Re: [Lingo] Bulgarian and Russian and Romanian (oh my?)

["David J Iannucci" <jlinux@example.com>]

On Mon, 07 Mar 2011 11:01 +0900, "Stephen J. Turnbull"
<stephen@example.com> wrote:
> All of the Croatians I know (1, but at 205cm, 125kg, I listen when
> he speaks ;-) say "Serbo-Croat" is an oppressive invention of
> Serbian linguists, similar to the way the Russians blocked
> introduction of some Ukrainain-specific cyrillic characters into
> Unicode for about a decade.

While I don't doubt there was linguistic oppression going on (along
with many other types) during those Cold War years in The Country
Formerly Known As Yugoslavia, nevertheless the question of whether
Serbian and Croatian are mutually intelligible is an empirical one. If
they are (and AFAIK they are, to a high degree), then most linguists
would say that it is entirely reasonable to think of them as varieties
of a single language, and thus referring to them by a unified name is
not uncalled for (though one may question the choice of name :-)

Dave