[HN Gopher] Croatian Wikipedia Disinformation Assessment
___________________________________________________________________
Croatian Wikipedia Disinformation Assessment
Author : atdt
Score : 80 points
Date : 2021-06-19 18:38 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (meta.wikimedia.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (meta.wikimedia.org)
| anigbrowl wrote:
| The report quality is excellent and a worthwhile template for
| disinformation investigations in other contexts. I found it
| especially interesting because while I am not an expert in Balkan
| affairs, I'm expert-adjacent; have friendships with refugees,
| journalists and former military/intelligence involved in the
| conflict on various different sides and have read deeply into it
| in my own time.
|
| A standout was the table listing relevant facts (specifically
| convictions of war criminals by an international tribunal) and
| whether the language sub-wikis accurately reflect those facts or
| not. Whether one likes or dislikes a given fact, its occurrence
| is a kind of ground truth that can serve as a reference marker by
| which to weight the factual content of an article. Thus, whether
| someone was convicted by a tribunal is a fact; whether it was
| fair is open to debate, but failure to mention the fact at all
| amounts to a concealment of information, whether negligent or
| willful. When we see a pattern of factual errors (including
| glaring omissions), we can assess the degree of deliberation
| involved by looking at whether the errors all run in similar
| directions and how systematic/assiduous the erroneous editor is
| in rejecting alternative points of view.
|
| A complicating factor here is Wikipedia's general open-access
| policy. As you probably know, some people who are interested in a
| topic appoint themselves gatekeepers of it and revert edits they
| disapprove of. Over time, I can be difficult the distinguish
| between passion and expertise. For example, suppose you grew up
| in a village where a battle was fought (before you were born or
| aware of such things). You receive from your parents, peers, and
| teachers an approximate view of the historical event as
| experienced by those who lived through or were directly impacted
| by it. While in high school, you find a Wikipedia page about the
| battle which has some details wrong - geographical facts, say -
| and you correct those with your local knowledge. As time goes on,
| you become the leading Wikipedian curating this topic, and enrich
| the article with all kinds of valuable information on how the
| battle was fought.
|
| But suppose you find yourself getting into arguments about _why_
| the battle was fought; now you 're going outside the scope of
| your local knowledge. Battles might fought for purely logistic
| reasons (control a river crossing, cut an enemy off from supply
| lines), personal ones (a commander has family or reasons to love
| or hate a particular place), or strategic factors (to weaken
| enemy resolve or tempt a misallocation of forces). These might
| not be apparent from the local perspective; received wisdom might
| posit a local cause that was actually just the initial skirmish
| of a larger action.
|
| Case studies illustrate some of the difficulties in evaluating
| controversial information. For example, the entry on Ratko
| Mladic, a Bosnian Serb, is heavily slanted on Serbian wikipedia,
| which emphasizes his positive qualities and plays down negative
| aspects of his story, as well as introducing analysis and
| speculation favorable to Serbian nationalist narratives. Now, a
| problem with bias accusations is subjectivity; a Mladic apologist
| might argue that other narratives omit contextual information
| that seems to justify his actions, or that emphasis on his
| criminality serves to distract from crimes by other parties that
| equally severe but less strenuously prosecuted.
|
| Although there may be large differences of opinion, that can be
| OK when the contextual variations are truthful. Different people
| can have very different ideas about what the significant factors
| are, and exploring those differences can be valuable. Most
| historical arguments (in my non-professional view) are not so
| much debates about _what happened_ but rather over _what matters_
| , and that can vary both because people are on different sides of
| a tribal argument but also because people have different
| assumptions about moral/ethical considerations that are
| orthogonal to their tribal membership.
|
| Missing from the report (perhaps because most people are not that
| interested) is any kind of dynamic information about the
| development and intensity of the divergences. It might be
| interesting to mine the article history and/or talk pages to get
| a sense of which parties struggled over control and how those
| struggles played out - for example, was there an openly
| revisionist challenge on core topics that was eventually
| sustained by attrition of disagreeing voices, or a stealth
| campaign of incremental nudges in one direction with a large
| cumulative effect?Modeling and visualizing these dynamics could
| yield valuable insights on other sorts of networked conflicts.
