Review of Alexander 2006, Alexander & Elias-Bursac 2010

M. Riđanović (2015), ms.

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AN AMERICAN LINGUISTIC TRAGEDY

Alexander, Ronelle. Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian, a Grammar: With Sociolinguistic

Commentary. Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2006. xxi + 464 pp.

Alexander, Ronelle and Ellen Elias-Bursać. Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian, a Textbook: With

Exercises and Basic Grammar, Second edition. Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin

Press, 2010. xviii + 510 pp.

Reviewed by: Dr. Midhat Ridjanović, professor emeritus of English and linguistics,

University of Sarajevo

[email protected]

In this review the first of these two books will be briefly called Grammar and the second

Textbook. We will also occasionally use B, C, and S as abbreviations for Bosnian, Croatian,

and Serbian.

For the past eight years the twin volumes under review have been the major resource in the

U.S.A. for teaching what used to be called Serbo-Croatian before the break-up of Yugoslavia

in 1992. After the Yugoslav wars of 1991–1995, new splinter states were created, each

naming its language after their new name. Thus were born Croatian, Serbian, and Bosnian,

and, in 2007, Montenegrin too (the four „languages“ will henceforth be referred to as BCMS

and, without Montenegrin, as BCS). Naturally, the new names didn't change what was spoken

by the four nations, in spite of efforts by normativists in each of the four countries, especially

Croatia, to make the language of their country different from the other three „languages.“ In

the Preface to my book Bosnian for Foreigners: With a Comprehesive Grammar (Rabic,

Sarajevo 2012), I say: „In spite of their different names, the four „languages“ constitute

basically the same language, whose speakers have no difficulty whatsoever in communicating

with each other [...]. Grammatical differences between the four „languages“ are negligible,

and lexical differences are also few and far between. [...] It is hard to measure differences

between varieties of the same langage, but it is safe to say that British and American English

are more distant from each other than B, C, M, and S are from each other. Misunderstandings

between speakers of British and American English do occur, but linguistic misunderstandings

between speakers of the different variants of BCMS are unheard of.“

The authors set out to write a joint grammar and textbook of three varieties of the same

language. While it may be possible to write a single book on the grammar of two or three

closely related varieties of a language by describing their common grammatical core and

adding information about special grammatical features of the individual varieties, it is

impossible to write a good textbook which would enable the user to acquire a solid command

of one or more varieties, in both spoken and written form. The irrefutable proof of this claim

is the fact that no such textbook has ever been written for both British and American Emglish.

The authors of the books under review tried to perform this impossible feat for BCS and, of

course, failed.

In spite of the commercial success of the two books under review, especially the second one, I

claim that they might well be counted among the worst foreign-language textbooks ever

published. They are filled with errors of every kind: ungrammatical word forms, phrases, and

sentences; meaningless clusters of words; incoherent dialogues; sloppy or wrong grammatical

rules; omissions of important rules; wrong accents; and false allocations of individual words

or grammatical forms to one of the three „languages“ in the BCS complex. This is to mention

only the major, recurrent errors.


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The Grammar volume includes some 50 pages of „Sociolinguistic Commentary,“ which, even

if well written, has no place in a BCS textbook. The Commentary is basically a history of

squabbles among Balkan linguists over insignificant details of usage, mostly in relation to

claims of a separate B, C, or S language. It contains nothing new that cannot be found in

published books and articles or on the Internet, and was obviously incorporated into the book

to impress the reader, to compensate for the lack of indispensible grammatical rules, to make

the book look bigger, and to raise its price.

I think that the most serious error committed by the authors is the acceptance of artificial

forms of words proclaimed as „correct“ by linguistically ignorant and nationalistically

oriented Balkan „linguists.“ Any disinterested observer of the postwar political situation in the

Balkans can see that the new splinter states are run by fascistoid governments, which are dead

set on reestablishing the traditional attributes of nation states for their fiefdoms; since

language is a hallmark of nationhood, they have searched for and found „linguists“ who

would produce „scientific evidence“ that the language of their particular state is a separate

language, worthy of a name of its own. The „evidence“ was usually no more than a handful of

words or word forms supposed to be peculiar to a particular „language.“ A laughable example

of a new word form supposed to be specific to Bosnian is found in the Textbook: the Bosnian

version of the dialogue on page 38 ends with Onda, lahku noć! (Then, good night!). The

official orthographic guide for Bosnian (Pravopis bosanskog jezika) prescribes the use of the

sound/letter h in about half a dozen words, which were indeed pronounced with h by most of

the Muslim population of Bosnia (and are now spontaneously used only in villages); one such

word is lahak 'light; easy', used in the greeting Laku noć (literally '((I wish you a) light night').

