On 4/13/05, Ray Saintonge <saintonge(a)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.