| disabled wrote:
| As a Croatian-American who speaks Croatian, you never want to go
| to the Croatian version of Wikipedia. Anyways, a lot of this
| pressure being put on Wikipedia/Wikimedia is through the
| investigative journalism organization, Balkan Insight (see links
| below that I referenced).
|
| The reason why people do this stuff is because not only do they
| want war---they want to commit genocide again.
|
| Here is what I wrote about it a couple of months ago:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26788882
|
| It [Wikipedia] does have power over what it allows to be
| published, although it does not have the staff to enforce
| violations. As a Croatian-American who speaks Croatian, it is
| best to avoid the Croatian language Wikipedia pages about wars,
| with some more recent than others. It is quite hateful,
| xenophobic, and nationalistic. The news source I provided is
| investigative journalism for Balkan countries funded via European
| Union.
|
| > "Wikimedia Foundation Inc, the US-based non-profit charitable
| NGO, is the owner of the Croatian version of Wikipedia." [1]
|
| > "However, the Wikimedia Foundation is not the founder of the
| Croatian version, nor does it accept that it is responsible for
| the accuracy of its articles. It insists that it does not have
| any power over Croatian-language Wikipedia entries." [1]
|
| Other reads are provided for reference [2][3][4].
|
| [1] Wikipedia Not Responding to Inquiries on Croatian Entries:
| https://balkaninsight.com/2018/04/23/wikipedia-not-replying-...
|
| [2] Croatian Wikipedia Removes 'Polish Genocide of Germans'
| Claim: https://balkaninsight.com/2018/03/29/croatian-wikipedia-
| remo...
|
| [3] How Croatian Wikipedia Made a Concentration Camp Disappear:
| https://balkaninsight.com/2018/03/26/how-croatian-wikipedia-...
|
| [4] Croatia Wikipedia Alters Jasenovac Camp Entry Again:
| https://balkaninsight.com/2018/08/29/croatia-wikipedia-furth...
| zozbot234 wrote:
| This is not "pressure being put on Wikimedia", it's the
| Wikimedia folks trying to re-establish/enforce the underlying
| principles of their projects, which have existed since these
| projects got started.
| disabled wrote:
| There has been a lot of international pressure that has been
| put on Wikimedia over the years about this issue.
| input_sh wrote:
| This ain't new, people tried to convince Wikipedia to do this
| for years. Wikimedia always claimed that there's nothing they
| can do about it. Turns out that was bullshit, as all of us
| knew.
|
| And Balkan Insight is really fucking good at getting English
| speakers to care about problems in the Balkans.
| DyslexicAtheist wrote:
| I second your recommendation of Balkan Insight as a reliable
| source. I've lived in Croatia for ~5 years training local LEA's
| in modern cyber and intel techniques (OSINT being a large part
| of it).
|
| The older population is still deeply divided over the horrors
| of the war with many veterans living on government money (some
| of them have never seen a fight). I have a lot of trust in the
| younger people who are sick of it all, want change and believe
| in integration, free movement (within EU) and modern values.
| But if you go out for drinks in a less touristy bar that you'll
| find yourself amidst a celebration of war criminals and/or
| people who benefited from the spoils of war (and organized
| crime that goes hand in hand there). Fun facts: the owner of
| Rimac is building his car company on his fathers criminal
| empire, the hooligans supporting the local Zagreb club (some of
| them Neo Nazi's) are being celebrated for enforcing the law in
| places where the police has no power or helping with local
| community efforts (rebuilding the city after the earthquake),
| ...
|
| There is a saying in Croatia "Where were you in '92" that is
| reserved for the older population. You never know who you are
| befriending and what crimes they got into during the war.
|
| Among the most horrible people that stem from the place are the
| modern elite. Anyone who shows their money and who often no
| longer live there. The owner of "Konzum", a huge grocery chain
| where the owner built his empire on war money and extracts the
| revenues via off-shore companies while sitting comfortably in
| his flat in London while his employees scrape by with shit
| working condition and terrible pay.
|
| There is also the puppet-mayor of Zagreb who peddles most of
| his contracts to the Bosnian mob and who is unable to speak up.
| It really pisses off the older Croatians.
