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. >
[PEN-L:4546] Re: Re: Protest against the Bombing
ts99u-1.cc.umanitoba.ca [130.179.154.224] Thu, 25 Mar 1999 18:50:39 -0600