14 October 2016

NOTICE

Yet again! ... I will be taking a break from incoming computer traffic, including emails and Comments offered to the blog, from now, October 14, until October 21 inclusively. I hope to manage a blogpost most days.

By the way ... I do not enable comments arguing that, for whatever reason, Bergoglio is not the lawful Bishop of Rome. Recently, too, I did not accept something written in Croatian. This is because I gather that the English Bishops consider that bloggers are responsible for the comments they allow. And I do not think I can rely upon Google translators to reveal accurately to me the sense of a piece of Serbo-Croat.

When I took over my desk at Lancing in 1972, I found in one of the drawers a 1930s Serbo-Croat phrasebook with delicious entries such as "At what time does the Airship leave for Zagreb?". Sadly, I did not keep it.

POST SCRIPTUM

A couple of people have rebuked me for talking about "Serbo-Croat". Well, if you insist, I'm sorry. But that was how the booklet described itself. You can hardly expect me to dissemble the Truth ...

5 comments:

W.C. Hoag said...

Father, Father! Please refrain from using that dreadful term "Serbo-Croat"! Neither Serbs nor Croats take kindly to that hyphenated monster. And seeing that the two peoples claim to be of different ethnic stocks and their languages although sharing a common grammar, employ different alphabets and words, it is best to just treat these as separate languages even if their native speakers can clearly understand one another. We don't want another Balkans war, do we? [wink, wink]

Unknown said...

Just a small remark about Serbo-Croat: there is no such language for the past 25 years. Serbo-Croatian language was official made up language of ex Yugoslavia, but Croatia left Yugoslavia 25 years ago and since then official language of Republic of Croatia is Croatian, and in Yugoslavia was only Serbian language left at that time until Yugoslavia completely stopped existing years later. So today Serbian is official language in Serbia and Monte Negro and is spoken in parts of Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Croatian is official language in Croatia. Those two languages are similar and we do understand each others, but there are differences in some words and writing and accent and pronouncing. Also Croatians are Catholics and Serbians are Orthodox. Thank you for your time.

Banshee said...

I woulda add that comments in other languages than that of the blogger are usually spam, and not for any product that should be adverised on a family blog.

William said...

One is reminded of the dictum that "a language is a dialect with an army".

Unknown said...

Hmm..those are two different languages, and have been for centuries before communists founded Yugoslavia and made up Serbo-Croatian language and made Croatian children learn Cyrillic letters in primary school. (Think Serbs wouldn't mind that Serbo-croatian language still exists as well as Yugoslavia ;))