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| | Culture > CROATIAN CULTURAL HERITAGE - HERCEG BOSNA :: Croats of Bosnia and Herzegovina :: (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-23) |
 | | Moreover, motivated by nuanced and far-sighted cultural politics, Illyrian central figures (politician and philologist Ljudevit Gaj, lexicographer, poet and politician Ivan Mažuranić, writer and polymath Ivan Kukuljević and philologist Vjekoslav Babukić) chose što-ije dialect as the basis of Croatian koine, instead of što-i, the native language-dialect of the majority of Croats. |
 | | The only field where “Illyrians” partially failed was orthography: they, contrary to the tradition of mainly phonemic Croatian orthography (from 1200s on), which is best suited for a “transparent” language like Croatian (or Latin, Spanish or Italian) adopted, in the spirit of pan-Slavism, predominantly morphonological orthography (better suited for “intransparent” languages like Czech or Polish). |
 | | But, this was a minor setback (later corrected by orthographic manual authored by Ivan Broz in 1892) compared to their triumphs in the vital areas of scriptory unification, definite language standardization based on što-ije dialect and continuation and extension of dominant tendencies embedded in Croatian literary and linguistic tradition. |
| www.hercegbosna.org /engleski/croatian_language.html (4338 words) |
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