In the future sh.wiki hopes to implement an automatic converter between Cyrillic, Latin, Ijekavski, and Ekavski, so these stylistic/dialect/variety issues won't be a problem anymore.
Now, with such conversion, you wouldn't have to worry about edit wars over what norm is used, because no matter what norm it is written in, it is displayed in the chosen norm (possibly based on IP range-- users in Croatia and Bosnia get Ijekavian, users in Serbia get Ekavian; users in Croatia, Bosnia, and Montenegro get Latin alphabet, users in Serbia get Cyrillic, but of course you can change these preferences).
Mark
Differences between standard Serbian and Croatian are larger than just differences of ekavian/ijekavian. A text in Serbian converted to ijekavian feels to us just a little less Serbian (somewhat Bosnian) than the original, it's not somehow magically transformed into Croatian. And please, don't throw NPOV phrases at me, because how on earth are you going to NPOV-ize loads of technical, scientific and everyday vocabulary, syntax etc.? Do you plan to write slashes between variants? Write the same sentence twice? Believe me, all of this has been tried before, immense force, threats, everything was applied and the end result was the same – zero.
Elephantus (from Croatian Wikipedia)
Lexical conversion can be implemented as well for such vocabulary. What is important, is that the majority of the parts of the language is the same. The rest can be converted easily using Zhengzhu's conversion software, lossless-ly.
Mark
On 10/10/05, elephantus elephantus@net.hr wrote:
In the future sh.wiki hopes to implement an automatic converter between Cyrillic, Latin, Ijekavski, and Ekavski, so these stylistic/dialect/variety issues won't be a problem anymore.
Now, with such conversion, you wouldn't have to worry about edit wars over what norm is used, because no matter what norm it is written in, it is displayed in the chosen norm (possibly based on IP range-- users in Croatia and Bosnia get Ijekavian, users in Serbia get Ekavian; users in Croatia, Bosnia, and Montenegro get Latin alphabet, users in Serbia get Cyrillic, but of course you can change these preferences).
Mark
Differences between standard Serbian and Croatian are larger than just differences of ekavian/ijekavian. A text in Serbian converted to ijekavian feels to us just a little less Serbian (somewhat Bosnian) than the original, it's not somehow magically transformed into Croatian. And please, don't throw NPOV phrases at me, because how on earth are you going to NPOV-ize loads of technical, scientific and everyday vocabulary, syntax etc.? Do you plan to write slashes between variants? Write the same sentence twice? Believe me, all of this has been tried before, immense force, threats, everything was applied and the end result was the same – zero.
Elephantus (from Croatian Wikipedia)
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Ahh, and what you said about "not magically transformed into Croatian" is funny.
Can you give me an example of a WP article where there is more than 3 unique words that are different in Serbian than Croatian, excluding Ijekavian/Ekavian differences?
If you can, most of them will probably be minor spelling differences (sc vs st, for example), or it will be an article about Europe (because Romania, Moldova, Spain, Portugal, etc. have different names in Serbian and Croatian).
But the vast majority of articles, like the vast majority of words, are identical with the exception of Ijekavian and Ekavian differences.
You are trying to pass Croatian off as if it were only distantly related to Serbian, to the people on this list who may not be as well informed.
It should be clear to anybody that upon any examination of the issue, it makes absolutely 0 sense that one year there is 1 language, by 10 years later it is magically transformed into 3.
What is really going on here is a change of how important are the same differences that have always existed.
Ladies and gentlemen, other than Ijekavski/Ekavski, the differences between Serbian and Croatian are perhaps just a little bit more than US and UK English. The differences progress a little bit further in that: Croatian always uses "Native" name for months, while Serbian generally uses loanwords; Serbian and Croatian have some different names for a few dozen countries (for example Spain, Moldova, Portugal which are Spanija/Spanjolska, Moldavija/Moldova, Portugalija/Portugal).
Other than this, differences in vocabulary are probably about as many and as frequent as between American and British English.
Now back to you, Elephantus.
In your e-mails, you've also been trying to play up the importance of Ijekavski and Latin alphabet. As noted before, that problem is easily solved, so the fact that you keep mentioning it is pure FUD.
