Talk:Torlakian dialects

First section

I confess to publishing the entire article without any sources or references. I spoke from knowledge; it is difficult to find things sometimes. I did do a quick search on Alltheweb.com and Yahoo.com but found little of much use. I will endevour to seek refernces which I will later add. In the meantime, if anyone knows anything I don't, I hope that they add it; or if I am wrong about something, change it freely, I will not re-alter it without discussing it here first. My knowledge is based on material which I have read in books, not on websites, and much of it was learnt when I spent a good few years travelling backward and forward to Eastern Europe in the late 80's and early 90's. I have otherwise maintained strong links with people from Bulgaria and the former Yugoslavia and I still visit these countries frequently on business. Celtmist 3-11-05

• No question of Torlak culture, and it has changed now into the same languages as Macedonia, Bulgaria and Serbia. My grandfather was from Preševo in todays southern Serbia, his wife, my grandmother was from Kumanovo in present day Macedonia. This was in first kingdom of Yugoslavia in late 1920s. He was travelling each day into Kumanovo by horseback when he met her and then after world war 2, a Macedonian state was established ruling Kumanovo inside Macedonia. Even before that, my grandfather always told me that people in both towns called themselves Torlaci and had naturally more common place with each other than had with different places more distant in Macedonia and further away in Serbia (but Serbian nationality was forced on them right from when Serbia was created in some time near 1830). I was born in Leskovac and I still speak a Torlakian form of the language, in Leskovac we don't use the definite article but my grandfather did use one because in Preševo, they did have it. But I still speak standard Serbian if I have to go to Belgrade or Novi Sad, that is the diglossia. Jordovan november 3, 2005

Good start Celtmist. I wikified the article somewhat and expanded on vocalic "L" as a feature; the table probably needs fixing as my knowledge on Bulgarian and Macedonian is inadequate (to put it mildly). Some sentences are still overly long, and frankly I didn't comprehend the long one about phoneme "h" so I just left it -- please clarify what you meant. Duja 14:19, 9 November 2005 (UTC)

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I know roughly what it means Duja. I lived in Macedonia until the break-up of Yugoslavia but I'm actually from Vranje. Basicly, where other Slavic dialects have 'H', Southern Serbian and Macedonian in standard form omit it. It has just melted away over the years. But they have to keep it because if they remove it from their literary language, Ohrid will be renamed Orid! That would be unfair to people in Ohrid and might even give their 'intellectuals' a motive to foment revolution in the future. And there has been enough of that in my sweet part of the world! :) Hrvoje nov10 05

I kind of understood it that way, but the sentence in question refers to Macedonian, and this article is about Torlakian; if that is the common feature, that should be mentioned explicitly. The sentence after it (This is actually a part of an isogloss...) is incomprehensible, and I'll try to fix it. Duja 12:19, 10 November 2005 (UTC)

Hello to Duja and Hrvoje. I am glad to see you like the article. The problem I had when writing it was mostly nerves, I'm not actually from the Balkans and all my knowledge is secondhand. I frequently visit the Balkan countries however on business and have been doing so for years. What brought my attention to Torlački was peoples amusing attitudes. For example, in the Pelagonia plain in Macedonia, the locals dismiss the Kumanovans as being unintelligible when talking, saying that they 'turn towards Serbian'. In Northern Serbia however, Belgrade, Novi Sad, Smederevo etc. they point the finger on Kosovar Serbs and southerners by saying '...ah, they speak Macedonian!', so there is me thinking! 'Let me get this right, Northern Macedonians talk Serbian and Southern Serbs speak Macedonian!' But you get this everywhere where neighbouring countries speak related languages (Sweden, Norway, Denmark; Portugal, Spain, France etc). I've tried to mend the isogloss section but I might have made it worse, if either of you can tidy it up, it would be most appreciated. Celtmist 11-11-05

Frankly, I was surprised when I discovered you were a Welsh after I saw the article; you seem pretty well acknowledged with issues here. As a mild critics, your sentences tend to be verbose to the level of incomprehension; I speak English fairly well but I had problems following you, as when I reached the end of sentence I already forgot what the beginning was about (and I have a hunch that you forgot it few times too) :-). Please try to restrain yourself a bit in this regard, and keep up on good job. BR, Duja 08:16, 11 November 2005 (UTC)

