Re: [Lingo] Bulgarian and Russian and Romanian (oh my?) (was: Alternatives to sed + awk)

[Josh Glover <jmglov@example.com>]

On 7 March 2011 03:01, 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.

Interesting. To a Bulgarian ear, Serbian and Croatian sound pretty
much the same, and in my linguistics courses at university, we learned
that it was one language. It seems that Serbs consider it one
language, whilst Croats don't:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serbo-Croatian#Views_of_linguists_in_the_former_Yugoslavia

Linguistics can be a highly political business. Many the the
"dialects" of Chinese have so little in common with Han Chinese that
they should be considered separate languages, while "languages" such
as Bulgarian and Macedonian are considered separate by at least one of
the peoples for reasons of national identity. I wonder if Serbian and
Croatian / Serbo-Croat fall into the latter camp.

David, are you out there? What take do mainstream linguists have on this?

-- 
Cheers,
Josh