Re: psychoceramics: the mir-acle of medjugorje

[Cosma Shalizi <s--@p---next1.physics.wisc.edu>]

> In Yugoslavia the language was Serbo-Croatian, which could use both.
> Apparently it has been decided to divide it into two languages, Serbian and
> Croat, depending on whether it is written using Cyrillic or Latin
> characters, respectively. There are regional differences in word use
> too: formerly dialects, these are apparently now enough to make for whole
> separate languages, so long as you tack vehement political agendaizings
> onto your argument.
> 

If we can trust Eric Hobsbawm (_Nations and Nationalism since 1780:
Programme, Myth, Reality_, 2nd ed., Cambridge U.P., 1992), there were, in
the early 1800s, at least four mutually comprehensible, locally
recognized dialects spoken in what's now Bosnia/Serbia/Croatia, one of
which got fixed on to become standard Serbo-Croatian (in somewhat the same
way as the Florentine dialect became standard Italian, the Paris dialect
standard French, the London/Kent dialect standard English, etc., only
more deliberately), and Serbian and Croatian as two distinct languages
are exceedingly recent inventions.  (I have a Croat friend who came to this
country before the war started, and only learned he spoke a different
language than the Serbs when he went home this summer.)
ObMindControl: Hobsbawm and Ranger (eds.), _The Invention of Tradition_

Cosma Shalizi
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