I am originally from Bulgarian city called Vidin. My grandparents still use old western Bulgarian dialect but our younger generation is slowly accepting the standard language from Veliko Turnovo oblast. In the time of Yugoslavia I know that the borders for republics did not mean very much, in same respect that our Bulgaria sector Macedonia is nothing special at its own borderpoint. It was once said that if you travel from Bulgaria to Serbia, to Macedonia, back to Bulgaria in the borderland corner, you can not really tell the linguistic difference. In Vidin, we use 'Ya' for the first person nominative. In Bulgarian, the word is 'Az'. We also pronounce the schwa more like 'a' and the Yakavitsa of Bulgaria, like Yekavitsa in Bosnia and Croatia is stuck on 'Ekavitsa'. We say 'Nema' not 'Nyama' for "there isn't". And it is true that we are accused of talking 'Srubski ezik!' (Serbian language) as they say to us in Varna and Bourgas. i don't care because everyone in Bulgaria likes Serbian folk pop music! Me include there! Brotadac

The Macedonian requires phonetical alterations: Wolf is 'Volk' and Hell is 'Pekol' so I am told...I don't have Cyrillic fonts sadly. Celtmist 12-11-05

Actually, I meant pekao = "baked" (past participle 3rd person sg.), and I choose that example because it belongs to relatively small class of Slavic verbs which have the root ending in consonant (Serb. infinitive pek-ti -> peći, P.P. 3rd person pekao, Pres. 1st person pek-jem->pečem; seći (cut) and reći (tell) behave the same, moći (can) similar). However, now that you mentioned "hell", it makes an interesting example too :-). I have to check the translations first though. Duja 09:06, 14 November 2005 (UTC)

OK - I mended the Macedonian version of the table :) Makedon

Good on you Makedon. I am sure that any linguist will appreciate the IPA transcriptions too. As for 'Pek' meaning 'Bake', well it is said that we learn something new every day. I knew that 'L' forms one past tense form in most Slavic languages but I thought that Duja was referring to Hell. Curiously enough, I am increasingly of the belief that the English 'Bake' and (to coin the term) Multi-Slavic 'Pek' variant, are cognates. It's a simple case of 1.Bilabial + 2.Back vowel + 3.Throat Stop (both times, K). Not worth mentioning in the article but I'll probably soon start an article on the postulated proto Balto-Slavic-Germanic language, said to have been one of the original four languages directly descended from Indo European. Celtmist 18-11-05

They might easily be cognates indeed; actually, it seems that pakao is also a cognate to pek-, as pek-ti has a wider meaning in Slavic, namely it can also mean to heat (sunce peče = The Sun heats). AFAICT, Bulgarian and Macedonian words for hell are homonyms with "baked/heated", while in Serbian it evolved into pakao. East Slavic languages use "had" or "ad" for hell (IIRC, of Hellenic origin), but in Czech it's peklo. Duja 10:26, 18 November 2005 (UTC)

The East Slavonic "had"/"ad" must surely be derived from Hadies, an archaic but biblical term for Hell. Seems right that as Hell has to do with burning, that the same word is used in Serbian. User:Nebojsa_485 nov18 2005

I like the additional information. I only wish to remind anyone that if we are to talk of a 'southern' Torlakian extreme, it would be in Bulgaria and Macedonia. Vranje if anything is more central. One needs to remove the national borders for this phenomenon. Torlakian is certainly 80% if not more in Serbia but of course, not entirely contained within Serbia's borders. The Kratovo-Kumanovo dialect of Macedonia is barely intelligible to the Central Pelagonian Macedonian speakers. West of Sofia in Bulgaria, the same thing occurs. Keep it up! Celtmist 18-11-05

True; the information I added was based on Lisac's article (and I kind of invented "subdialects" to fit into the table), which focused on dialects in Serbia. Someone should fix it and add information about dialect as used in Bulgaria and Macedonia, and classify information on "subdialects". Sources on web are scarce though. Duja 10:06, 19 November 2005 (UTC)

To say here, too: great work. I started to make some changes, but all of you did a great job. --millosh (talk (sr:)) 06:51, 22 November 2005 (UTC)

Cases without flections

Just to note: Cases are not strictly related to flection. "of something" is genitive, too, even it doesn't have flection. (I can talk more about that...) --millosh (talk (sr:)) 12:26, 22 November 2005 (UTC)

I thought so too. However, Declension page explains the situation:

In inflected languages, nouns are said to decline into different forms, or morphological cases. Morphological cases are one way of indicating grammatical case; other ways are listed below.