|
| The top lawyer of the country is in the mob, as are several
| judges. The Hack club "Mama" in Zagreb is constantly harassed
| by the local criminals who want them to vacate the premises so
| they can rent it out for higher prices, despite a long term
| contract being in place. Many of the trendy cafe's are run by
| the mobsters wifes, GF's and sisters. You can get a great deal
| there in the middle of the town for lease for your new
| restaurant or club idea and once you're in - BOOM! the rent
| double or triples. People wonder why restaurants and clubs
| never survive there more than 2-3 years and often shut down
| while they are at the peak of their popularity. It's not
| because Zagreb constantly plays with new ideas, it's because
| otherwise you might lose a couple of fingers, or worse. Also
| cops are useless there (unless you pay them) ... in fact I got
| some of my best weed of a corrupt cop in Zagreb.
|
| There is also the question of Dubravka Suica who is now in the
| Vice-President of the European Commission, a corrupt individual
| who got rich as a teacher moving into politics and supporting
| the local "construction projects" and benefited from pork-
| barrel projects in her home region Dubrovnik.
| disabled wrote:
| All of this is true.
|
| > There is a saying in Croatia "Where were you in '92" that
| is reserved for the older population. You never know who you
| are befriending and what crimes they got into during the war.
|
| Yeah, I am in my early 30s (I was 3 in '92) and my family is
| American. Let's just say that I am third generation Croatian-
| American (for all 3 generations we are American, and this is
| by birth), and I am half-Croatian (by blood). My grandmother
| always said that the fighting was always a 2-way street and
| that neither side has been innocent. She also said that she
| had Serb friends and that they were "the nicest people she
| ever knew." It's different in America. I do not know many old
| people in Croatia.
|
| I also especially take offense to people understating the
| evils of our Nazi (Ustase) movement. One reason (of several)
| is that I have a relative who died fighting the Croatian
| fascists.
|
| I also wish that Croatia would stay out of Bosnia. I know
| that is an unpopular thing to say, but we should. It's one
| thing to give ethnic Croats in Bosnia Croatian citizenship.
| It's another thing to be funding segregated schools
| (partially funded by the Roman Catholic Church--on behalf of
| Croatia) that indoctrinate the next generation of youth with
| a completely different version of the history of Bosnia.
|
| I also know of corruption done by Croatian diplomatic
| officials posted abroad (which is just about the worst form
| of corruption there is--and can be quite dangerous), although
| Croatia probably would do nothing about it.
|
| Anyways, another thing that irritates me is that there are
| both Croatians and Croatian emigrants selling insignia with
| the our Nazi Coat of Arms on it (the Ustase--we were a Nazi
| puppet state in WWII so it is literally a Nazi insignia).
|
| Just for reference, on the left is the Nazi (Ustase) coat of
| arms [Note: often the "U" at the top is left out--it's Nazi
| insignia either way], while on the right is the Croatian coat
| of arms: https://dubokavoda.com/wp-
| content/uploads/2019/08/Grbovi-NDH...
|
| Here are some listings on Etsy literally selling the Nazi
| coat of arms:
|
| > https://www.etsy.com/listing/249865187/croatian-cuturica-
| siz...
|
| > https://www.etsy.com/listing/505814936/old-croatian-grb-
| croa...
|
| > https://www.etsy.com/listing/917628493/croatian-pendant-
| char...
|
| > https://www.etsy.com/listing/998887249/croatian-national-
| sym...
| glenngillen wrote:
| With regard to the coat of arms, I'm familiar with this (or
| something that looks similar) from various Croatian
| football teams. Is this really a Nazi symbol? Or just a
| Croatian identity one, and the Nazi one they put a "U" on
| top of for Ustase?
| [deleted]
| mrkramer wrote:
| Croatian identity(coat of arms) is chessboard [0] it is
| 500 years old. Quasi Nazi symbol is Ustase (U) but it was
| initially a movement for Croatian Independence later on
| it became Nazi like.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coat_of_arms_of_Croatia
| mrkramer wrote:
| >DyslexicAtheist
|
| You described Croatia as a Pablo Escobar's Columbia where
| crime and corruption reigns and dominates everyday life but
| that's not the case. Yes corruption is high but that's the
| problem of Communist legacy. Many of the same state workers
| and politicians who worked in Yugoslavia are working for the
| state right now or their children are.
