Saim wrote:Don't know how I neglected to mention that.
Although the infinitive can and often does replace
să+subj., as is the case in Serbian vs. in Croatian, that applies more so to verbs like
a putea "can, to be able to" than to
a vrea "to want". As far as I've seen,
I've only seen să+subj. used with a vrea ‘to want’. (It's also equivalent to the situation in Tosk
& Standard Albanian, which prefers
të+subj., versus Gheg, which prefers
me+past part. [
which together compose the infinitive]).
Interesting. I'm not sure if there's a similar distinction in Serbian... at least there doesn't seem to be. I wouldn't be likely to use the infinitive form for either
moći (
can) or
hteti (
to want).
The part highlighted in red is where I meant to write, "I've only seen
să+subj. used with [verbs like]
a putea ‘can/could, to be able to’." Once again, "D'oh!"
I have to correct the part where I only mentioned Tosk and not Standard Albanian as well, for a seemingly hairsplitting reason. An Albanian or two on a FB group I'm in whose theme is Albanian-language prescriptivism (I fit right in
) were quick to "correct" me when I said I spoke Tosk Albanian (and not Standard Albanian [as well]), IIRC. Keep in mind the majority of the group's members are ostensibly liberal, although it too has its fair share of "avocadians". "Advocadians", in case you're not in on the inside joke, are pop linguists or amateur linguists, always toxic nationalists, who make up etymologies as they go and tend to deny claims of any Albanian words having come from a foreign language. not just the plethora of words of Late & Vulgar Latin origin, which can range anywhere between 800, 1000 or 1500 years old (which, in turn, is understandable, since oftentimes you couldn't even tell these words came from Latin and could only possibly know their etymology after looking it up), but also the ≤600-year-old words from Ottoman Turkish and the even-more-recent ≤100-year-old loans from Italian! (
Please excuse the brief tangent, Saim, and please excuse the off-topic discussion, france-eesti!)
And, to be honest, these people made a solid point. Lest you didn't already know this, the literary Albanian language pre-WWII was Gheg-based, with the Southern Gheg dialects of important cities like Elbasan and Tiranë/Durrës holding the highest prestige. It is Gheg dialects that are the more conservative, after all. Although Tosk
was used in written language as well, it was only Southern Albanians who ever used it as a literary language, and Tosk dialects held absolutely no prestige, being regarded as vulgar and of the working class. This is the motivation at the core of Enver Hoxha's putting Tosk on a pedestal and modeling the new Standard Albanian language on it, although this was only limited to morphology—there are a few Gheg nouns, adjectives and phrasal adverbs which are permissible to use or have also been encoded into the Standard language, since Tosk dialects were characterized with the working class. However, I'm sure "northern envy" played a part in Hoxha's linguistic policy as well, given that development, modernization and industrialization in Socialist Albania favored the South somewhat more than the North, and Northerners (i.e. Southerners) faced a considerable amount of discrimination.
In addition, they claim that Gheg Albanian is richer in words of both indigenous [Proto-Albanian] and Latin stock, and thus that the post-WWII standardized Albanian language would've consisted of much fewer borrowings and neologisms from Italian or English. From the dozen-or-two minutes I've spent reading the poetry of the more famous and revered poets, I'd say they're pretty damn spot on.
(PS, some
post hoc edits highlighted in blue.)
(By the way in Croatia they do have da-constructions, just not in as many contexts and it has different stylistic connotations than in Serbia; some people hypercorrect it out of their speech but it's not technically incorrect).
I was not aware. Thanks for elaborating on that for me. My knowledge of BSC is cursory (as I'm sure you know), the product of a cursory read of a Wikipedia article. Now that you've mentioned it, the Croatian situation sounds like it's comparable to Romanian's, minus the part about the feature being hypercorrected out of popular speech (I'm not sure if it's hypercorrected in all the same places in Romanian). Which leads me further inquire: How accepted is the infinitive in Serbian, if it is at all?