#serbo-croatian

[rmmgy-blog]

I really hope Duolingo releases a course on that language spoken in Croatia, Serbia, Montenegro and Bosnia and Herzegovina that is mutually intelligable between all of those regions. It'd be funny to see them squirm trying to figure out how to represent it.

My two cents would be to call it Serbo-Croatian, give it a new flag that mixes those two countries' national flags Austria-Hungary style or use the flag of Yugoslavia to depict it and do it in the more common latin script, or perhaps make it the first bi-script course.

Interested to hear the thoughts or feelings of others though. Beyond the meme of "funny Balkan infighting" I do think it would be really nice to see the language reach a wider audience and I personally would love to learn it if they made a course.

[heyyellee]

It's cute to learn about your partners heritage and I like learning new languages. But I don't know how to explain to my father in law that all my Serbo-croatian comes from eurovision.

[dailyworldmusic]

Ljudožder - BoA

💿 Ritam Strasti Yugoslavia, 1982

[ishparpuaqib]

i happen to be generally quite fond of exonyms and calques, but imho translating proper names (and toponyms and so on) should only be mandatory if they come from languages closely related to the language one is translating into—say, no more than one order of magnitude removed from their earliest demonstrated common ancestor (limiting mandatory translations in english to other germanic languages). insisting on calling belgrade 'whiteyard' or whatever would be rather silly, but i quite like the idea of referring to brussels (from middle dutch 'broekzele') as 'brooksale' ('sale' in the sense of 'hall') or to frankfurt as 'frankfort'. double points if the close relation between the languages allows for the calqued name to be formed in the exact same manner as the original—it is, for instance, perfectly possible to translate the name of oslo using the native (and cognate) english suffix -ley, 'osley'

(moreover, i think the number of calques should ideally be maximised by taking advantage of existing calques in languages closely related to one's own—the english should, for instance, make use of icelandic 'kænugarður' and solve the kiev/kyiv dispute by referring to the city simply as 'canyard')

[northwest-by-a-train]

Oh this is scathing

[sneg-v-avgustu]

😇 @bojan_cvjeticanin

[da-riya]

Admittedly I had awkward situations where I knew a language that I thought the other person also knew, but I didn't know how to "break the ice" so to say

[uraandri]

ok now i need to figure out why were two serbo-croatian speaking women conversing exclusevily in english in this caffee. the convo wasn't being recorder for a podcast cause none of them had any technology on the table

[slettlune]

from the moment i heard guillaume (in the witcher dlc) speak i was like "OH that is a norwegian accent! that is 100% someone from southeastern norway speaking english!"

and it isn't! i looked up the va and he's from bosnia and herzegovina. and then i remembered i've made this exact same wrong assessment about the accent of people from bosnia and herzegovina before, which is really fascinating because our languages are not related at all

[kutyozh]

actually slavs know the most important thing: that tummy is life

[cinesludge]

Movie #61 of 2024: Hitman

I have a feeling this was the movie that prompted Olga Kurylenko to fight like hell to prevent her Bond girl character in Quantum of Solace from becoming a sex object.

[a1exkra1ie]

feeling normal emotions about "dušo" being a term of endearment that literally means "soul"

[daydreamodyssey]

Servo-Crowatian

[fifi-goes-to-hollywood]

https://open.spotify.com/track/248Jb9J8zsegFBaROd66ie?si=fC5lTsQnRhK3QeF2bYHSQA%0A

May I suggest it as a jance song

Immediately added to the playlist, she slaps hard

✨From Kranj to Vrhnika playlist✨

[ishparpuaqib]

unfortunately intraslavic calques seldom produce interesting results, because all slavs are the same. you know what the proper serbo-croatian translation of polish 'kraków' is? 'krakov'. the proper translation of russian 'moskva' is—'moskva'. (both are already in use as exonyms; big surprise!) might as well combine us all into one country and call it a day. the biggest challenge would probably be figuring out how to distinguish the dozens upon dozens of different 'belgrades'

[anarchotolkienist]

Wrt differences in national language internal to groupings that exist on a dialect continuum, I might go as far as to accept that they are actually different languages today - Swedish Norwegian and Danish, Gaelic, Irish and Manx, to pick the examples I'm most familiar with, might all be different languages today. But in these cases the national differentiation, i.e. the political decision that these languages are different along these particular national lines, precedes any actual discernable difference specific to those national lines. The nationalisation of languge is fundamentally political and artificial, and is profoundly not rooted in the supposedly ancient and authentic voice of the volksgeist to which they appealed.