|
| Lustration of Communist elite and state workers including
| judges didn't happen like in other East European countries.
|
| Croatia in 2019 was visited by 20 million tourists and one of
| the reasons except "nature and beauty" is low crime and
| feeling of being safe. There are no street gangs and violent
| street crime over here.
|
| >There is a saying in Croatia "Where were you in '92" that is
| reserved for the older population.
|
| Btw it's 91 that's the year when the War started you probably
| confused it with Bosnia where the War started in 1992.
| ordx wrote:
| Same thing is happening in Russian Wikipedia. Majority of
| articles are written from the official pro-Kremlin point of view
| and any attempts to change that are blocked. Given that there are
| millions of Russian-speaking people live outside of Russia,
| something like this split needs to be done.
| cosmodisk wrote:
| I remember having a very heated discussion on some pretty
| recent historical events with a few Russians. At some point I
| thought I'm in some sort of an alternative reality.. However,
| eventually,after almost smacking each other faces, we figured
| that the way we were taught at school was miles and miles apart
| and they didn't know any alternative opinions. It took quite
| some effort to at least acknowledge it.
| varjag wrote:
| I concur. It's usable if you want to know how T-72B2 differs
| from T-72B3 but is heavily editorialized for most non-technical
| topics, not even directly political.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| The uncomfortable truth is that many average Russians support
| "the official pro-Kremlin" outlook. Similarly, if the Chinese
| Wikipedia was not blocked by the government, it would probably
| look a lot like Baidu Baike, and all the articles about
| "sensitive" topics would be whitewashed and socially harmonised
| by the "great human flesh search engine crowd". The Chinese
| government is actually doing Wikipedians a favor by keeping the
| nationalist masses from accessing the site!
| yorwba wrote:
| The article argues that it was the split of Serbo-Croatian
| Wikipedia into country-specific Wikipedias that fractured the
| community and enabled the takeover of the Croatian Wikipedia.
| mrkramer wrote:
| I am Croatian and I don't understand what's the problem? Croatian
| admins are probably patriots who want to protect our country from
| the past Communist ideology and defend our War of Independence.
|
| I'm sure US admins are patriots as well for example and are proud
| of their War of Independence and all the good things that US has
| done in the past while at the same time being critical of all the
| bad things that happened in the past.
|
| After all Wikipedia should be facts not opinion articles but of
| course there is always some commentary on top of facts which can
| be ideological.
|
| In Croatia there is Culture War going on between the Left and the
| Right for the last 30 years but that is democracy. If we all
| think the same then nobody is thinking.
|
| Why is Croatia singled out and not Poland for example? Poland is
| more "right" than Croatia and over there we can see intense and
| sometimes violent confrontations between left and right.
| brazzy wrote:
| The problem is that a cabal of people subverted the processes
| of Wikipedia to gain effective control of the Croatian
| Wikipedia, and used that control to exclude opposing viewpoints
| entirely and in some cases insert and preserve completely
| counterfactual content.
|
| That is what is being "singled out", not their political
| ideology.
| mrkramer wrote:
| Every time when I read Croatian Wikipedia I see facts I mean
| historical facts. Commentary on top of facts can be
| ideological but facts are facts. From the Wikipedia report I
| can see topics of WW2 and War of Independence being
| problematic but I read about these topics on Croatian
| Wikipedia and I didn't see any "counterfactual content".
|
| And like I said Wikipedia is not about opinion articles it is
| about factual information.
| createdapril24 wrote:
| https://www.reuters.com/article/us-security-wikipedia/cia-fb...
|
| This kind of vulnerability seems to be a very difficult one to
| plug. Ultimately, Wikipedia should be seen as a source of
| information, but not to be trusted blindly. That's a good stance
| to take purely out of factual inaccuracy and data incompleteness
| - but also necessary from the perspective that Wikipedia has, is
| and will be used to influence because it holds an authoritative
| position.
