This article discusses the some of the major changes that have occurred in language planning in Serbia over the last decade. Great attention is given to the name of the language in light of the breakup of Yugoslavia and to the changes occurring (or the lack of them) in comparison to the languages of some of the other republics. There is discussion of the use of alphabets as well as a brief coverage of the``ekavijan'' vs.``jekavian'' dilemma. This is followed by a rather lengthy discussion of changes in orthographic reference books, and the article concludes with a brief overview of the work of the Committee for Standardization.
Introductory remarksThe events that began in 1991 and brought about the fragmentation of Yugoslavia, and with it the geographical boundaries of the region where Serbo-Croatian was used, have had only an insigni®cant eect on the structure and substance of the standard language used by the Serbs. The changes related to the name of the language and the alphabet used to write it are much more important.
The paper reports the results of an experiment designed to explore the interaction between tone and quantity in Serbocroatian. The test materials consisted of 39 synthesized versions of the test word pusti. Depending on the type of accent, this word may have four meanings, short accents being associated with forms of the verb pustiti and long accents with forms of the adjective pust. In producing the test stimuli, the duration of the first vowel was varied in 10-msec steps from 120 to 240 msec. Three fundamental frequency patterns were superimposed on the test words: a monotone pattern, a falling pattern, and a rising pattern. Twelve listeners identified the stimuli as forms of the verb pustiti or of the adjective pust. The results indicate that the tonal patterns influence the boundary value at which listeners change from ‘short’ responses to ‘long’ responses. This boundary value was at 145 msec for monotone and falling fundamental frequency patterns, and at 170 msec for words with rising fundamental frequency patterns. The responses are interpreted with reference to the dialect background of the listeners: the higher crossover point between short and long rising accents appears to be a characteristic of listeners from Vojvodina.
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