...

The following are systems that some languages use to mark case instead of, or in addition to, declension:
-Positional: Nouns are not inflected for case; the position of a noun in the sentence expresses its case.
-Prepositional/postpositional: Nouns are accompanied by words that mark case, but the noun itself is not modified.

So, the right thing to say is that Torlakian (and Bulgarian, Macedonian) lost Morphological case, (but not cases in grammatical sense), mostly in favor on prepositional/postpositional system. IMO "Case" more commonly refers to "Morphological case", but I'll rephrase the article. Duja 12:44, 22 November 2005 (UTC)

Yes... In general, case is gramatical category which can be realized in different ways: using prepositions, postpositions, and flection (which is in this case "morphological case") or some combination of them. --millosh (talk (sr:)) 13:25, 22 November 2005 (UTC)

"More commonly" is just "what we was learning in school" ;) --millosh (talk (sr:)) 13:25, 22 November 2005 (UTC)

Thanks for the contributions Millosh. You and Duja are both totally correct about cases. A case need not have inflections to represent a seperate function. Many modern day Slavs may hate this, but the trend is that inflections are actually being dropped.

Until midway through the first millenium A.D, Latin had a case system in some ways resembling hat of most Slavic languages. The yielding of Latin into modern European languages now leaves Romanian dialects as the only language to maintain something of a case system. As for Spanish, French, and Italian, well they have ended up on the same road as modern Macedonian and Bulgarian. But this has not stopped there. Take Serbo-Croat (all its forms): there was a time when each noun had a distinct marker but over the decades, they too have pushed towards losing their identity. The Locative and Dative cases have now merged 100% to the point that some language books no longer class them as different; masculine and neutral nouns take the same form in the accusative as the nominative. These things were originally different everywhere.

The point I wanted to make was about an edit: Kajkavian and Čakavian being exceptions - to Torlakian's difference from Standard Serbian -as more different from Croatian. Does everyone follow? :-)

When I originally wrote that paragraph, I meant precisely that. Torlakian at its southern extreme within Serbia, has greater differences from Belgrade Serbian, than ALL forms of Croatian, that expressly means Kajkavian and Čakavian...now I for one have avoided joining the debate pages on Serbo-Croat, but I'll tell everyone that as an impartial outsider, I do not regard Neoshtokavian Serbian and Croatian as two languages. This annoys Croats more but I have linguistic reasons, none political. Now to explain why I say Torlakian is more different, I shall go to an even greater extreme, and jump straight over Croatia into the next Slavic country! Slovenia. Because Slovenes are at one end of the dialect continuum, no form of dialect contained within Croatia can be more different from Serbian than Slovenian, just as Macedonian is not geographicly positioned to have a language closer to Croatian than Serbian! There may be features which are similar but they all have roots in something.

So I hereby state that Standard Serbian is closer to Slovenian than it is Torlakian. If Torlakian had to be placed into a language category, I have to say it would be closer to Bulgarian and Macedonian though I can't say which (probably the former). The fact that Torlakian omits the inflections AND largely uses the definite article sets it far apart from Serbian, despite Serbian and Slovenian being reasonably different: the grammar says it all, it can change the entire structure of a language. And no form of language contained within Croatia is so different from Serbian that Slovenian is closer!