| Keyframe wrote:
| While pretty much all mentioned wikis share same bias and
| mistrust towards them, apart technical articles... Proposed
| solutions make sense, except for
|
| _Encouraging the affected communities to discuss the possibility
| of re-merging Bosnian, Serbian and Croatian language projects
| into the original Serbo-Croatian language projects to re-align
| with the practices of other pluricentric Wikipedia language
| versions._
|
| Which will not happen, and on top of it is border-line offensive
| and shows a dose of not understanding the differences. Serbo-
| croatian or Croato-serbian (as the full name of the language is)
| was an artificially constructed language during social-communist
| Yugoslavia. All involved parties agreed to part ways on
| unification of the languages for a myriad of reasons, not all
| political ones.. and that's now water over the bridge.. and now
| this entity, probably through ignorance, wants to offer re-
| introduction of the topic which countries have fought wars over?
| Nah. One of the reasons why SH (serbo-croatian) wiki even exists
| is because there's a group of people living in the past and which
| makes, for themselves, communities like that. Raisong the issue
| as a possible course of resokution and common ground not only
| gives legitimacy to it, but is border-line offensive and
| absolutely ignorant of the issues at hand.
|
| Otherwise, apart from that, great. Something needs to haooen to
| ex yugoslavian wikis throughout to make them at least half-
| thrustworthy.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Serbo-Croatian is a family of very closely related languages.
| There are some differences in lexicon and script, but there are
| also differences among varieties of English. And you could
| write English down using a different script like Devanagari,
| but this would not somehow make it into a different language.
| dragandj wrote:
| > There are some differences in lexicon and script
|
| Even this is only to a point; namely, all these languages use
| Latin alphabet, while Serbian also uses Cyrillic (Serbian
| uses both alphabets). Croatian originally used Glagolitic
| script (many centuries ago). This Latin/Cyrillic division is
| caused by Catholic/Orthodox church split and Habsburg/Ottoman
| empire border rather than being some central feature in
| languages.
| locallost wrote:
| This is unfortunately complete baloney, and I really cannot
| find a better word. The differences between the languages are
| not greater than the differences between American and British
| English or German in Germany and Austria. In fact the language
| spoken by the Swiss cannot be understood by almost all Germans,
| yet it is still called German. The only artificial part are the
| names which stem from the inability to come to a compromise,
| e.g. neither side can accept to speak the language of the
| others. It needs one name because it is for all intents and
| purposes one language. Everything else is just politics. This
| view has recently also been supported by a group of linguists
| in the region, see:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declaration_on_the_Common_La...
| input_sh wrote:
| At least in Bosnia, it's not that uncommon to refer to the
| language as just nas (our).
|
| But yeah, while I 100% agree it's one language, naming it is
| tricky. I tend to use BHS (short for Bosnian, Croatian,
| Serbian).
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_language_is_a_dialect_with_a.
| ..
|
| Really, _all_ languages are basically the same language. Draw
| a circle around any <del>50km</del> 5km area and almost
| everyone in there will understand each other, with only minor
| differences in speech.
|
| Think this is wrong? Okay, then: English should be divided
| into Romantic and Germanic. It's two languages (basically
| French, and basically Dutch) that have been mashed together,
| with a splash of Celtic influence.
|
| These are all bad takes. So's yours.
| scrollaway wrote:
| I'd like to invite you to Belgium, a trilingual country.
| And no, here a lot of people don't speak all three (nor
| even the major two). French and Flemish are not close to
| each other at all.
|
| Your comment sounds fine on the surface, if you don't
| actually stop to think about it. It's horribly wrong in
| lots of Europe, Africa, south America and Asia, hell even
| in the US it's not correct everywhere.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Yeah, it's only really true of the Germanics (and English
| with the basic vocabulary of a few languages, because
| English is weird) - but even then, questionably.
| locallost wrote:
| Here is a quote from the late Serbian linguist Ivan Klajn:
|
| "Experts have the viewpoint that if 70 percent of the words
| between two languages are common, then they are not
| languages but variants of the same language. And in our
| case it is not 70, but over 90 percent".
|
| Original quote in Serbian:
| http://www.rtv.rs/sr_lat/drustvo/govore-li-srbi-hrvati-
| bosnj...