But Muslims never used this greeting; their traditional parting greeting used at all times of day

was Alahemanet ('I leave you in Allah's care'). So Lahku noć is doubly wrong: (a) The

greeting itself has never been used by traditional (believing) Muslims; (b) Muslims who use

this greeting – and most city Muslims do – wouldn't dream of pronouncing lahku (with h)

because they are aware of the fact that the greeting was „borrowed“ from Christians, who

have always used the form laku (without h)!

Another major error committed by Prof. Alexander has to do with the designation of the

territory on which a particular Balkan „language“ is spoken. Everybody accepts the fact that

Serbian is the name of the language spoken in Serbia and that Croatian is the language of

Croatia; there is a sizable national minority of Serbs in Croatia and of Bosnians in Serbia,

whose members call their languages by their national names, though all the inhabitants of

each of the two countries speak in the same way. But Bosnia-Hercegovina is more

complicated. The most important fact about the language of this country is that all its

inhabitants speak in exactly the same way. The only logical name of that language would be

Bosnian in the territorial sense (the country was called only Bosnia from the creation of the

first medieval Bosnian state in the 10th century to the mid-19th century, when Hercegovina

was added to its name). Besides, Bosnian Serbs and Croats are, in fact, descendants of

Bosnian Orthodox people and Catholics who were „converted“ to Serbs and Croats in the

course of the 19th century. Therefore, historically speaking, there are no Serbs and Croats in

Bosnia.

The different names of the Bosnian language were created in the aftermath of the Dayton

Peace Agreement of 1995. Every informed person knows that the Agreement was signed

hastily in order to put an end to the hostilities and that grave errors were made by carving up

what had for centuries been one country and by dividing a nation which had been marked by a

common language and culture for more than a millenium. The Serbian and Croatian

aggressors in the 1992–95 war killed or persecuted tens of thousands of people in order to

create „ethnically clean“ areas and, unfortunately, the Dayton Agreement largely legalized


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their illegal and immoral „ethnic cleansing.“ The tragic result is a total demographic

redistribution of the country's population, so that Serbs now constitute 90% of the population

of the Republika Srpska while Bosniaks account for nearly half of the total population of the

Federation of Bosnia-Hercegovina. Ethnic cleansing also resulted in the ludicrous situation in

which one language was called by a variety of different names – Serbian in the Republika

Srpska and Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian in the Federation of Bosnia-Hercegovina. This, in

turn, gave rise to the totally crazy situation in schools, which divide children of different

„nationalities“ because they must be taught different „national groups of subjects“

(nacionalne grupe predmeta) in language, literature, history, and religious instruction. Every

bit of this abominable ethnic cleansing on all levels — from territorial to linguistic — is

recognized and reinforced by Professor Alexander in her book on Bosnian, Croatian, and

Serbian. One example is the use of names in the dialogues appearing in individual lessons:

according to the authors of the Textbook all Bosnians are Muslims, although they constitute

less than half of the population of the Bosnian Federation and though thousands of Bosnian

Christians call themselves Bosnians; all Croatians and Serbs are Christians, though there are

large populations of Muslims in both Serbia and Croatia, who mostly call their language by its

official „state“ name. The bitter irony is in how the authors state their main intent in the

Preface to the Textbook (p. xii): „Our intent has been to give as true a picture as possible of

existing usage within a framework that is accessible to students and usable in the classroom.“

Whether this beautifully framed intent was the authors' true intent, we will never know, but

what they have produced is the exact opposite: as I will show in the remainder of this review,

their picture of „existing usage“ is filled with non-existing words and word forms in each of

the three „languages.“

Page 1 of the Textbook contains the following information: „Two alphabets are in use in the

region where B, C, and S are spoken, called “Latin” and “Cyrillic.” S uses both alphabets

while B and C use the Latin alphabet. Learning to pronounce B, C, or S is easy, because each

alphabet letter corresponds to only one sound.“ The claim that all Bosnians and Croats use the

Latin alphabet is a sweeping statement as there are quite a few Bosnians who use the Cyrillic

alphabet, at least occasionally, and Bosnian schools are obliged by law to teach both

alphabets. But that is a minor error compared to the claim that learning to pronounce B, C, or

S is easy, because each alphabet letter corresponds to only one sound. In the Latin alphabet

three BCS sounds are represented with two letters each (lj, nj, dž) and a learner who is new to

such spelling of single sounds will have to be warned not to pronounce the two letters

separately. Besides, even if s/he knows that lj, nj and dž represent single sounds, s/he may

have difficulty pronouncing them (many foreigners never learn to pronounce lj and nj). Other

sounds and consonant clusters foreigners find dfficult to pronounce are r (especially in its

vocalic function), tr, dr, tl, dl, mn, and the „notorious“ distinction between č and ć and dž and

đ. Instead of saying that learning to pronounce BCS is easy, the authors should have said that

the relation between pronunciation and spelling is simple in BCS, as individual letters

correspond to individual sounds, except in the case of lj, nj, and dž. Learning to pronounce

BCS sounds is a totally different matter – it is hardly ever easy and can be quite difficult for

people who are not good mimics and who don't have a background in learning foreign

languages.

