in former Yugoslavian countries speak"
More than half of the Balkans are not slavic.
As for slavic languages: Croatian and Serbian are pretty much the same, and Bosnian is similar close enough. Slovenian is slightly different, then there is Bulgarian. Macedonian is just a dialect of Bulgarian language.
Non slavic languages:
Albanian - Isolate of indo-european languages (its own branch)
Greek - its own branch of indo-european languages
Romanian - Latin branch, with some Dacian (less than 2%)
Other Minor Languages: Turkish, Romani Variants, etc - (aka, i.e. not to be confused with romanian, but it is an indian origin language)
As for the whole peninsula, they share a lot of common words due to the ottoman empire's past, which is called a Balkan Sprachbund https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balkan_sprachbund
Even they might share some words, name of objects, or food dishes, A Greek, an Albanian, a Slavic, and a Romanian person will not be able to understand each other at all.
Yeah no.
I am a homo sapiens, a living being from this Universe. Born on the Planet Earth. My mother and father were also homo sapiens. Their mothers and fathers too. Several million generations before, their mothers and fathers were some types of primates, who knows.
I respect the languages my mother and father and their mothers and fathers spoke and taught me, but I do not want to be limited to those.
Therefore, I also tried to learn few other languages. To name some well-known: English. Deutsch. Italian. Basic. Pascal. C. C++. Forth. Modula II. Logo. Lisp. Fortran. Cobol. Java. Javascript. Probably few more that I don't remember :)
Some of them I only studied on paper, without any direct opportunity to apply it in real life. I studied those, just for the sake of studying.
I love to listen to people speaking in many languages and I love when people use many dialects of the same language, that are so different to each other that they barely understand themselves.
Diversity should be considered a blessing.
But the only real thing that makes it possible for people to live together is uniformity. Same language, same customs, same expectations, at least same calendar.
It seems to be absolutely laughable that people from anglophone countries nowadays love to talk about diversity when they are unable to find a common ground with their rural compatriots and all their “diverse” friends are the same middle class people grown up on Hollywood movies and Rowling books.
Episode 1. Growing up I picked up Serbian/Croatian without knowing, from comic books, movies (never synchronized, foreign movies subtitled only), songs and books. Got the surprise of my life 1st time I went to Belgrade (while in high school). I could understand everything spoken, I could read too. They could not understand a word I was speaking in Macedonian. And I spoke their language really badly, laghably so. ;-) It was funny.
When I visit my old home, I have the impression that the youth nowdays don't understand Serbian/Croatian as much as we did.
Episode 2. Sometime in the 90-s, I went to Sofia to see the city for the 1st time. I bought bunch of Computer Science books, the likes of The Art of Computer Programming and similar. Some bits I could understand, but all of the computer related words were translated in Bulgarian (from their English forms) and I had hard time following. Some works I could guess (remember the term for computer keyboard was similar to what we use for a piano keyboard), but looking up and translating sapped my enthusiasm for CS. :-)
These days sometimes when I hear "Macedonian is a dialect of Bulgarian", I give a news site like https://www.dw.com/bg/ a try, to see what I can understand. I recognize lots of words, the meaning of simpler sentences, news on current events news that I already am familiar with. Longer more complicated sentences, or themes I am not familiar with, I do struggle, to get the meaning of what is written.