Anyhow, feel free to respond to me or make edits... Celtmist 23-11-05

In the sense of flection, Torlakian is more different from standard Serbian then Slovenian is. But, I (as well as any other person who live south of Belgrade in Serbia) would better understand Macedonian and Torlakian (and even Bulgarian, too) then Slovenian and Chakavian. Also, Kosovo-Resavian dialect and even Smederevo-Vrsacian dialect (where Belgrade belongs, too; but Belgrade has more differences from the basic dialect because it is a big city) are closer to Torlakian then to Chakavian because influence of Balkanization came up to Belgrade. Standard language is based on Eastern-Herzegovian (not on Shumadia-Vojvodian, even it is a myth), which is closer to Chakavian area. Also, dialect spoken in Nis area is fully understandable by all Neo-Shtokavian Serbs and Croats (even Croats like to make distance from this fact ;) ), unlike Luznica-Timok dialect (or "Pirotian"). --millosh (talk (sr:)) 13:06, 23 November 2005 (UTC)

Also, Luznica-Timok dialect has a number of Latin influences. For example, people say "Ja govorim srpski a oratim po pirotski" which means "I talk Serbian but [oratim] Pirotian" which is clear Latin influence. --millosh (talk (sr:)) 13:06, 23 November 2005 (UTC)

But 60-70% of Serbia proper is under influence of Balkanization (including Belgrade area) as well as standard spoken language and it is very hard to say that standard Serbian is closer to Slovenian or Chakavian then to Torlakian. --millosh (talk (sr:)) 13:06, 23 November 2005 (UTC)

Also, standard Bulgarian is based on Eastern Bulgarian dialects which is far of Torlak area. Yes, my grandfather from Pirot valey speaks in Sofia Torlakian as well as people from Sofia speak something very close to Torlakian, but it is not so close to Bulgarian standard. But, it can be said that Torlakian is closer to Macedonian standard then to Serbian standard. (But, again, Macedonian is closer to Serbian then Chakavian and Kaykavian. But, of course, contemporary Kaykavian and Chakavian are under strong influence of Croatian Neo-Shtokavian standard, as well as Torlakian is under strong influence of Serbian Neo-Shtokavian standard; which means that it is more possible that even speakers of Torlakian and Chakavian can understand each other well because they would use a lot from Neo-Shtokavian language system.) --millosh (talk (sr:)) 13:06, 23 November 2005 (UTC)

You talk a lot of sense Millosh! Who am I to disagree? Unfortunately, this is how it is when one of the contributors is not from the region in question. I really did always think that Serbia's standard language is based in Belgrade. So, it is based in Eastern Herzegovina, but based on the Ekavian accent in line with most people's speech in Serbia. That puts a different complection on everything. In this case, the speech of Belgrade and Vojvodina is where variation applies. So now we can agree that the variation in speech between those most adherent to Eastern Herzegovinian and those speaking in their dialect forms in the far north of Serbia at least places North Serbian dialects closer to the far western end of South Slavic languages (ie. Kaykavian as in Slovenia and Croatia) than Torlakian, but now it also fair to say that both Torlakian and Vojvodinian vary somewhat from the standard language.

As for standard Serbian, it's a hard one. Maybe it's position is stuck halfway between Torlakian and Standard Slovenian (after removing the Balkanization where possible.

So, here Millosh, is what I propose someone like you might be able to do. If you know some basic phrases in Slovenian, can translate them into Standard Serbian, and then into Torlakian (within Serbia, not beyond), then you can run this experiment itself. I'll leave the findings and the judgment to you; but as a word of advice, try not to (if possible) focus on your more familiar Pirot form. Pirot is in the east but because of Serbia's shape, the east-west variation isn't as strong as the north-south which is over 400 kilometres in distance. Use the speech of Preševo if possible - because we are looking to see how much variation there is WITHIN Serbia's borders. That will most certainly have more of the Macedonian/Bulgarian features than any other spoken within Serbia. In the meantime, you are right about Sofia and their speech. Eastern Bulgarians seriously dislike Sofians for their speech being what they call (Macedonian/Serbian) whilst being the capital. Bulgaria's language is based on Veliko Turnovo because it was the capital of the pre-Ottoman Slavic Bulgarian kingdom. This is more central but generally means that those slightly eastward speak the purest form of Bulgarian. Celtmist 26-11-05