Lexical conversion (ie, replacing words which are different) is also relatively easy to resolve but obviously not as easy as orthographic or alphabet conversion, but it's already being done on the Chinese Wikipedia. For example, the term that means both "computer" and "calculator" to Mainland Chinese, means only "calculator" in Taiwan. So it is converted. They have different words for "internet", so that's converted. Some countries and people have different names, which are converted.
Now, if you don't have to worry about the little different words, the Ijekavski vs Ekavski, and the Latin vs Cyrillic, what is there left to worry about but the name of the language?
Mark
On 10/10/05, elephantus elephantus@net.hr wrote:
In the future sh.wiki hopes to implement an automatic converter between Cyrillic, Latin, Ijekavski, and Ekavski, so these stylistic/dialect/variety issues won't be a problem anymore.
Now, with such conversion, you wouldn't have to worry about edit wars over what norm is used, because no matter what norm it is written in, it is displayed in the chosen norm (possibly based on IP range-- users in Croatia and Bosnia get Ijekavian, users in Serbia get Ekavian; users in Croatia, Bosnia, and Montenegro get Latin alphabet, users in Serbia get Cyrillic, but of course you can change these preferences).
Mark
Differences between standard Serbian and Croatian are larger than just differences of ekavian/ijekavian. A text in Serbian converted to ijekavian feels to us just a little less Serbian (somewhat Bosnian) than the original, it's not somehow magically transformed into Croatian. And please, don't throw NPOV phrases at me, because how on earth are you going to NPOV-ize loads of technical, scientific and everyday vocabulary, syntax etc.? Do you plan to write slashes between variants? Write the same sentence twice? Believe me, all of this has been tried before, immense force, threats, everything was applied and the end result was the same – zero.
Elephantus (from Croatian Wikipedia)
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Just to say that at least very small minority (maybe one contributor on sr: ) agrees to merge sr, hr and bs Wikipedias into one. Even it is so, Serbian and Croatian communities cooperate very good.
There are some ideas how to make cooperation better, but, please, don't force talks about merging because such ideas make cooperation harder.
And about sh: Wikipedia: Yes, Elephantus is right when he says that our communities (Serbian and Croatian) have problems with sh: Wikipedia. People who want to cooperate would prefer sh: Wikipedia and we would have only strong nationalists on our projects. Unfortunately, there are more strong nationalists then people who want to cooperate in Balkans. The consequences are: big Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian Wikipedias with a lot of nationalist POV and small Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia with specific NGO POV from Balkans.
Also, I want to say again: sh: Wikipedia was reopened too early. It is opened and I don't think that it would be better to close it again. But, we have some problems and I don't know how to solve it... And, please, don't make pressure for merging sr:, hr: and bs:.
Hi Milos,
There is no pressure for merging.
I simply said, along with my announcement of 1000th article on shwiki, that I hope that at some point in the future, even if it's in 10 years, I hope it can be merged.
In response to this, Elephantus posted an angry comment.
Cheers Mark
On 10/10/05, Milos Rancic millosh@mutualaid.org wrote:
Just to say that at least very small minority (maybe one contributor on sr: ) agrees to merge sr, hr and bs Wikipedias into one. Even it is so, Serbian and Croatian communities cooperate very good.
There are some ideas how to make cooperation better, but, please, don't force talks about merging because such ideas make cooperation harder.
And about sh: Wikipedia: Yes, Elephantus is right when he says that our communities (Serbian and Croatian) have problems with sh: Wikipedia. People who want to cooperate would prefer sh: Wikipedia and we would have only strong nationalists on our projects. Unfortunately, there are more strong nationalists then people who want to cooperate in Balkans. The consequences are: big Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian Wikipedias with a lot of nationalist POV and small Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia with specific NGO POV from Balkans.
Also, I want to say again: sh: Wikipedia was reopened too early. It is opened and I don't think that it would be better to close it again. But, we have some problems and I don't know how to solve it... And, please, don't make pressure for merging sr:, hr: and bs:. _______________________________________________ Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
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Milos Rancic wrote:
Just to say that at least very small minority (maybe one contributor on sr: ) agrees to merge sr, hr and bs Wikipedias into one. Even it is so, Serbian and Croatian communities cooperate very good.
There are some ideas how to make cooperation better, but, please, don't force talks about merging because such ideas make cooperation harder.
