[PEN-L:4546] Re: Re: Protest against the Bombing

[ts99u-1.cc.umanitoba.ca [130.179.154.224]]

Although I am in large agreement  with Barkley's post (there are 
several other matters on which I do disagree), I think the comment 
below is quite factually wrong.  Whereas Serbian and Croatian are 
for the most part very similar (or at least were until Tudjman began 
to change the language so that it no longer resembled Serbian) as 
are, I believe, Macedonian and Bulgarian, Slovenian is quite 
different though related.  Slovenians do not understand Serbian or 
vice versa.  Only about 40-50 per cent of the words are the same.  
For instance, the word for worker in Serbo-Croat is 'radnik', in 
Slovenian 'delavec'; onion in S-C is 'luk', in Slov it is 'cebula' (to give 
two examples where the words are totally unrelated.)  Furthermore, 
the Slovenes have a different grammar involving not only singular 
and plural but also 'dual'.  Newscasts on Slovenian TV orginating in 
Zagreb or Belgrade usually are subtitled simply because many 
Slovenes don't understand Serbo-Croat. And so on.

I also believe Barkley's figures on income disparities are wrong.  In 
the 1950s the ratio of Slovenia to Kosovo was closer to 15 to one 
and declined up to the 1980s to the area of 5 to 1 before increasing 
again as the decentalization of economic powers and the decline of 
national economic policy increased the regionalization of the 
Yugoslav economy.  Furthermore, the autonomy of Kosovo had 
lead the Albanians to set up their own schools which specialized in 
Albanian culture and language to the detriment of technical and 
scientific studies.  (Also I have been told when I was there in the 
late 1980s shortly before the breakup, but can not verify, that there 
was strong islamic opposition to educating female students 
particularly in practical or work-related areas.)  The lack of 'human 
capital' made it very difficult to invest in economic development 
despite the large funds made available to Kosovo through the Fund 
for the Faster Development of Less Developed Regions.  As a 
result, taxes transfered primarily from Slovenia and Croatia to 
Kosovo for economic development projects was largely wasted in 
projects that never became operational or were absorbed in 
massive cultural white elephants such as the national library in 
Pristina.  The autonomy of Kosovo prevented the Serb or 
Yugoslavian governments from planning these investments in any 
way that could be integrated into a national development strategy.  
Meanwhile, the Albanians had been practicing an ongoing and 
quite vicious process of ethnic cleansing of Serbs from Kosovo.  It 
is interesting that, in the name of preventing ethnic cleansing, the 
US is giving military aid to the greatest ethnic cleansing operation 
in the history of Yugoslavia.

By the way, isn't it time to begin the real impeachment of Bill 
Clinton for real 'high crimes and misdemeanors'?

Paul Phillips,
Economics,
University of Manitoba



From:                   "J. Barkley Rosser, Jr." <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To:                     <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Copies to:              <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject:                [PEN-L:4539] Re: Protest against the Bombing
Date sent:              Thu, 25 Mar 1999 16:27:47 -0500
Send reply to:          [EMAIL PROTECTED]

>      OK, sigh, I guess I'll get into this one, although
> I view it as pretty murky and not an easy call, although
> I think that ultimately this bombing is a mistake and
> could well lead to a really ugly mess.  I hope not.
>      But let's get some of the history right for starters:
><snip>  
Although Slovenian,
> Serbo-Croatian, Macedonian, and Bulgarian are officially
> viewed as distinct languages, it is a fact that somebody can
> manage just fine with Bulgarian in Slovenia, and that one can
> walk from Varna, Bulgaria on the Black Sea to the northwest
> corner of Slovenia without ever encountering a linguistic
> discontinuity or divide.  These "languages" are artifices of
> governments and higher level entities.
>