The Serbian people and their Language by Pavle Ivić, Randall A. Major ISBN 9788679464712, 8679464716 instant download

The Serbian people and their Language by Pavle Ivić, Randall A. Major ISBN 9788679464712, 8679464716 instant download

Of the two broad domains of the history of language, one is at the same time the history of the people. That is the external history of language containing what happens fo the language, while what happens in the language is obviously part of its internal history. Dialect branch- ing finds its place in the external history of a language, along with the breakaways and proximations where, more clearly than anywhere else, the fate of a people as an ethnic group is reflected and condensed. Moreover, here is the history of a language in its function as a funda- mental tool of culture; most often, both the development of a culture and its language are fixed in the written texts extant from the past. The ambition of this book is to offer the Serbian reader an overview of the external history of our language. One of the two longer texts in the book is dedicated to the ethno-historical element, and the second to the cultural-historical one. In conjunction with those themes, there is also a text about the present state and future of our dialects, the legacy of our ethnic history, and another dedicated to a work that set a standard of our language as an instrument of culture—Vuk KaradZi¢'s Diction- ary of the Serbian Language (1818). In all of these texts, linguistic data are seen under the magnifying glass of their basis—the history of the people themselves, whether ethnic, political, cultural, social... Only sporadically, for the sake of illustration or the identification of certain external relations, facts will be cited from within the internal history of the language, mostly related to the development of sounds or forms. Internal changes in the areas instrumental in producing a language, that enormous and complex system of signs, have their own special, autonomic conditions arising from the life of that system, but not from the life of society using them. For that reason, such changes are beyond the scope of this book.