And about sh: Wikipedia: Yes, Elephantus is right when he says that our communities (Serbian and Croatian) have problems with sh: Wikipedia. People who want to cooperate would prefer sh: Wikipedia and we would have only strong nationalists on our projects. Unfortunately, there are more strong nationalists then people who want to cooperate in Balkans. The consequences are: big Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian Wikipedias with a lot of nationalist POV and small Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia with specific NGO POV from Balkans.
Also, I want to say again: sh: Wikipedia was reopened too early. It is opened and I don't think that it would be better to close it again. But, we have some problems and I don't know how to solve it... And, please, don't make pressure for merging sr:, hr: and bs:.
I basically agree. I think that there is a big difference between encouraging the Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia, and insisting that the other three be merged into it. Before a merger can be possible the partisans need to be shown that co-operation can work. It's hard to say whether the sh:wikipedia was opened too early; for some any opening would be too early. The challenge at this stage is for those on the combined project to find ways of co-operating. I'm sure that all three projects have some relatively uncontroversial articles that can be copied into the combined project. Can an active edit history be copied as well?
For a merger to happen (and all three do not need to happen at the same time) the participants in the separate projects need to feel that their participation there is a waste of time, and just let that project fade away. When it is obvious that a project has no participants, and all the contents have been copied into the sh project it can be allowed to fade away. That will take as long as it needs to take. Until then it is an individual option to work on the separate or combined projects.
Ec
Just remember that if you want to merge projects, you need to merge communities. And differences between communities are not only political based. (For example, the main reason why I don't want to merge Serbian Wikipedia with Serbo-Croatian is that their community, as I see, is too much authoritarian.)
On 10/10/05, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
Milos Rancic wrote:
Just to say that at least very small minority (maybe one contributor on sr: ) agrees to merge sr, hr and bs Wikipedias into one. Even it is so, Serbian and Croatian communities cooperate very good.
There are some ideas how to make cooperation better, but, please, don't force talks about merging because such ideas make cooperation harder.
And about sh: Wikipedia: Yes, Elephantus is right when he says that our communities (Serbian and Croatian) have problems with sh: Wikipedia. People who want to cooperate would prefer sh: Wikipedia and we would have only strong nationalists on our projects. Unfortunately, there are more strong nationalists then people who want to cooperate in Balkans. The consequences are: big Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian Wikipedias with a lot of nationalist POV and small Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia with specific NGO POV from Balkans.
Also, I want to say again: sh: Wikipedia was reopened too early. It is opened and I don't think that it would be better to close it again. But, we have some problems and I don't know how to solve it... And, please, don't make pressure for merging sr:, hr: and bs:.
I basically agree. I think that there is a big difference between encouraging the Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia, and insisting that the other three be merged into it. Before a merger can be possible the partisans need to be shown that co-operation can work. It's hard to say whether the sh:wikipedia was opened too early; for some any opening would be too early. The challenge at this stage is for those on the combined project to find ways of co-operating. I'm sure that all three projects have some relatively uncontroversial articles that can be copied into the combined project. Can an active edit history be copied as well?
For a merger to happen (and all three do not need to happen at the same time) the participants in the separate projects need to feel that their participation there is a waste of time, and just let that project fade away. When it is obvious that a project has no participants, and all the contents have been copied into the sh project it can be allowed to fade away. That will take as long as it needs to take. Until then it is an individual option to work on the separate or combined projects.
Ec
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Hi Milos,
This is often the case with smaller Wikipedias.
Since there is such a small community, the authority is still very centralised, though hopefully this will change.
However, any user who makes significant contributions may apply for adminship, and if you did that (for example), I would support it.
Cheers Mark
On 10/10/05, Milos Rancic millosh@mutualaid.org wrote:
Just remember that if you want to merge projects, you need to merge communities. And differences between communities are not only political based. (For example, the main reason why I don't want to merge Serbian Wikipedia with Serbo-Croatian is that their community, as I see, is too much authoritarian.)
On 10/10/05, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
Milos Rancic wrote:
Just to say that at least very small minority (maybe one contributor on sr: ) agrees to merge sr, hr and bs Wikipedias into one. Even it is so, Serbian and Croatian communities cooperate very good.
