Croatian linguistic purism

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One of the features of the Croatian language, common to many Central-European languages (Czech, German, Polish) is word coinage.

The Croatian tradition of neologisms and linguistic purism goes back to the earliest documents of literacy (11th to 12th century), but it was in the Renaissance Croatian literature that this characteristic has become dominant.

1 The early period
2 The Illyrian period and Šulek's activity
3 The Yugoslav period
4 After Communism
5 References
6 External link

[edit] The early period

In the Dubrovnik Renaissance literature, 16th century poet Dinko Zlatarić freely "translated" Greek and Latin names into Croatian — sometimes wrongly, due to superficial knowledge of etymology. For instance, in his translation of Torquato Tasso's "Aminta", published in 1580, Zlatarić's purist tendencies led to mistakes: the hero's name Aminta becomes in Croatian Ljubmir (Lover) because Zlatarić wrongly assumed that the name "Aminta" stems from "amare" (to love), while in fact it is from Greek "amyno" (to defend).

This tradition of Croatian neologisms continued uninterruptedly in next centuries and is recorded in numerous Croatian dictionaries until the Illyrian movement in the 19th century when it reached the peak in works of one of the most prominent Croatian philologists, Bogoslav Šulek (born and raised in Slovakia).

[edit] The Illyrian period and Šulek's activity

The Illyrian movement and its successor, the Zagreb philological school, have been particularly successful in creating the corpus of Croatian terminology that covered virtually all areas of modern civilisation. In short — they extended and systematised the purist tendencies already present in the by then more than 300 years old Croatian vernacular literature and lexicography.

This was especially visible in two fundamental works: Ivan Mažuranić's and Josip Užarević's: "German-Croatian dictionary" from 1842 and Bogoslav Šulek's "German-Croatian-Italian dictionary of scientific terminology", 1875. These works, particularly Šulek's, systematised (i.e. collected from older dictionaries), invented and coined Croatian terminology for the 19th century jurisprudence, military schools, exact and social sciences, as well as numerous other fields (technology and commodities of urban civilisation).

These accomplishments didn't come out of blue, but are a product of multicentenary tradition in Croatian language — therefore it is no surprise that Croatian linguist Stjepan Babić's monumental monograph "Tvorba riječi u hrvatskome književnom jeziku" (Word-formation in Croatian literary language), 1986, is considered still the best work on the topic in the entire Slavic philology.

[edit] The Yugoslav period

During Yugoslav period, from 1918 to 1990, the Croatian language was subject to "unification" with the Serbian language into Serbo-Croatian Language. Opinions about the nature of that unification vary; many Croats now regard it as forced (and that assertion was one of driving forces of national awakening in 1990s).

The only brief exception was in the puppet "Independent State of Croatia", 1941 to 1945, when totalitarian dictatorship of Ante Pavelić pushed purist tendencies to extremes. No Croatian dictionaries or grammars were published during this period because of the opposition of the Croatian linguists. This era is best covered in Marko Samardžija's "Hrvatski jezik u Nezavisnoj Državi Hrvatskoj", (Croatian language in Independent State of Croatia), 1993.

To understand the processes during the Yugoslav period, one must take into account at least three factors:

Serbian language is "unfriendly" toward neologisms. One of basic tendencies of this language is to prefer loan-words over neologisms and calques.

Unification into one, Serbo-Croatian language was preferred by neogrammarian Croatian linguists (the most notable example was influential philologist and translator Tomislav Maretić). The recipe was simple: if a term is described by two words in Croatian (a neologism and Greek/Latin Europeanism) and one word in Serbian (Europeanism) — the "choice" was to suppress Croatian neologism and "promote" Europeanism.

While during monarchist Yugoslavia "Serbo-Croatian" unification was motivated mainly by an attempt to consolidate a state identity, in the Communist period (1945 to 1990) it was the by-product of Communist centralism and "internationalism". This period is described in the "Novi Sad agreement" and "Declaration" section of Croatian language page. Whatever the intentions, the result was the same: the suppression of one of basic features of Croatian language.

Croats felt that in Communist Yugoslavia, Serbian language and terminology were prevailing in a few areas: the military, diplomacy, Federal Yugoslav institutions (various institutes and research centres), state media and jurisprudence at Yugoslav level. Also, the language in Bosnia and Herzegovina gradually accepted more Serbian idioms in educational system and the republic's administration. For Croatian tradition of neologisms, these were "no go" areas.

No Croatian dictionaries (apart from the historical "Croatian or Serbian" dictionaries, conceived in the 19th century) appeared until 1985, when Communist centralism was well in the process of decay.

[edit] After Communism

After the collapse of Communism and subsequent wars, the situation changed. Many Croatian people reacted by "expelling" all words in the Croatian language that had, in their minds, even distant Serbian origin.

Croatian linguists fought this wave of "populist purism", led by various patriotic non-linguists. Ironically: the same people who were, for decades, stigmatised as ultra-Croatian "linguistic nationalists" (Stjepan Babić, Dalibor Brozović, Radoslav Katičić, Miro Kačić) have been accused as pro-Serbian "political linguists" simply because they opposed these "language purges" that wanted to kick out numerous words of Church Slavonic origin (which are common not only to Croatian and Serbian, but are also present in Polish, Russian, Czech and other Slavic languages).

After creating a flurry of sensationalist articles in the press, this phenomenon subsided. Since the late 90s, instead of forced purism, Croatian has been evolving naturally, developing its own words and forms, thereby increasing the distance separating it from other South Slav languages.

Numerous representative Croatian linguistic works were published since the end of Communism in 1990, among them three voluminous monolingual dictionaries of contemporary Croatian.