We don't really have mods around here; not much for them to do.

How different exactly are Serbo-Croat et al? I was under the impression they differed about as much as the various dialects of English.

It's much more complicated than that since these distinctions are quasi-independent of dialect distinctions. A "Croatian"-speaker and a "Serbian"-speaker from the same town will be more similar in their speech than either is to a "Serbian"-speaker from elsewhere. It's like the divergence between Hindi and Urdu, which is chiefly present in higher registers.

Well personally I couldn't say linguistically, but one of the differences is that dialect is "ekavski", as we call it, for Serbian and "ijekavski" (and "ikavski" somewhere in Croatia) for Croatian. basically, that means that when you see e in Serbian words you replace it with ije to get it as it is said in Croatian. Not always, it is not a general rule, but mostly from what I can think of now.
Other then that, in Croatian the verb remains in infinitive form and in Serbian it is changed to follow the grammatical gender of the subject in the sentence... so in a way Serbian is more precise.

Examples:

English: Do you want milk?
Serbian: Da li želite mleko?
Croatian: Želite li mlijeko?

English: Today was a very beautiful day.
Serbian: Danas je bio veoma lep dan.
Croatian: Danas je bio veoma lijep dan.

English: Would you like to go out with her tomorrow?
Serbian: Da li želite da izađete sa njom sutra?
Croatian: Želite li izaći sa njom sutra?

Then again, my examples are not depicting what I wanted to say, but basically Croatian and Serbian have little to no difference in their dictionary. The thing with verbs is as I've mentioned and shown here and one notable difference is that Croatian is written only in latinic, while Serbian is written in cyrillic and can be written in latinic also.



And about that thing with verbs being in infinitive in Croatian and not in Serbian, well... I've heard (and also used) infinitive verbs in my speech and have heard people who speak Croatian use the da + verb_root-ending also, so... No rule actually. We all speak how we like.

Of course, it's more complex than that. All ikavski varieties are considered Croatian and all ekavski varieties Serbian, but there are Serbs who speak ijekavski varieties who would be greatly offended if you told them they spoke "Croatian".


It is still possible to distinguish Croatian from Serbian in Latin script if there is a foreign name in the text. Croatians leave the spelling unaltered whereas Serbs respell it according to how it would be transcribed into Cyrillic. That is, they would write "Bil Klinton" where Croatians would have "Bill Clinton"

This is true. But even though it is not proper, even in Serbia, among the younger population on the Internet it is common to see that they keep foreign names and company names intact and in the original form. Maybe it is due to copy-pasting

Anyways... Are people here always so willing to participate in discussions like this? I'm very glad that there are people of interest! And I'm glad I can be of help... even if not as a linguist, but rather as a speaker of the "tong of interest"

That depends. I read a book once by a woman who listed Ancient Greek on a McDonald's job application.

And they didn't accept it because they thought that no one actually speaks Ancient Greek??? Those McD's guys...

:p

Well, I can also list That I know a bit of Church Slavonic, but that would't get me anywhere... except in a church... that is, if I wanted to read texts around the icons as newspaper or something like the standard practice material!

Maybe try a useful language if you want to put it on a resumé, like Spanish if you live in California, Texas or New York City; French would be useful in Quebec; English could be useful in many parts of the world. For a resumé it's probably best to learn a language that is the 2nd or 3rd most spoken in your area, or the official/co-official language of the area. No offence to those that want to learn lesser known or endangered languages but if you're shooting for a resumé stick to the more spoken ones.

I'm learning Arabic and Hebrew because that's the part of the world I'm most interested in. For future career aspirations, they will undoubtedly be extremely useful but they wouldn't do me much good on a resume here. French might be more handy.

Hebrew was the first language I ever attempted to learn and is currently on my list. I too love that area. I think Arabic probably would look good on an application especially in major cities or maybe for the army or government as a translator if you didn't want to ultimately move. But in general I was talking about using languages such as Ancient Greek and Old Church Slavonic or Sanskrit on a resumé! But you're right if you plan to move to the place where it's spoken or work for a companie originating in it's country.