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THE SERBO-CROATIAN LANGUAGE belongs to a group of languages united by certain common characteristics and called the Slavic languages. The Slavs, be it said at once, are not at present a race or a nation; they are merely of individuals who speak Slavic languages. So the governmental and literary language of the United States is English, but English is the only mother tongue of millions of Negroes and thousands of American Indians and Chinese and Japanese who dwell within our borders. Nor is there any reason to think that the Slavs ever formed a race. Race is a word so difficult to define that some ethnologists have given up the attempt in despair; there are few, if any, unmixed races in the world, and no branch of the Slavs belongs to any one of the possible few. But it is probable that at the opening of the Christian era there was only one Slavic language, which the philologists call for convenience Primitive Slavic, and that, like the ancient Greeks, the speakers of it formed, in a broad sense of the term, a nation: that is, a people united by common customs and beliefs as well as by a common language, and conscious of their own unity.
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Issues relating to identity are for humanities – which obviously encompasses Slavic studies – one of the central problem and research fields. The questions of national variations in identity are amongst the most complex and therefore atract attention of scholars representing various disciplines of knowledge. While putting to use variegated approaches and methodologies, we arrive at comprehensive image of identity problematics and can better understand its developmental specifics which is determined by historical, social, subjective, that is, cultural factors. Having been aware of this state of affairs was what drove the cunsecutive research in this field, including in linguistics, which among others results in the present publication. The presented issues have been undertaken, which coincided with the fourtieth anniversary of the Institute of Slavic Philology at the University of Silesia – linguists representing different academic centres in Poland and abroad, in particular: Bosnia, Croatia, Montenegro, Czechia, Macedonia, Slovenia, and Ukraine. They responded to an invitation from the University which has a few decades of research experience by remaining aware of the weightiness of the problematics to be discussed which unveils ever new aspects and values actualized and created in languages undergoing current transformation. (A fragment from the Preface)
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The subject of the description are the hybrid structures in closely related languages – Slovak and Polish. Most linguists perceive hybrids as a separate phenomenon of word formation which provide the basis for linguistic description. Slovak dictionaries consider the formation of a hybrid as a word having in its composition native and foreign elements. Polish linguistic literature sees many inconsistencies in their defining. The purpose of this article is to set these issues in order, though, and indicate the necessity for such language units functioning in today’s Slavic languages. Competition between native and foreign forms results from the tendency towards internationalisation of formative systems of Slavic languages.
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The article discusses the three-dimensional division of the Croatian language compared to the two-dimensional division of the Polish language and their impacts on collective identity and social and political situation. Language is a fundamental factor of national identity, especially in the case of a significant stratification of language and the society. Individuals, in fact, very often speak multiple languages (e.g., a standard language, a dialect, a language of one’s profession etc.), which means that they belong to a greater number of language communities.
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The Slovene language in Prekmurje and Porabje has been developing separately from the Central-Slovene Carniola language for a long time. Until the beginning of the 18th century, the surrogate Kajkavian language had been used in church by Slovene people living between Mura and Raba, which proved to be more understandable compared to the Central-Slovene standard language. Catholic priests, educated in Kajkavian centres (Zagreb, Varaždin), used Kajkavian prayer books for their worship services. Similarly, Protestants were under the influence of the Croatian Kajkavian language, supplemented by linguistic elements from the Ravensko-Goričko dialect. Due to the dual development of the Slovene language, the Prekmurje language in the Pannonian area differed from Trubar’s and Dalmatin’s Carniola language in the Slovene Alpine area up until the mid- 19th century.The Slovene standard language unified in the mid-19th century, when the Central- Slovene and Eastern-Slovene language variations merged into New Slovene, or unified Slovene standard language. However, in the eastern part of Slovenia, this unification was followed only by Catholic authors, while Protestant authors continued using their own linguistic norm until the end of World War I, when part of the Prekmurje area was merged with Slovenian territory in 1921.Today’s linguistic situation in the Porabje area shows a substantial gap between the dialect and Slovene standard language. In the past, this has been successfully regulated by the Prekmurje standard language, although in the second half of the 19th century the New Slovene language has deepened the divide. Nowadays, the standard language in Porabje is considered as an artificial language, taught in school, while the archaic Porabian dialect, used in everyday communication, is beginning to disappear in the face of contact with Slovene, Kajkavian, and Hungarian.Lately, there has been a desire in the Porabje area to preserve the use of the dialect in worship services, while Porabian Slovene, used in artistic language, radio (Slovene radio Monošter), and newspapers (newspaper Porabje), is trying to find a balance between the standard literary norm and the dialect.
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This article deals with the dual grammatical number in Slavic and non-Slavic languages, analysing both its diachronic and synchronic aspects. Following an outline of general information about the dual number as grammatical category, an overview of its usage in different non-Indo-European (Hebrew and Arabic) and Indo-European languages (Greek, Latin, Old Church Slavic, modern Romance as well as Germanic languages) is presented. The dual number exists in numerous languages, spanning several different language families. In a global comparison, the highest level of morphological richness belongs to Arabic, Slovene, and the two Sorbian languages (Upper and Lower), whereas the usage of the dual number in other languages today is reduced and limited mainly to pronouns, paired objects, and expressions in combination with the number two (e.g., in Hebrew). Traces of it remain in present-day Slavic languages, primarily in reference to organic objects that generally appear in pairs. In today’s standard Slovene, the dual, which is modified in various aspects, seems to be a relatively stable category, making it one of the most distinctive features and particular marks of recognition of this small Slavic language. At the end of the article, an investigation is made into the practical use of the dual number in the standard Slovene language corpus Nova beseda.
