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Serbian, Croatian, and other languages

From: Garmt de Vries-Uiterweerd <garmtdevries~at~gmail.com>
Date: Tue, 30 Mar 2010 14:26:34 +0200
To: Jules Verne Forum <jvf~at~gilead.org.il>

(I changed the subject of this thread, since it's not about the CIJV anymore)

On 26 March 2010 17:07, Davor Sisovic <davor.sisovic~at~pu.htnet.hr> wrote:

> Years ago I tried to explain this Serbo-Croat problem to some Forum members
> (Garmt, do you remember?), and it's quite complicated to elaborate it in few
> words. But breafly: Former Yugoslavia had 4 official languages: Slovenian,
> Serbian, Croatian and Macedonian (and Albanian at Kosovo and part of
> Macedonia). Serbian and Croatian were pretty close and it was a kind of
> political directive that this two languages have to merge. But, in only
> reflected to their names (including the names of the school subjects): in
> Croatia this "common language" was called Croatian-Serbian, and in Serbia it
> was called Serbo-Croatian, but basically all the time they were two separate
> languages with rules created at separated Serbian and Croatian institutions.
> After 1990. (spread of Yugoslavia in todays 7 independent states) we got
> again "independent" Croatian and Serbian languages - again it was only
> change of the name, not of the content.
>
> So, in some editions of JV works id could be marked that they were
> translated to Croatian-Serbian or Serbo-Croatian language, but really it is
> Croatian or Serbian langage.

Yes, I remember quite clearly. You and Marko Obradovic did a great job
explaining this to me, when I was looking into this for my list of
translated Verne titles.

It is always difficult to identify what a language is. Sometimes it
may be a matter of choice. For my list of titles, I took the approach
to consider something a language if the speakers, or "those in charge"
(inasfar as someone can really be in charge of a language) consider it
a separate language. Therefore I consider books that were published in
the period when Serbo-Croation (or Croatian-Serbian) was promoted as a
single language to be Serbo-Croatian translations, and books that were
published earlier or later to be Serbian or Croatian.

Similarly, I treat Malay and Indonesian as different languages, even
though Indonesian is basically a standardised version of Malay. But it
was promoted as an individual language (for political reasons
obviously, so as to underline Indonesia's new position as a sovereign
state). In my opinion, books published before Indonesia's independence
can be thought of as Malay translations, later books are Indonesian.

Conversely, I treat Ottoman Turkish and modern Turkish as equivalent.
When Kemal Atatürk reformed the language in the 1920s and 1930s, the
goal was explicitly to update the language to the new political
situation, not to replace one language with another.

I may have to change my point of view regarding Romanian and
Moldovian. I treated them as different until now, because I had the
impression that the people of Moldova considered Moldavian to be a
separate language. But recently, several politicians in Moldova have
stated that the languages are in fact identical, and that it is a
matter of choice to call it Moldavian.

> Additional complications came after proclamation of separate Bosnian
> language (a kind of mixture between Croatian and Serbian), and again after
> proclamation of separate Montenegrian language.

I do have a couple of Bosnian titles in my list, but no Montenegrian
so far. Obviously, the sources I consulted may have misidentified a
book's title. I wish I had kept track of my sources from the
beginning! I'm (slowly) checking the entire database I have comiled so
far, and adding references for each title variant.

I wonder if we'll see the birth of a Kosovan language soon :)

> Facing all that problems, during my attempts to make a bibliography of JV
> editions in all former Yougoslavian countries, the first criteria has to be
> the place of publishing, not the language.

If you're compiling a list of books, I guess this is a perfectly good approach.

> Croatian JV bibliography: http://www.ice.hr/davors/crobibl.htm
> Serbian JV bibliography: http://www.ice.hr/davors/JVbibl_Serbian.htm
> Slovenian JV bibliography: http://www.ice.hr/davors/JVbibl_Slovenian.htm
> Comparative table of
> French/English/Croatian/Serbian/Slovenian/Bosnian/Macedonian titles of JV
> editions: http://www.ice.hr/davors/tablica.htm

Thanks for these links! I knew of your Croatian bibliography, of
course, but I hadn't seen the full table yet. I'll cross-check it
carefully with the titles in my list.

Cheers,
Garmt.
Received on Tue 30 Mar 2010 - 15:26:42 IDT

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