More on Cases

Hi. Let me start by saying how good of a job I think you all did with this page. I have a comment to make about the case system though. Again, I'm not a linguist and my knowledge of Torlakian is intuitive (I was born and mostly raised in the area--S. Serbia). In any case, at least in the central parts of the north-south line between Nis and Vranje, I think there are actually two cases in use, namely Nominative and Accusative. Other cases are formed by prepositions that are added to the Accusative form in most cases. For example, a speaker from Leskovac would say: nom. terasa acc. na terasU gen. od terasu dat. na terasu etc. Also, and this is only valid for Serbia I suppose, the local speakers, besides acknowledging various local variants (some people can actually guess a village or an area within a small region someone is coming only based on the way that person speaks) still talk of three distinct overarching groups of dialects: from north to south they are Nis (nislijski), Leskovac (leskovacki), and Vranje (vranjanski). Pirot is usually exluded from this autoclassification by dismissing the language people speak there as "bugarashki" or Bulgarian-like (no offense to the people or Pirot or Bulgarians meant). I just wanted to add my two cents worth of thought to the discussion. ZT

You forgot vocative :) All Torlakian speeches have at least three morphological cases in singular: nominative, acusative and vocative. --millosh (talk (sr:)) 00:28, 28 November 2005 (UTC)

People from Pirot make clear distinction between Serbian and Bulgarian standards and Pirotian speech as well as they prefer Serbian vocabulary (if they don't have some word inside of their own vocabulary). --millosh (talk (sr:)) 00:28, 28 November 2005 (UTC)

Again, the main problem with understanding speech of Pirot valey is that there are a lot of Latin (i.e. Romanized Thracian) influences which are not so usual in other Torlakian speeches. --millosh (talk (sr:)) 00:28, 28 November 2005 (UTC)

Cheers ZT. It's a plain fact and you get it everywhere when people living in a borderland have a speech resembling the people over the frontier by those living more central, by this, I mean when the people accross the border are primary nationals of a related state: French and Spanish; Swiss and Austrian German; Norwegian and Swedish; Moroccan and Algerian Arabic etc. No Bulgarian will be offended except that along the Black Sea, they all think that in Pernik, the locals speak Serbian! No pleasing some! Celtmist

They are probably on their way in Southern Serbia to losing the cases all together; this is how it was with Bulgarian and Macedonian. OK, during the inception of modern Bulgarian and the acceptance of Macedonian as a language within Yugoslavia in 1944, the cases had long perished, but, the way that they reached this stage was a long process where-by in Old Slavic, there were distinct cases which yielded with time and in the end, there was one surviving Nominative and an alternative Accusative. Then, the accusative yielded to nominative. The loss of declension is like a virus eating away the noun cases and spreading northwards now having reached most of Serbia. Places like Nis, for instance, are currently partly affected. Give it another 50 years and we'll see the difference there too. Don't think that having a language academy will save grace. It never did this for the Romance language where-by in the western branch (that what includes ALL the popular languages, French, Spanish, Italian etc) the forces of nature cleansed all inflected cases there. Celtmist

We don't have a crystal ball so it's difficult to tell; however, cases are alive & well in shtokavian dialect, which has the tendency to spread southwards due to influence of official media. If there were a case-eating virus, I don't see it, quite the contrary. As I said, however, we cannot predict the future. Natural languages do have a certain tendency of simplification in the long run, but shtokavian case system still resists it pretty well, as far as I can see. Duja 08:20, 29 November 2005 (UTC)

As for the Vocative. This particular case is somewhat isolated from the rest of them in that it doesn't regularly appear throughout a text, and this has survived in Bulgarian and parts of Macedonia. Ridvan becomes 'Ridvane' when he is being called. Celtmist 28-11-05

I think I would agree that the cases are not receding at the moment but quite the contrary, at least in southern Serbia. It has, I think, little to do with linguistic reasons and much more with social ones plus the mass-media. Naturally, you can't really devide those two (i.e. lingustic and soc. reasons). Speaking of Nis as a case in point, the speach of Nis was previously much more in line with other Torlakian subdialects than it is today (contra Celtmist). There is a clear (at least seemed clear to me when I lived there) tendency of a 'caseification' of the way people speak in Nis (please, someone correct me if I'm wrong). I personally think it has something to do with the urban environment and the inferiority complex in comparison to other major center in Serbia like Belgrade and Novi Sad. Also, from my own experience, I have seen little code-switching among people from Nis studying in Belgrade during my own student days then among other southerners.