There are some ideas how to make cooperation better, but, please, don't force talks about merging because such ideas make cooperation harder.
And about sh: Wikipedia: Yes, Elephantus is right when he says that our communities (Serbian and Croatian) have problems with sh: Wikipedia. People who want to cooperate would prefer sh: Wikipedia and we would have only strong nationalists on our projects. Unfortunately, there are more strong nationalists then people who want to cooperate in Balkans. The consequences are: big Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian Wikipedias with a lot of nationalist POV and small Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia with specific NGO POV from Balkans.
Also, I want to say again: sh: Wikipedia was reopened too early. It is opened and I don't think that it would be better to close it again. But, we have some problems and I don't know how to solve it... And, please, don't make pressure for merging sr:, hr: and bs:.
I basically agree. I think that there is a big difference between encouraging the Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia, and insisting that the other three be merged into it. Before a merger can be possible the partisans need to be shown that co-operation can work. It's hard to say whether the sh:wikipedia was opened too early; for some any opening would be too early. The challenge at this stage is for those on the combined project to find ways of co-operating. I'm sure that all three projects have some relatively uncontroversial articles that can be copied into the combined project. Can an active edit history be copied as well?
For a merger to happen (and all three do not need to happen at the same time) the participants in the separate projects need to feel that their participation there is a waste of time, and just let that project fade away. When it is obvious that a project has no participants, and all the contents have been copied into the sh project it can be allowed to fade away. That will take as long as it needs to take. Until then it is an individual option to work on the separate or combined projects.
Ec
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I absolutely agree. At this stage a merger may be nothing more than an intellectual ideal. It could be years before the conditions are right, if ever. The most that can be done now is to make the opportunity available.
Ec
Milos Rancic wrote:
Just remember that if you want to merge projects, you need to merge communities. And differences between communities are not only political based. (For example, the main reason why I don't want to merge Serbian Wikipedia with Serbo-Croatian is that their community, as I see, is too much authoritarian.)
On 10/10/05, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
For a merger to happen (and all three do not need to happen at the same time) the participants in the separate projects need to feel that their participation there is a waste of time, and just let that project fade away. When it is obvious that a project has no participants, and all the contents have been copied into the sh project it can be allowed to fade away. That will take as long as it needs to take. Until then it is an individual option to work on the separate or combined projects.
Ray Saintonge wrote:
I absolutely agree. At this stage a merger may be nothing more than an intellectual ideal. It could be years before the conditions are right, if ever. The most that can be done now is to make the opportunity available.
Is it really a good precedent to separate Wikipedias based on political differences among groups of people? By that notion, we should've split up traditional and simplified Chinese long ago, but based on the principle that splitting effort should be avoided as much as possible, a partly-technical solution to keep them in the same Wikipedia was found instead.
Plus, forcing political opponents into one Wikipedia should lessen the tendency of ideologically-uniform Wikipedias to stray from a neutral point of view. If, for example, en: were split up into en-us: and en-everyone-else, I could see both of those being worse than the current unified one on many areas---the tension between American and non-American editors forces some sort of more neutral synthesis.
-Mark
On 12/10/05, Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:
Ray Saintonge wrote:
I absolutely agree. At this stage a merger may be nothing more than an intellectual ideal. It could be years before the conditions are right, if ever. The most that can be done now is to make the opportunity available.
Is it really a good precedent to separate Wikipedias based on political differences among groups of people? By that notion, we should've split up traditional and simplified Chinese long ago, but based on the principle that splitting effort should be avoided as much as possible, a partly-technical solution to keep them in the same Wikipedia was found instead.
This is a good example, as the differences between Trad. and Simp. Chinese are much greater than those between Serbian, Bosnian and Croatian. In fact, they are great enough that the current converter has quite a bit lower than ideal accuracy, which wouldn't be the case for a Serbian <> Croatian <> Bosnian converter.
