Macedonian is not a language

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Midnight
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Re: Macedonian is not a language

Postby Midnight » 2012-03-20, 8:16

The same old thing. For example little kids from CZ which have never heard of Slovak might have trouble understanding some different words, but when they're growing up and they see a Slovak actor/actress on the TV or hear a Slovak song, they get used to it. I still don't know all the Slovak words like names for each flower (honestly I don't care about flowers in any language), but I do understand 95-98% of the language and can speak it to some degree. So in the end I could call Slovak a dialect of Czech or Czech a germanised version of the more Slavic Slovak. Nowadays even the Slovak language takes a lot of words from Czech, because it's so close. And I don't speak Serbo-Croatian yet, but from what I've seen the YUGO pack (Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian and Montenegrin) differ even less.
So they could be considered dialects. Other languages call their forms dialects and are much more far apart. So the difference between dialect and a language is the politics. AMEN

P.S. No matter how close Bulgarian and Macedonian are. If they want to call their dialect a language, it's their "thang". If Americans wanted to call their language American, even though it still would be mutually intelligible with the Continental English, they'd have every right to do so.

If L1 and L2 come from the same root and have evolved step by step, it's ok I guess. If one country drew f.e. L3 words just to be different, then it's not that cool. AFAIC Macedonian has these extra letters Ѓ Ѕ Ј Ќ Љ Њ Џ while Slovak has these little bastards ä, ľ, ĺ, ŕ, ô - this proves nothing, but anomaly in ortography. Call it a dialect, call it a language, but no need to use linguistics as a weapon for the means of racism.

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Re: Macedonian is not a language

Postby TeneReef » 2012-03-30, 18:51

Macedonian and Bulgarian are like Dutch and German, or Slovenian and Croatian.
Different dialects have been chosen for the standard language. (Low German was not chosen for the German standard, nor was kajkavski for the Croatian one).
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Re: Macedonian is not a language

Postby Unknown » 2012-11-19, 18:01

Ок но ако не се лъжа, български и македонски са почти 90% подобни, нали?

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Re: Macedonian is not a language

Postby johnklepac » 2013-01-15, 4:04

I say that if they want to think of it as a separate language they can. I'm undecided on the matter.

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Re: Macedonian is not a language

Postby cHr0mChIk » 2016-12-18, 0:57

language learner wrote:Could you give a link to those dialects? Im curious how definite articles would work with cases.


"У школу је иш'л у Камикат, па после до црквуту. Неје бил лош ученик, а ко су ми казували стари даскаље од предмети су му нарочно ишли математика и физика, али дисциплина никико." :)
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Woods
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Re: Macedonian is not a language

Postby Woods » 2017-01-18, 23:25

It’s an old topic, but someone brought it back.

TeneReef wrote:Macedonian and Bulgarian are like Dutch and German, or Slovenian and Croatian.
Different dialects have been chosen for the standard language.

How do you know, if you don’t speak either Bulgarian or Macedonian?

They aren’t.

I don’t have a problem with Macedonians picking a different dialect and making it the standard language. I even think it would be really cool. But it’s not the case. I have a problem with them removing good Bulgarian words and replacing them with fake made-up ones, as well as changing the orthography not to accommodate the phonology of the language, but only to make it less similar to what it comes from, and twist it even further. It’s disgusting.

I would love to hear a dialect of my own language, which is at the same time used as a standard somewhere. It would be very nice to travel westward and start hearing something that sounds like the language you’ve only read in books, for example. But that’s not the case. Instead I hear words turned upside down, letters replaced just to make it look like something that doesn’t exist in any dialect either in Bulgaria or Serbia, fake grammar and tons of other kinds of shit. Among all of this, there is, of course, some dialect Bulgarian, and I guess some Serbian words and other real things. What I’m against is the fake shit that is not supposed to be there. And I think it’s way too much.

If you know German and read Dutch, you don’t get the same feeling. I don’t know about Slovenian and Croatian – I’ve got no idea. But they’re probably normal languages that have developed naturally as well.

And that’s not me being a nationalist – I’m not. And I don’t see what racism has to do here – is anyone talking about who’s black and who’s white? Whoever is not Bulgarian, Macedonian or Serbian, should not state their opinion that readily, because you’ve got no idea what you’re talking about.

It would be interesting to hear what Macedonians think, if there are any in this forum. In Bulgaria the general perception is that they’ve been brainwashed by their education system to believe in fake facts that do not hold in reality. But if there are any linguists who have researched where their language comes from, have read its oldest literature etc., then it would be very interesting to hear what they think.

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Re: Macedonian is not a language

Postby linguoboy » 2017-01-19, 1:54

Woods wrote:If you know German and read Dutch, you don’t get the same feeling. I don’t know about Slovenian and Croatian – I’ve got no idea. But they’re probably normal languages that have developed naturally as well.

I wonder what-all you include in the "natural" development of "normal" languages.

Standard German is about as unnatural a dialect of Hochdeutsch as you could find. No "natural" variety shares its phonology (with its weirdly unbalanced vowel system) or its hodgepodge of vocabulary (with archaic words like Knabe rubbing up against recent borrowings from Low German and English), its use of the genitive or its participial constructions calqued on Latin. It's just that it's been around long enough for people to forget how strange a lot of these elements are. But there are still people alive today who were born before Macedonian was standardised.
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Re: Macedonian is not a language

Postby Saim » 2017-01-19, 7:01

Woods wrote:I have a problem with them removing good Bulgarian words and replacing them with fake made-up ones, as well as changing the orthography not to accommodate the phonology of the language, but only to make it less similar to what it comes from, and twist it even further. It’s disgusting.


Do you have some examples?

Since you mentioned Serbian and Croatian, the main difference in the standard language is that Croatian is less accepting of loanwords and prefers to coin new words based on Slavic roots, or in same cases maintain or revive older Slavic words:

Standard Serbian - Standard Croatian
trotoar - nogostup
aerodrom - zračna luka
lingvistika - jezikoslovlje
jezički purizam - jezično čistunstvo (or jezični purizam)
Latin months (januar, februar...) - Slavic months (siječanj, veljača)
hiljada - tisuć
apoteka - ljekarna
univerzitet - sveučilište
advokat - odvjetnik
muzika - glazba
hladnjak - frižider

What I find funny is that Croatian purists often call the former words "srbizmi" even though they were borrowed from other languages. In practice many of these words are used in informal Croatian, in some cases concentrated in some regions (alleged "srbizmi" like hljeb and hiljada were historically the preferred variant in parts of Croatia).


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