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Okay... but then where do you draw the boundaries between
| the Germanic languages? What constitutes a language will
| always be political, until the day we stop drawing
| borders between languages.
| locallost wrote:
| Try playing a German movie without subtitles to an
| English person and then do the same with a Serbian movie
| and a Croatian person and you will have your answer.
|
| People either understand each other or they don't.
| There's absolutely nothing political about that.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Try playing a German movie without subtitles to a Dutch
| person, and then do the same with a Geordie movie and a
| Yankee.
|
| Speaking of... Wikipedia (Dutch):
|
| > Wikipedia is een online encyclopedie die ernaar streeft
| inhoud te bieden die vrij herbruikbaar, objectief en
| verifieerbaar is. Het project is gebouwd op vijf zuilen.
| De Nederlandstalige versie startte op 19 juni 2001 en is,
| gemeten naar het aantal lemma's, met meer dan 2 miljoen
| artikelen de op vijf na grootste taalversie.
|
| And Wikipedia (German):
|
| > Das Ziel der Wikipedia ist der Aufbau einer
| Enzyklopadie durch freiwillige und ehrenamtliche Autoren.
| Der Name Wikipedia setzt sich zusammen aus Wiki
| (entstanden aus wiki, dem hawaiischen Wort fur
| ,schnell'), und encyclopedia, dem englischen Wort fur
| ,Enzyklopadie'. Ein Wiki ist ein Webangebot, dessen
| Seiten jeder leicht und ohne technische Vorkenntnisse
| direkt im Webbrowser bearbeiten kann.
|
| Different languages. Neither is too hard for an English
| speaker. (If in doubt, try pronouncing the words.)
|
| While I'm at it, Wikipedia (French):
|
| > Wikipedia est un projet d'encyclopedie collective en
| ligne, universelle, multilingue et fonctionnant sur le
| principe du wiki. Ce projet vise a offrir un contenu
| librement reutilisable, objectif et verifiable, que
| chacun peut modifier et ameliorer.
|
| Also a different language! But just you tell me you don't
| understand that.
| dragandj wrote:
| Play any Serbian/Croatian/Bosnian movie anywhere in
| Serbia/Croatia/Bosnia, and nobody would need any
| subtitles; that's the point. In Croatia, they
| (sometimes?) subtitle Serbian movies, for great comic
| effect.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Many different languages are mutually intelligible. Many
| dialects of the same language are not mutually
| intelligible. That's because the ways people speak don't
| divide up _neatly_ into languages.
| dragandj wrote:
| This is the same language. Three different names for
| political reasons.
| dkjaudyeqooe wrote:
| I think you're missing the point. There seems to be endless
| discussion around this question, but it is purely academic
| and doesn't affect people who speak one language or the other
| in the least. It's irrelevant.
|
| If (some significant number of) Croatians say they speak
| Croatian then these is a language called Croatian spoken by
| Croatians. It doesn't matter if it has a striking resemblance
| to another language or if it is unique. People have a right
| to linguistic self-determination as much as anything else.
|
| The language you speak is entirely political. Academics or
| historians don't get to determine what languages people
| speak, people do that for themselves.
| yorwba wrote:
| > In fact the language spoken by the Swiss cannot be
| understood by almost all Germans, yet it is still called
| German.
|
| This is not a good analogy, because there's a separate
| Alemannic Wikipedia (covering slightly more than Swiss
| German) https://als.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Houptsyte
| Keyframe wrote:
| Aside the fact you have linked to a declaration linked to
| political platform initiatives, one of the core serbian
| propaganda machinery during the 90's wars and breakup of
| Yugoslavia was denying identities and right for self-
| determinism across constitutive nations in said country.
| Prime example was (and is) throughout denial of montenegrin
| nationality and language, the other (among many) establishing
| a never in history existing one (not common base) language
| platform which would solidify serbian tendencies to tie-in
| languages and outside of its area, and thus people, into its
| own agenda. Our children, at least in Croatia, have trouble
| understanding a large volume of lexicography from swrbian
| language, and I am sure there's the opposite as well. Notable
| is the absence of Bulgarian in the story, which to a large
| extend is also understood by our yugoslavian-schooled peers,
| no different than macedonian or slovenian for that matter.
|
| Any and all discussion around languages in these matters have
| started and stopped by politics and ultimately even supported
| by academia. Is there a common understanding and overlap
| between languages? Of course. Are there differences? Of
| course, and as time goes by they grow larger - new
| generations have no idea what the other one are talking about
| for a lot of even trivial examples. Whomevwr says differently
| either does not love in the region or lives in a bubble.
