RE: Latin digraph characters (was: Re: Klingon silliness)

From: Marco Cimarosti (marco.cimarosti@essetre.it)
Date: Wed Feb 28 2001 - 04:58:39 EST


Douw Ewell wrote:
> Aren't Serbian and Croatian the standard example of two
> "languages" that are
> really the same language but are treated separately (a) for
> political reasons
> and (b) because Cyrillic is used to write the former and
> Latin to write the
> latter? Are there any linguistic or vocabulary differences
> between them?

<OT talking about languages, not scrips>

I think that the difference between the two is comparable to the difference
between British and American English. (Oops! I am a Latino, not an Anglo, so
change last 4 words to "Spanish and American Castillian" :-)

I.e., relatively big differences in the colloquial languages, but just a
handful of spelling and vucabulary variations in the unified literary
language.

I think, for instance, that "river" would be "rijeka" in Croatian and "reka"
in Serbian ("ријека" ad "река", in Cyrillic).

</OT>

_ Marco



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