However, in zhwiki, (most) people see the value in keeping a single WP, at least to a reasonable degree, and the prevailing attitude among Traditional users is "it will get better, but for now we should endure because the reward will be worth it". On the other hand the attitude among many Simplified users seems to be "remind me what the problem is again?", for two reasons: 1) probably about 80%, maybe 90%, of the content on zhwiki is (stored on the server) in Simplified. 2) Traditional-to-Simplified conversion is MUCH easier and produces much better quality results than vice-versa, since there are only a handful of Traditional characters with multiple Simplified counterparts, while there are many Simplified characters with multiple Traditional counterparts (to be fair, though, in many cases the secondary options are Trad'l characters that are relatively infrequent)
Plus, forcing political opponents into one Wikipedia should lessen the tendency of ideologically-uniform Wikipedias to stray from a neutral point of view. If, for example, en: were split up into en-us: and en-everyone-else, I could see both of those being worse than the current unified one on many areas---the tension between American and non-American editors forces some sort of more neutral synthesis.
That is one of the main reasons I hope to see a merger eventually.
While opinions in the various Chinese communities are diverse enough that they would be able to maintain a good degree of NPOV even if they were separate, views in the Balkans are radically different.
One article I copied from bs.wiki to sr.wiki and hr.wiki a few months ago started a big conflict because the article was (apparently) obviously POV. From that I learned two lessons: 1) don't post articles on religion or regional history unless you're confident about the NPOV-ness of their content; 2) don't trust Balkan WPs to maintain a good NPOV environment.
Mark
Mark Williamson wrote:
One article I copied from bs.wiki to sr.wiki and hr.wiki a few months ago started a big conflict because the article was (apparently) obviously POV. From that I learned two lessons: 1) don't post articles on religion or regional history unless you're confident about the NPOV-ness of their content; 2) don't trust Balkan WPs to maintain a good NPOV environment.
The most basic lesson: 3) Don't post articles in languages you don't know.
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Delirium wrote:
Ray Saintonge wrote:
I absolutely agree. At this stage a merger may be nothing more than an intellectual ideal. It could be years before the conditions are right, if ever. The most that can be done now is to make the opportunity available.
Is it really a good precedent to separate Wikipedias based on political differences among groups of people?
No, it is a terrible precedent, but it happened before we understood it well enough.
It seems to me quite possible to move forward gently and slowly and to get consensus, and that there's no reason to force people together before they are ready.
--Jimbo
There were the whole story about ICTY and Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian. They used translators for all languages (including Bosnian <-> Croatian <-> Serbian)... Until they realized that people can understand each other well.
It is hard to understand the problem... Maybe someone from Ireland may guess what the problem may be. If Irish people developed two a little bit different standards, I am sure that they would be maybe stronger in demands for two different Wikipedias.
Standard language is political question and the situation is a lot different then in English language relations. While English speaking people don't care for written variant, while cohesion between Chinese is much stronger (they developed the whole civilisation on their writing system) -- people from Croatia, Bosnia, Montenegro and Serbia feel that standard language is important part of their separate identities.
Also, majority of people from those countries feel that the name "Serbo-Croatian" is offensive term. If you say to someone from this area that (s)he talks Serbo-Croatian, it is almost the same as you say to some African American that (s)he is a Nigger.
I think that software allows to us to make some "light" tools for translation between similar standard variants, such as en-uk <-> en-us, sr <-> hr <-> bs, Simplified and Traditional Chinese. As I said, I think that we can finish Serbian conversion (http://conversion.vikimedija.org/) in the next couple of months. But, this is not only our problem. A lot of standardized and non-standardized languages have and may have the similar problem. Occitan is the example, but it is not the only one; I am sure that there are some groups who would like to pronounce/write some Neapolitan or Sicilian in other way then it is "standardized" on Wikipedia. In other words, we need some kind of general tool for such situations.
And to back to SCB relations. There are two important things more:
- All attempts which try to unify Croatian, Bosnian and Serbian would be treated as an attack by all communities (and not only by Wikipedian communities). In other words, Croatian, Bosnian and Serbian Wikipedias should have their own URLs, their own main pages etc.
This means that it was good decision to separate Serbian, Bosnian and Croatian Wikipedias. It is better to have three strong Wikipedias then one weak.
Wikipedia is not technical, but cultural project. While we have a lot of "technical contacts" with a lot of FS and OS communities from former Yugoslavia, cultural relations are a lot more complex. In that sense, cooperation between communities from Croatian and Serbian Wikipedias are important cultural event for our cultures. (I.e., this is one more thing where Wikipedia made a great success.)