This is not to say that simplification of case system is not a general tendency among south Slavic languages, but I doubt it that it will follow the same dynamic it had in the Torlakian dialects.

All right, let me explain myself a with more clarity. It stands to reason that the speech of those of Niš will have been more in line with the southern languages without cases, only to develop cases in recent decades. This only happens where the Nish-citizen chooses the standard language, the result? some mixture between traditional Nish language and standard Serbian. In all Torlakian regions, the dialect is heavily influenced by the standard language for reasons of education, media, and social survival. The Torlakian dialect as traditionally spoken in many parts now remains only in spirit, old untranslated stories, other folklore, poems, songs, the occasional slang expression, often beyond the comprehension of the user. So, the modern Serbian langauge is largely based on the Vuk Karadzic reforms of the early 19th century. The next chapter in the language was the Serbo-Croat episode which lasted about 140 years. During this time, Nis and Leskovac were incoroprated within a Serbian state, be it Yugoslavia Mark One, Mark two, Kingdom of Slovenes Croats etc, or simply the pre-world War I Serbia. All along, Nis dialect is inadvertedly competing with a standard language without people realising. The standard language has come out on top and noun cases have made a comeback - nobody disagrees with you here. The general point is the following: the loss of inflections was a development happening over centuries. A sovereign Macedonian and Bulgarian state means that for now, they will not be returning to those regions. It could easily have returned to Macedonia too had Yugoslavia Mark II not given Macedonia language rights. But they had their linguistic autonomy and it joins Bulgarian in not having them. The loss of cases is said to have originated deep south in regions outside of Slav controlled zones, like Thessaloniki, where the Slavs were in some way influenced by Balkanization. The influence spread and was cutting into modern Serbia. But luckily for Case-lovers, an independent Serbia allowing a standard language of some kind did atleast save some grace. Either way, in the long run, disappearance of cases is the trend, and is likely because as was proved with French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese, no linguistic academy has power to prevent popular usage. Sadly, loss of cases is just one long term process which has happened everywhere. What has happened in Nish is a temporary revival, but in the long run, nothing will reverse the course of nature. What will be, we'll have to wait and see... Celtmist 2-12-2005

I wonder, was there any attempt to include Torlakian on some of the official EU minority langages lists?ZT --dagobert 22:03, 29 November 2005 (UTC)

Very unlikely Dagobert. First of all, there is no standardization as it were for Torlakian dialects. Macedonians of Kratovo have their dialect, Bulgarians of Bregovo theirs, and Serbs from Kosovo and Pirot theirs. All people who speak the dialect generally accept that they are Serb/Macedonian/Bulgarian by nationality, or Krashovans in Romania, and see the dialect as their local form of their own language, rather than something seperate. There is no movement within the regions to achieve a grater level of autonomy that I personally know about and few people really know the term 'Torlački' at the turn of the 21st century. The article has generally raised awareness that a dialect/languages does exist; is used to a degree, and the editors simply point out some of its features. Celtmist 2-12-05

Great work Duja, Makedon, Celtmist - keep it up! Evlekis 25 December 2005

Latin Quo

It is a good observation but I now I realise that the Latin quo and the Slavic based kvo are not of common descent: firstly, they would be cognates rather than the Slavic languages borrowing from Latin. Latin words have made their way into Slavic speech, particularly South Slavic as the whole area was under Rome when Slavs arrived, hence the number of words we share with Romanian - not just the Romanian of the country - but Romanian as spoken in pockets accross the former Yugoslavia. A word for "what" is just too basic for one language to borrow it from another I guess. My point is that our word "kakvo" is related to "how?", and alone it actually means "what kind?" but it suffices for just "what/što" in pockets of Serbia and Bulgaria. As for Bulgaria, this habit travels accross their whole land, certainly far enough for it to be a part of Standard Bulgarian and not just Belogradchik-Tǔrn areas. Even so, most people generally know that Kakvo is not a variant translation of Što, I mean there is the vestige of even Bulgarian once having had Shto of some kind, as in their word "Zashto" (For what?) meaning Why. Not zakakvo as one might imagine...compared to Slovenian Zakaj along with areas of Croatia. That's why I'm sure that kvo and quo are unrelated. The other thing is, our words 'Ko' (think of Croatian, Polish Tko) as well as SHTO itself, are cognates with the English word What (earlier Hwat - compare to Norwegian Hvad). Jordovan february 23, 2006

