On Sun, Oct 09, 2005 at 06:30:04PM -0700, Mark Williamson wrote:
I recall something about a Croatian law requiring all
Serbian movies
to be subtitled (or vice-versa?). Rather than reacting with
nationalistic pride when seeing these subtitles for a language that is
basically identical to their own, moviegoers generally laughed at the
attempts of "translation".
You recall wrongly. A similar incident is described at en:Differences in the
official languages in Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia or whatsitcalled, but
there was never a law requiring subtitling anything.
With Croatian, it seems that people try hard to make
it a different
language from Serbian, but it isn't really except in a sociolinguistic
sense (and even then, not all Croatians perpetuate the idea of a
separate Croatian language). Macedonian, on the other hand, has truly
different words and spellings, rather than artificial divisions
created by linguists for political purposes.
It is actually awkward for us in .hr to listen to foreign words, accent and
style, regardless of how similar they are to our words, accent or style, and
the consensus is that we shouldn't have to do it. Nothing more, nothing less.
The country didn't collectively hire linguists to invent words, and then
hire gorillas to force four million people to stop using old words and use
the invented ones. That simply never happened, not by a long shot. There
were politicians and linguists who had an agenda of modifying their speech
and the speech of others, but their influence has always been finite, and
generally minor.
Recent nationalism has caused many outsiders to treat Croatians as some sort
of excessively xenophobic people who now go out of their way to be different.
However, the way we speak, and how that is different from the people in
Serbia, dates much further back than the creation of the Croatian state.
We have always spoken a bit differently, hence the variance in
Serbo-Croatian/Croato-Serbian. The official sanction of a Croatian language
is merely a different type of an acknowledgement of the existing situation,
not an attempt to construe something out of thin air.
--
2. That which causes joy or happiness.