Talk:Charter of Ban Kulin
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Language
editSince User:123.208.163.55 has lately been edit-warring to change the language presented in the lead, I invite them to present the arguments in favor of their version here. This document is written in a 12th-century Shtokavian dialect, in a time when there was not yet any distinction between the various national lects of BCMS/"Serbo-Croatian" as an abstand language — nor were any of the standard varieties of the language (Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin, Serbian) standardized until the 19th-20th centuries, so applying them to a medieval document is entirely anachronistic and misleading. From the perspective of present-day cultural heritage, too, restricting the label to one national variety or another makes no sense: the article itself notes (with cited sources) that the charter "is regarded part of Bosnian, Serbian, and Croatian literature", so it should not be presented as if it is exclusive to any one when this is not at all the case. Vorziblix (talk) 16:11, 10 December 2020 (UTC)
- Every ounce of energy spent on debating how to name that language is one ounce spent too much. --Mhare (talk) 17:36, 10 December 2020 (UTC)
- I fully agree. (And yet here I am, having let myself get drawn into it... bleh.) Sometimes I wish we could just switch to labelling things by individual dialect (Shtokavian, Chakavian, Kajkavian, whatever), as some academic papers in linguistics do, and be done with it. Vorziblix (talk) 19:35, 10 December 2020 (UTC)
BCMS translation
editThe text is translated into the local modern language and into English. The former, of course, causes problems. When I came across the article I found it absurd and difficult to read due to the numerous slashes and parentheses that were supposed to account for the 3 or 4 different standards and their variations. I decided to reduce it all to a single variant. I think modern Bosniak standard is the most appropriate for the task, although it is still a relatively arbitrary choice. (That's why the article says it's translated into Bosnian and not into Serbo-Croatian.) However, I'm not a native speaker of that variety (I'm from Croatia), so there's a possibility I used something that would be unusual for actual natives - e.g. I just realised that I used "tisuća" while "hiljada" is more common in Bosniak.
The translation used to mechanically stick to the original's syntax. I toned that down and tried to make it sound a bit more modern and down-to-earth in its phrasing. I'm however unsure if that's the right approach. Perhaps the best solution would be to outright gloss the entire text, allowing the translations to be as idiomatic as needed while presenting all the relevant linguistic data of the original. Which would take a lot of work...