About the last argument: quo has the same origin as 'shto/ko/hvad/what/who' (the difference between who and what is short i and short u in PIE), so we are talking about very related words between IE languages. --millosh (talk (sr:)) 11:58, 6 March 2006 (UTC) This is not the only word which can be treated as 'basic'. Words for family and talk (familija and oratiti) are words with clear Latin origin. --millosh (talk (sr:)) 11:58, 6 March 2006 (UTC) Latin culture made influence in Bulgaria, too. --millosh (talk (sr:)) 11:58, 6 March 2006 (UTC) Your theory is supported by Serbian linguists (maybe Bulgarian, too) and it is relevant. However, article should contain all relevant theories. --millosh (talk (sr:)) 11:58, 6 March 2006 (UTC) As I think, both facts (Latin 'quo' and Slavic 'kakvo') had influence in Torlakian 'kvo'. Slavic origin is supported by similar word (kakvo), but Latin origin is supported by the same word and the same function (note that 'kakvo' is related, but not so close with the meaining of 'ko/kvo/who'). Also, there is a possibility that 'kakvo' is younger form then 'kvo' (which should be researched). --millosh (talk (sr:)) 11:58, 6 March 2006 (UTC)

Hi! Sorry for interfering. I'm Bulgarian, and my Bulgarian etymological dictionary supports what Jordovan said, namely that kakvo comes from kak (how) (apparently + adjectival suffix -v- ?) and not from kvo. So kakvo doesn't come from kvo, it's the other way round. Only if somebody finds an etymological dictionary or any scientific source that claims the opposite should an alternative theory be mentioned. Besides that, Latin quo is not the same word with the same function, because, contrary to what I myself used to believe before looking more closely at Latin, it doesn't mean "shto", it means "where(to)", "why" and such, as in "quo vadis" (where are you going). "What" is "quid". "Quod" also means a lot of things, but not exactly "what". Again, that's my Latin dictionary speaking (apart from my own limited experience with the language). --85.187.203.123 17:00, 7 March 2006 (UTC)

I'm Bulgarian too and can confirm that kvo is merely a colloquial shortening of kakvo here. shto is also used in this meaning, but it is more commonly a shortening of zashto (why?). I don't think Latin has anything to do, this is basic Slavic vocabulary. → Тодор Божинов / Todor Bozhinov → 16:29, 31 March 2006 (UTC)

Kosovo Gorani learning Macedonian

Am I missing something or does that have anything at all to do with the subject of the article? I think it should be deleted. --85.187.203.123 10:42, 5 March 2006 (UTC)

I'd keep it, it's useful because the Gorani, who are sandwiched between Albanian and FYROM territory are traditionally speakers of Torlački. Now they are about to make Standard Macedonian their language. I have no idea about the sources but it doesn't use too much space; it's good when an encyclopaedia entry embraces a slightly wider picture so long as it doesn't ride off on a bike! Evlekis 18 March 2006

Erm, it's still in there? User:Macedonia has spread it into several articles at a time, and I retained it only in Gorani (Kosovo), where it belongs. I'm gonna re-remove it. Duja 20:35, 20 March 2006 (UTC)

Name change

The article was moved from Torlakian dialect to Torlakian without notice by User:Peter Isotalo. I already asked him why he did that; the article ought to have went through WP:RM. I'm going to put it there.. It turned out it was possible to move it back, so I did it. If anyone disagrees, please follow the process and use WP:RM. Duja 16:06, 31 March 2006 (UTC)

I am a bit confused that it's called Torlakian dialect when Torlakian is described in the article as more than one dialect. In that regard, I can see why Peter may have changed it since in other instances where a name describes only the language (as in Sanskrit or Esperanto), the article title doesn't have "language". It's redundant. In addition, articles on dialects like Cantonese (linguistics) and General American don't have the word "dialect" in the title. If dialect is put in to emphasize that it's not considered a full language, I think that the article's discussion on that is sufficient. AEuSoes1 22:50, 1 April 2006 (UTC)

Pretty much what Aeusoes1 said, except that I'm also going to point out that there's absolutely no need to go through RM if a move is uncontroversial or unproblematic. RM is a tool designed to be used when the consensus is less clear, and not as an arbitrator of routine moves. This move is neither controversial nor problematic. There's clear support for it both in practice and in actual guidelines. A general rule is to avoid using "XXX dialect" since it can lead to all sorts of POV-problems.