| Whether that's anecdotal or a docimented fact (exercise to a
| reader to find reactions in each country to said declaration
| that followed promplty lole fire from all levels from
| academia to politics in all countries) is a sideshow to the
| following: apart from yugoslavian period and a bit before
| there's no shared history (500+ years of ottoman empire does
| that to one part of the region whereas the other wasn't in
| it), there's no shared literature throughout history (since
| it's a wikipedia post, find history of croatian literature
| and then serbian), how come it's called serbo-croatian or
| croato-serbian excluding all other nationalities/countries
| (and how come it's only ex-yugoslavia centric?), and
| ultimately and the only unarguable reason relevant to the
| topic is that language is one of the key components to
| national identities which region has struggled (wars over)
| within recent decades - tha ultimate reason why this won't
| happen ever, as exemplified even by this small universe of
| replies within.. which was my whole point.
| lima wrote:
| > _In fact the language spoken by the Swiss cannot be
| understood by almost all Germans, yet it is still called
| German._
|
| It's called "Schweizerdeutsch" (Swiss German) and is indeed a
| separate language. In fact, every region in Switzerland has a
| different dialect :-)
| valvar wrote:
| To add to that (as I guess many will not know this -- I
| certainly didn't until recently), the group of dialects is
| called Alemannic German, and is not exclusive to
| Switzerland. There are similar dialects spoken in all of
| the surrounding countries -- including, of course, Germany.
| Linguistically and historically it's part of the same
| language continuum as standard German, so the name "Swiss
| German" is not misinformative as some may assume from the
| fact that standard German speakers often can't understand
| Swiss German. There are other (probably many, though I only
| know of a few) similar examples of languages where people
| might assume the dialects are mutually intelligible, but
| they really aren't -- Italian also being one. I suppose
| it's even the case in most countries/languages that
| there'll be dialects that are only barely mutually
| intelligible.
| locallost wrote:
| I speak German and as most others in Germany I do not
| understand Swiss German. My point was simply this: the
| similarities between those two are so tiny to a point that
| people who only speak one of those two would not be able to
| communicate. Yet they still find a way to put German into
| the language spoken by the Swiss. The differences between
| Serbian and Croatian are so tiny that people speaking only
| one of those would absolutely be able to understand each
| other. And this is true even after decades of partial
| isolation from one another.
| dragandj wrote:
| Even stronger: the differences in internal regional
| dialects within Serbia and Croatia, are sometimes larger
| than the differences between official Serbian and
| Croatian (although even these small differences in
| official languages are often artificial and politically
| forced into).
| samch93 wrote:
| Native swiss here and would not sign that swiss german
| can't be understood by germans and that it is a separate
| language. Austrians and germans who live at the border can
| very well understand us and their dialects share many
| features with swiss german, more so than with some german
| dialects from the north. I think that categorizing swiss
| german as a separate language is very much an act of
| balkanization. It is part of the german language whichs
| spans a large geographic area with many different
| variations.
| udba wrote:
| Certainly the naming of the language as "Serbo-Croatian" or
| "Croato-Serbian" happened in the Socialist period, but the
| Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, Montenegrin, etc. etc. languages
| are really variants of a polycentric language [1], whatever you
| want to call it. For those not from the Balkans, imagine the
| British, Americans, and Canadians insisting that their versions
| of English are completely different languages, or making up new
| words to distance themselves from each other.
|
| Snjezana Kordic's book made the case that there is a
| polycentric language shared by those countries and that much of
| the current politicking over this topic is nationalist in
| basis. I think it's easy to see that this bickering over
| language is yet another useful distraction from the
| catastrophic state of society and the economy in those lands.
|
| [1]:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declaration_on_the_Common_Lang...
| beaner wrote:
| Same thing happens in the English wikipedia. Criticisms and
| scandals feature prominently in the bios of right-leaning
| political figures when they are present or even hinted at, and
| largely cut out or downplayed for left-leaning political figures.
|
| No I do not have a source, it's just something you notice when
| reading wikipedia regularly for 20 years. I didn't keep a record
| in anticipation for this HN comment.
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