Still, the situation is now that there are separate
wikis AND a merged
one. Apparently I am not the only one who thinks that that is a
strange and unwanted situation. Either Serbocroatian has to go, or the
other three have to go (after moving the articles of course), in my
opinion. The democratical thing seems to be to not merge - there seem
to be more people interested in the Serbian and Croatian Wikipedias
than in the Serbocroatian one.
Yeah... the people who agree with you are, lets see, Elephantus, and,
Elephantus. Josip said that he thinks they shouldn't be merged, but he
doesn't mind sh.wiki's existance.
Now, it seems natural to me that more people are interested in the
Serbian and Croatian Wikipedias, after all they are much, much, much
bigger.
That's nice, but what will this mean for the
Serbocroatian Wikipedia?
Will it mean that it will remain as it is, will it be put out of
existence or will it become the serbocroatian-except-croatian
wikipedia?
It would mean that Bosnian and Serbian would merge into it. Remember,
Serbocroatian encompasses 3, not 2, other Wikipedias' "languages". So,
unless only 1 votes to merge (which would make it almost pointless),
it could still be a better solution than 3 separate Wikis, with 2
instead of 3.
I don't know how much different the
languages/dialects are. I do know
Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian have only a handful of differences in vocabulary.
Serbian _usually_ uses the Ekavian standard, and Croatian and Bosnian
_always_ use the Ijekavian standard. However, lossless conversion
between the two is easily possible.
Now, if the languages have only been diverging since the breakup of
the former Yugoslavia, prior to which most people would've thought it
outrageous to claim to speak "Serbian" or "Bosnian", that would mean
that there are almost no changes. Those changes which do exist since
then are partly artificial, as Croatian linguists try to get people to
use "authentic Croatian words" which are mostly artificial.
that from both sides people are moving towards
separate languages. If
That's actually not really true. It's a very complicated question.
Although many Serbs, Bosnians, and Croats will tell you they speak
"Serbian", "Bosnian", or "Croatian", most will hesitate if
you ask
them "Is that a different language than (one of the others)?".
Obviously, some nationalists will immediately and proudly respond
"yes", but the majority is unsure. So, while they're sure that the
language they speak isn't called "Serbocroatian", they're often not so
sure as to whether their language is a single language as the other
members of "Serbocroatian".
we consider languages to be variations with at least a
given amount of
difference, they are indeed dialects of the same language. But if we
It seems that's how we're doing it now. Only exceptions are
Serbian/Bosnian/Croatian, Malay/Indonesian, and Moldovan/Romanian
(though that is partly a division along the boundaries of scripts
which cannot lossless conversion).
consider languages to be dialects with a special
formal status,
they're different languages.
That's definitely not how we're doing it. Some linguists would say
that Yiddish is a dialect (or at least a sociolect) of German. Yiddish
has no special formal status of any kind; however, we treat it as a
separate language.
If, as seems to be the case, the users themselves
prefer to go
separate ways, there is not much gained by having an extra Wikipedia
where you may write in both forms.
Note that so far, the only people who have weighed in are 2 Croatians.
No feedback so far from Serbians, Bosnians, Metohijans, or
Montenegrins, or any of the other... well, let's just call them
"places". And 2 is definitely a small number -- for all you know, the
two who have weighed in so far might be the only two opposed out of
all Croatian Wikipedians (although that is _extremely_ unlikely
statistically). And one out of the two seems to oppose for the reason
of differing reguls, which is an issue easily resolved...
Cheers
Mark W