On 4/13/05, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
While I recognize that there are long established traditions favouring the two script approach to Serbian, I think that the ekavian/iyekavian distinction is going too far. It makes the idea of a single Serbian language a joke, and shows the language as incapable of establishing standards. If the variants in Republika Srpska and Montenegro insist on their own varieties it turns the whole idea of Serbian nationalism into a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta.
Hehehe. I understand that situation with Serbian standard variants is funny to others, but let me explain :)
Father of modern Serbian standard language is Vuk Stefanovic Karadzic. He was iyekavian by origin. He was borned at iyekavian part of western Serbia. (Today, that part of Serbia is ekavian because of Belgrade-oriented centralization of Serbia.)
But, the center of Serbian culture was not in Serbia (which became independent at the first half of 19th century). It was in Vojvodina, which was the part of Austro-Hungary empire. And, people from Vojvodina, but from Belgrade, too, was (and are) speaking ekavian.
One more but: Serbs from Montenegro, eastern Herzegovina and Bosnia was (and are) iyekavian.
So, before Djuro Danicic (Vuk's student) introduced new Latin alphabet (at the first time completely adopted by Croats, today only letter đ/Đ is from original Danicic's alphabet), Vuk and Corat Ljudevit Gaj introduced "two variants of the same language". And, that language was called with different names: "Croatian or Serbian", "Serbian or Croatian", "Serbo-Croatian" and "Croato-Serbian". As centralistic communits system didn't want to devide language to "Croatian" and "Serbian", they devided language just into iyekavian and ekavian. So, Serbs from Bosnia, Herzegovina and Montenegro was speaking the same variant of language with Croats, while Serbs from Serbia was speaking another variant. Today, standards are Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian.
When Former Yugoslavia was destroyed, as well as standard Serbo-Croatian language, Croats and Bosniaks had clear situation: The big majority of Croats and Bosniaks are iyekavian. However, Serbs didn't have that situation: some Serbs are ekavian and some Serbs are iyekavian.
During the war in Bosnia, there were one linguistic experiment (supported by low, military and police), which was introduced by Radovan Karadzic regime: Standard language became ekavian. All of radio, television, newspapers and state authorities was forced to write in ekavian. (In very polite words, I think that it was not good idea.)
Today, organization which takes care about Serbian standard is "Council for Standardization of Serbian Language", which has delegates from academic and government institution from Serbia, Republic of Srpska and Montenegro. And, the only part of Serbian language politics which has almost concensus is that Serbian language has two standards: ekavian and iyekavian. Alphabets are the problem in politics, standards are not.
Children, tinagers and students from Republic of Srpska and Montenegro are learning iyekavian variant and differences in texts are bigger then in two main variants of English language. You can have a lot of articles in English without diferences like "kilometer-kilometre" or such. But, it is probabbly that you will find if the text is iyekavian or ekavian in the first sentence of article. However, there are no misunderstandings between iyekavian and ekavian speaker.
As I see, implementation of ekavian/iyekavian is more easy then implementation of transliteration between Cyrillic and Latin alphabet and vice versa. And I am sure that you can keep variants as one text inside of database.
Also, I don't care about Serbian nationalism. I care about live attributes of Serbian culture. And Wikipedia is the place which can implement them. If people here have good will.