John Cowan 2008-05-10 20.15: > Leif Halvard Silli scripsit: > > > So, the issue - the macrolanguage - seems indeed to exist, merely under > > - in some "abroad" circles - another name. > > There is a dialect continuum spoken in four different countries (with > outliers elsewhere). > > There are also two separate standard languages, Serbian and Croatian, > which merged for a while (in the sense that users of each agreed to > accept the orthography and lexis of the other as also instances of their > standard form) and have since separated again. > > There is an incipient third standard language, and a label for a fourth > but no actual separate standard yet, perhaps not ever. > Not sure what you mean by "third" and "fourth". > Or as a Croat linguist put it to me back in the 1980s. "I am a native > speaker of Croatian, and therefore have a native command of Serbian > as well." > You forgot one, important, unifying thing, namely the special alphabet - or alphabets - which were crafted to unify the two - or more - "breeds" of these encompassed languages. The Serbian Cyrillic alphabet and its corresponding Croatian Latin alphabet, are the only two Latin and Cyrillic alphabets in use which are 100% interchangable - and created to be like that - except when it comes to sorting. (Though I have observed an - perhaps post-Yugoslavian - tendency to perform Cyrillic enumeration and sorting based on the Latin order values.) Only the Serbocroatian languages share these alphabets. (The Macedonian Cyrillic alphabet differ a little from the Serbian one. And the Slovenian differs a little from the Croatian one.) I have not heard that any of the Serbocroatian languages since Yugoslavia broke up have switched back to any "pre-Yugoslavian" alphabet or something. When it comes to Chinese, then the more or less common script is one of the most important reasons, as I understand it, for talking about macrolanguage. So where is the reason to view it otherwise with regard to Serbocroatian. -- leif halvard silli _______________________________________________ Ltru mailing list Ltru at ietf.org https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ltru
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