And the logical argument for having "XXX dialect" when there is nothing to disambiguate "XXX" from alludes me. Why add superfluous dismabiguators if they're not needed? If articles that could be named just "Torlakian" do appear, like for an ethnic group or similar, I suggest using Torlakian (linguistics).

Peter ^Isotalo 11:20, 2 April 2006 (UTC)

Well... ok; I wasn't aware about that particular guideline, and all language articles I encountered (quite a few) had a "language/dialect" qualifier, probably because most are potentially ambiguous. Personally, I must say I don't like that guideline, but there you go... I got better things to do than to oppose it. Duja 19:42, 2 April 2006 (UTC)

O please

Stop wich spleeten the Serbian language. This languege is the mix language wich it was spocet during the Ottoman E. The Ottomans say for this Languege "Prizrend dialect"--Hipi Zhdripi 17:41, 26 May 2006 (UTC)

The English is atrocious, so FYI "Stop wich spleeten" probably means "Stop with splitting" and "spocet" probably should be "spoken". 惑乱 分からん * \)/ (\ (< \) (2 /) /)/ * 19:51, 17 May 2007 (UTC)

Look at the date. That comment was a year ago. And don't feed the troll...--Hadžija 19:57, 17 May 2007 (UTC)

From User talk:Angr

Excuse me, why do you insist on previous version of the artical Torlakian, which is far more incorrect and full of notorious lies? Wikipedia is a place for trueth lovers, not blind nationalists.

--Luzzifer 13:45, 21 August 2006 (UTC)

Please read Wikipedia:Verifiability. The criterion for inclusion is verifiability, not truth. The article does list its sources; they're at the end. If you disagree with the conclusions of those sources, you're welcome to find published sources that argue the contrary, and list them as well, but you are not welcome to remove sourced statements just because you don't like them. User:Angr 13:48, 21 August 2006 (UTC)

That's not the point. The map of Pavle Ivić does not say that what you wrote at all. As I said, everybody can publish something. Here, you, and everybody should use reviable sources --Luzzifer 14:06, 21 August 2006 (UTC)

Hm. Luzzifer is new here and under influence of Serbian scholars. Also, it seems that he is well introduced in Serbian dialectology. So, a few notes:

1. If Bulgarians say that some parts of Bulgarian dialects are Torlakian, then it should be noted that they say so; also, a number of Serbian dialectologists (i.e. Belic, Ivic) say the same: Torlakian is present in Bulgaria, too. --millosh (talk (sr:)) 17:09, 21 August 2006 (UTC)
2. POV pushing claims like "but many linguistic facts clearly show that Torlakian vernaculars are vernaculars of Serbian language. Pavle Ivić, prooved taht using the methodes of linguistic geography." especially inside of controversal articles are not welcome on Wikipedia. This is not essay nor original research, but encyclopedy. So, all of your claims should be in the manner "this scientist said this [reference]; that scientist said that [reference]. --millosh (talk (sr:)) 17:09, 21 August 2006 (UTC)
3. Again, look what User:Angr said: thruth or not, it should be verifiable. Also, you can't claim that "something is truth" if there are significant scholars with different oppinions. --millosh (talk (sr:)) 17:09, 21 August 2006 (UTC)

Phoneme /h/?

What does this sentence refer to?

Macedonian, Torlakian and a number of Serbian and Bulgarian dialects, unlike all other Slavic languages,
technically have no /h/.

Don't all Slavic languages lack /h/ as a separate phoneme? In Slavic languages written in Latin alphabet, "h" generally means /x/. Apparently, for loanwords in Slavic languages using Cyrillic, it usually turns to х (/x/) or г (/g/), so I might be wrong, but it seems to be considered a free variation on these sounds. 惑乱 分からん * \)/ (\ (< \) (2 /) /)/ * 19:47, 17 May 2007 (UTC)