Professional paper
Does Historical Grammar Help in Understanding Croatian Standard Language?
Boris Kuzmić
orcid.org/0000-0001-5757-2913
; Faculty of humanities and social sciences at the University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia
Abstract
The author highlights several facts from the historical outline of the development of the Croatian standard language that help us to understand or better understand the contemporary state of the language (the fleeting ‘a’; long accents and unaccented post-accentual lengths; declension of nouns; first person singular present tense; third person singular imperative; adverbs of time: last night, today, this morning, tonight; setting in particular etymology words; etc.) . The paper examines different examples of the relationship between the Croatian standard language (synchronic description language) and its historical grammar (diachronic description language). In other words, the question posed is whether diachronic linguistics, referring to the historical grammar, can help in understanding the Croatian standard language. Written on a series of examples, the paper presents an affirmative answer to the question. This entails the obligation to make every teacher of the Croatian language have a philological education, or at least a philologically informed understanding of grammatical material.
Keywords
historical grammar; Croatian standard language
Hrčak ID:
164444
URI
Publication date:
1.12.2015.
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