Also, I have to express one my frustration with (international) Wikipedian community (not with Jimmy, who completely understands the situation and who is willing to help): A number of times I asked (via different tools: using the list or the pages on Meta or using the pages on English Wikipedia) for help to solve some Balkan related problems. I got something more then zero response. But it is very interesting to talk what Wikipedia should exist and what should not even we were working a lot on our communication and our problems. In other words: if you don't want to help us, just don't make problems to us.
- Also, again, we are talking about four communities. It is not so easy as Mark says, because...
1. During around a year and half I was working with one community. Almost one year we have community strong enough to assimilate all new Wikipedians to work on Wikipedia which doesn't know for edit wars even it has more then 14.000 articles and a lot of contributors. I don't care for adminship on sh:. (I don't even remember when I used admin privileges on sr: last time.) Merging communities doesn't mean that some people from sr:, hr: and bs: should become admins on sh:. It means a lot more.
2. sh:, sr:, hr: and bs: have different relations between people. While it is not a big deal to become an admin or bureaucrat on sr:, while community from hr: is at the beginning of similar implementation, sh: and especially bs: have (as I think) have more hierarchy: in their communities it is a big deal to become admin (I think that they don't have any bureaucrat). If we make another kind of simple merging, community from sr: would have a great majority of admins. So, this should not be a good way, too.
...
Maybe I am boring to a lot of this list member :) But I think that more talk about this issue would help to a lot of people to better understand our problems.
On 10/13/05, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:
Delirium wrote:
Ray Saintonge wrote:
I absolutely agree. At this stage a merger may be nothing more than an intellectual ideal. It could be years before the conditions are right, if ever. The most that can be done now is to make the opportunity available.
Is it really a good precedent to separate Wikipedias based on political differences among groups of people?
No, it is a terrible precedent, but it happened before we understood it well enough.
It seems to me quite possible to move forward gently and slowly and to get consensus, and that there's no reason to force people together before they are ready.
--Jimbo _______________________________________________ Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
"Milos Rancic" millosh@mutualaid.org wrote: [snip]
Also, majority of people from those countries feel that the name "Serbo-Croatian" is offensive term. If you say to someone from this area that (s)he talks Serbo-Croatian, it is almost the same as you say to some African American that (s)he is a Nigger.
This has to be a relatively recent development, because we had some very good friends when I was small (about 30 years ago now :-) and the husband was quite happy to say that he was, and spoke, Serbo-Croat: he was proud of it IIRC.
I'm not aware that the term "nigger" has ever been quite so acceptable to those to whom it has been applied in a pejorative way.
I'm also not aware that the term "Serbo-Croat" has ever been used as an actual hate term in the same way as "nigger", but I'm happy to be educated if you can provide sources...
This was periodically, not only recent... Croatian linguists always called the language "Croatian or Serbian" (and even just "Croatian") while jargons in Croatia and Serbia was always "Croatian" and "Serbian". But, some people still say that they speak Serbo-Croatian.
Also, keep in mind that "Serbo-Croatian" language name supported with a lot of force. And this force was one of the main reasons for bloody war in 1990s.
Yes, some people felt SFRY as their country and Serbo-Croatian as their language. But, history of Yugoslavia (between 1918 and 1991) was full of national based conflicts (especially between Croats and Serbs).
On 10/13/05, Phil Boswell phil.boswell@gmail.com wrote:
"Milos Rancic" millosh@mutualaid.org wrote: [snip]
Also, majority of people from those countries feel that the name "Serbo-Croatian" is offensive term. If you say to someone from this area that (s)he talks Serbo-Croatian, it is almost the same as you say to some African American that (s)he is a Nigger.
This has to be a relatively recent development, because we had some very good friends when I was small (about 30 years ago now :-) and the husband was quite happy to say that he was, and spoke, Serbo-Croat: he was proud of it IIRC.
I'm not aware that the term "nigger" has ever been quite so acceptable to those to whom it has been applied in a pejorative way.
I'm also not aware that the term "Serbo-Croat" has ever been used as an actual hate term in the same way as "nigger", but I'm happy to be educated if you can provide sources... -- Phil [[en:User:Phil Boswell]]
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