Re: Montenegro Independent?!

In article <e57n24$1jao$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> "gogu" <golanule_VA_DA_MUIE@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
Ï "*** T. Winter" <***.Winter@xxxxxx> Ýãñáøå óôï ìÞíõìá
news:Izun7H.BwD@xxxxxxxxx
....
But as I understand it's much more related to Serbian than to Polish,
Bulgarian, Russian, etc.
Is this correct?

That is what linguistically is difficult to say.

I am not so sure.
From my experience in Poland and Bulgaria and after I heard some
Montenegrin, I can say that Serb and Montenegrin are two almost identical
languages but Polish is a (almost) foreign language to Serbs or
Montenegrins!

Yes, probably. Like the language of Volendam is (to me) a completely
foreign language.

Montenegrin is probably
just as related to Serbian as it is to Croatian, and less related to
Bulgarian and much less related to Polish and Russian.

Well, I don't know the percentages but I certainly don't find any similarity
with Polish.
And I have spend about 3.5 months *living* in Poland, so I have a quite good
opinion on Polish.
First of all, you'll never find in the "Montenegrin" the 3 or even 4
consecutive consonants of the Polish language!

Well, one of the first sentences I learned in Serbo-Croatian was:
"Snam samo malo Srbskom-Hvratskom". For somebody speaking a Germanic
or Romanic lanhuage it looks like "Srbskom" has a cluster of five
consonants. That is false, in this case the 'r' is vowel-like. But
you have been lead astray by the way sounds are represented in a
language. For instance, in Polish the letter sequence 'rz' is a
single consonontal phoneme. I think a Dutch word like "angstschreeuw"
would bother you very much. It looks like there are eight consonants
clustered together, there are not. There are only six phonemes here.
I still must have somewhere a Greek periodical where the name of a
well-known filmstar was spelled (translitterated to Latin script) as
"Mprigitte Mpardot". It took me (knowing only some classical Greek at
that time) some time to find the meaning. Also in Greek, what you see
in letters is not always what you hear. A single sound can be represented
by multile letters.

I am still trying to understand (as somebody from the Netherlands) the
concept of ethnic stock.

Maybe that's the reason you don't understand it;-)

What is my ethnicity?

Don't ask me ***, you must know that!

I have no idea. Pray tell me. Am I a Frank? A Frisian? A Saxon? A
Batave? A Portuguese Jew? A French Huguenot? Spanish? I have really
no idea. Probably a mixture of all of them. But certainly not Dutch,
because such mixtures are also quite common outside the Netherlands.

There are people like Dutch who are a produce of a mixture of more people,
but you must not forget that there are people who are a mixture of far less
people.
Slavs (under their different names, Serbians, Bulgarians, etc) and Greeks
are just two examples.
I am not supporting any "purist" theory, I am just saying there were far
less intermixes in these people than in others.

How much Albanian stock is there in either Greece or Montenegro?

Maybe religion is to be praised (or blamed...) for that, who knows...

One thing is certain, in the Netherlands religion is to be blamed for quite
a few non-mixtures. The Netherlands is a country that has been deeply split
because of religious issues. Nevertheless, this clear split between
Catholics, Protestants and Jews did not interfere with mixing. But who
am I to state that as I am a third generation heathen. Yes, religion had
no place for all of my four grand-parents, that came from two quite
separated parts of the country.

It's not a bad thing to learn, is it?...
From her answer I understand that they are quite similar, let's say like
Montenegrin been a Serbian idiom.

Well, if you reason like that, you must also say that Dutch is actually a
dialect of German.

As I got it from various replies here but also from personal experience,
Dutch and German are quite far away each from other (although related),
while Serbian and Montenegrin
are very close related.
You can't compare the two cases I think.

You can. Many Germans state(d) that Platt-Deutsch was just some form of
German. And Dutch is extremely related to Platt-Deutsch. (To wit, just
last year, when I was in the Northern part of Germany I bought some books
on Platt-Deutsch. There was virtually no distinction, except for spelling,
with the versions of Dutch spoken in Groningen.

Mutual understandable would be a criterion if the relation was transitive
(you, as a technical person should understand that). That is, if dialects
A and B are mutually understandable and dialects B and C are mutually
understandable, than also dialects A and C are mutually understandable
and in that case they are dialects of the same language (presupposing
we could define the concept of dialect compared to language).

Well, while in mathematics this is correct, I don't believe the same is
working in relation with languages!
It depends on the grade the two pairs of languages are mutually
understandable and that can even
annul the whole equation!

Now you are introducing something different: "the grade".

But let me go further. People from the South-Eastern part of the
Netherlands, close to Germany, speak a language that is understandable
both by Dutch speaking people and by German speaking people. The
reverse is also true. So, what is it. A separate language? A dialect
of German? A dialect of Dutch?

I don't know, pray tell us!
Has this "language" a name?

No name, but you can call it "Limburgian" if you wish. Quite a few variants
have been found. I do not know where my book on the languages/dialects of
Limburg are right now, but I think there are some ten variants. All easily
identifiable. Even in a city as Amsterdam, until some ten or twenty years
ago, approximately five different "dialects" were spoken.

I have no idea. There is
*no* Dutch ethnicity.

Maybe it should be one and defined as a mixture of all you've mentioned;-)

And it what way does it distinguish from people in Belgium? Germany?

different one from the other (British, Germans/Prussians and ...
Russians!),
we are speaking about two people obviously of the same or similar ethnic
stock...

Eh? Yes, the British ethnicity goes so far that we have the English, the
Welsh, the Scots, and whatever.

Yes, here we have separate ethnicities.

But you took them together. Like you took together Germans and Prussians.
The latter is especially strange as the Prussians had originally a language
quite different from what the other Germans had. More close to Latvian and
Lithuanian. They more or less adopted the "German" language.

Sure, even Greece numbers only about 180 years but this has nothing to do
with ethnicity!
An ethnicity can exist even if there is no such a country!
Don't forget that in antiquity there was not a "Hellas" state but all the
Greeks from the various city-states were defining themselves as ...
Hellenes/Greeks!

As I have understood, only to be able to join the Games of that time.

And
although the UK is fairly old, there is still no real unity. There is
regular talk about separation of Scotland from England, and in Scotland
there is still a regular mourn in church about how the Scots lost again
the English a few hundred years ago.

Yes, but it's curious when it comes to vote about their "independence", my
Scottish friends vote ... against;-)

As there has not yet been a vote, I wonder. But whatever the case may be,
in Serbia vs. Montenegro, there has been a vote, and the results show that
they should separate.
--
*** t. winter, cwi, kruislaan 413, 1098 sj amsterdam, nederland, +31205924131
home: bovenover 215, 1025 jn amsterdam, nederland; http://www.cwi.nl/~***/
.

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