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The position of the Bosnian language and its identity have been developed and defined through political and religious tendencies, by resisting and accepting new lexical items in the language – Turkish-origin words.The subject of this article is the Turkish-origin words in Škaljić’s Dictionary as a significant layer of Bosnian language lexis and its normative provisions.The Dictionary contains 8,742 words (expressions) and was published in 1965. As such it presents the most reliable source for studying Slavic-Oriental language interference.The present work sheds light on the importance and role of Turkish-origin words in the autonomy of the Bosnian language, as well as in preserving its Slavic identity.
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The Dervish and the Death, by Meša Selimović, is one of the few internationally recognized novels written by a Bosnian. It was published in 1966, and since has been translated into many languages. This novel is a unique inside story on Muslims in Bosnia, a culturally atmospheric narrative about a dervish’s loss of ideology which becomes a universal metaphor for the fight between a man and the ideological system.At the time The Dervish and the Death was published, Muslims, one of the six most prominent South Slavic ethnic and religious groups in Yugoslavia, were not officially recognized until 1971. Being already famous, Meša Selimović, born as a Muslim, a partisan in the Second World War, and a communist, declared himself as a Serb. The war in the 1990s was waged, mostly against Bosniaks and Bosnia, fueled by a stereotype that misrepresented the Muslim identity as Turks, a people who, as a traditional enemy, are danger for Europe. During this period a few Bosniak scholars tried to strengthen national identity by interpreting The Dervish and the Death as an Islamic novel. Nedžad Ibrišimović, excellent but less succesfull writer than Selimović, wrote an essay about the contradictions in the way Selimović treats Islamic values through his dervish’s view on religion, the Koran, etc., underlining that the novel is well written, the best in Bosnia, but it is not an Islamic book (it is, according to him, even anti-Islamic).This work gives a better picture of the whole issue of the identity of Bosniaks, their attitude towards religion, literature and simplifications of Bosnia inside and outside the country.
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The article looks into the differences between the respective histories of English and Croatian grammars. It further discusses the current situation regarding the publication of grammars, taking into account the differences between the respective positions of the two languages in the world, as well as different approaches to grammar within the Englishspeaking world and Croatia.
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Stereotypes, including national ones, have been thoroughly researched in terms of psychology, sociology, history and politics, and also go in-depth through culture with its ethnography, literature and language. The beginning of studies into stereotypes dates back to the 1920s.The following study presents Polish-Czech and Czech-Polish stereotypes as historical, cultural and linguistic phenomena, and it also characterises understanding of one another’s language amongst Slavs? Then a theoretical matter is considered, that of false lexical items, to finally arrive at the appearance of hetero-stereotypes. The “false mirror” of language is universal: for the average Pole the language of the “brothers” from the south has made the Poles laugh in the past and it still does. It is of interest that, for the Czechs the Polish language is a source of amusement as well. There is a belief that the Czech language sounds like old Polish, and a more widespread view that Czech is a language of children, for the Czechs speak using diminutives. Poles on the other hand are said to speak through their noses, or to speak like geese as a result of the Polish vocalic system.
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The accentuation norm of the Bosnian language has not been systematised or laid out in one body of work to this day. On the other hand, the standard Bosnian language is characterised by numerous accentual alterations which have not been the focus of academic research until now, leaving us with practically no estimate on the number of variant forms which are frequent in spoken Bosnian and inversely - variant forms that only exist in literary Bosnian.These two facts have been the primary points which determined the objective of this research – to first of all systematise the accentuation norm of the Bosnian language, that is to describe in brief the main accentual types of all types of words, abiding by a singular accentuation typology, as well as to examine the frequency of accentual alternations which are found in normative manuals of the standard Bosnian language.The method of excerption was applied on professional and scientific literature (grammar books and dictionaries). Research using questionnaires and surveys was conducted in primary and secondary schools in Travnik and Sarajevo. The gathered data was analysed statistically and commented on thus enabling us to determine which accentual alteration was more frequent.The accentual alterations found in the standard Bosnian language were sorted according the parts of speech : nouns, pronouns, adjectives, numbers, verbs and invariant parts of speech.The research complied with the accentual typology that divides all types of words in the following two categories:1. Immutable accentual type – which categorises words that have the same, unchanged accent in all forms and all the words of this type were sorted into four subgroups that are characterised by: a) circumflex, b) grave, c) double grave, d) acute accent.2. Mutable accentual type – which categorises mutable words the mutability of which can be in form of: a) a change in tone, b) a change in length, c) a change in the place of the accentuation.Based on the overview of accentual types it is apparent that in the whole corpus of the Bosnian language there is a significantly larger number of words of the immutable accentual type.
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