The authors follow strictly the rule that falling accents can occur only on the first syllable of a

word. The rule was concocted in the early 20th century by linguists of the neogrammarian

school, which has long since been on the garbage dump of history. Unfortunately, the 1954

Novi Sad Agreement on the Pravopis codified many artificial forms and rules invented by

these old-fashioned linguists, including the rule for the falling accent being limited to the first

syllable. Strict observance of this rule gives rise to monstrous sounding pronunciations, which


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even television anchors, who are supposed to speak „correctly,“ cannot produce. I have yet to

hear a news reader who has not stumbled trying to pronounce „correctly“ words like

Australija Australija, paradajz 'tomato', and Kolorado Colorado, i.e. with the prescribed short

rising stress on the second syllable instead of the natural pronunciation with a falling accent

on the third syllable.

Now get ready for what is probably the most incredible statement in a foreign-language

textbook. In the Preface to the Textbook, on page xvi, the authors say: „It is not necessary to

teach all elements of this complex accentual system [i.e. the BCS accentual system, M.R.]

either at the outset or at all [emphasis mine], since one can communicate perfectly well by

simply knowing the place of accent and a few important instances of vowel length.“ We all

know that there are ways to communicate without using words – sign language, pantomime,

gesture and body language in general – so why learn languages, why write foreign-language

textbooks?! The statement which writes off BCS accents as irrelevant to communication is

analogous to one that would appear in an EFL textbook in which the authors claim (God

forbid!) that it is not necessary to teach all elements of the complex system of English verbal

tenses at the outset or at all, since one can communicate perfectly well by using the present

tense all the time, and pointing with a finger behind oneself when indicating a past event and

in front of oneself when indicating a future event! The truth is that the functional load of pitch

accents and vowel length in BCS is higher than the functional load of many pairs of

segmental phonemes, and we all know that contrasts with higher functional load are more

important in a teaching context than ones with lower functional load. Whoever has taught

BCS to foreigners must have witnessed cases of the learners' neglect of the rules for the use of

suprasegmental phonemes affecting comprehension. This often happens when the meaning of

a sentence hinges on the interpretation of a form of a noun segmentally identical in the

genitive singular and plural, but with a long final vowel in the plural. The following headline

appeared recently in the major Bosnian newspaper Oslobođenje: „Dolazak predstavnika EU u

Sarajevo“ (Arrival of EU representative(s) in Sarajevo). This may mean the arrival of one, or

more than one, EU repesentative in Sarajevo, because predstavnika with a short final a is

genitive singular and with a long final a genitive plural. There are literally thousands of

minimal pairs of words differing only in pitch on the stressed syllable and/or vowel length on

one or more syllables, accented or unaccented.

The dialogues appearing in every lesson are usually stilted and artificial, sometimes even

senseless. The authors made what I believe is the worst mistake in writing foreign-language

textbooks: they composed dialogues which will illustrate specific grammatical elements

and/or lexical items they want to teach in the particular lesson, paying little attention to the

content of the dialogues so that some are unnatural and sometimes border on crazy; this is

illustrated by the following excerpt from the dialogue appearing on page 6 of the Textbook:

2. George je profesor, a Mary je profes rica. (George is a professor, and Mary is a woman

professor.)

3. A njihov pas? (And their dog?)

2. jihov pas n je profesor. as n je č vjek! (Their dog is not a professor. A dog is not a

man.)

The authors of the Textbook must be very fond of dogs. So they compose a dialogue,

appearing on page 24, to prepare the learner of BCS to buy a dog when s/he gets there, rather

than a ticket at a bus station. The learner is offered a yellow dog [!!!!] but her/his brother, for

whom s/he is buying the dog, doesn't like yellow dogs, he prefers red ones (the closest to a red

dog I have ever seen is a white-and-orange spotted dog). What the authors have failed to do is

compose a dialogue between the American learner of BCS and the Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian


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airport employee who will have to enlighten her/him about the complicated regulations

connected with transporting the dog by plane across the Atlantic!

Other examples of ludicrous sentences in the dialogues:

Pod djèvojkama su stòlice. 'Under the girls are chairs' (p. 113)

Dòručak je u djèvojkama. 'Breakfast is in the girls' (p. 113)

Dòručak je u mirnoj djèci.1 'Breakfast is in the quiet children' (p. 115)

Bez bàlkanskih jezika nema sreće. 'There can be no happiness without Balkan languages' (p.

119)

Pjevam pjesme bàlkanskim jèzicima. 'I sing songs to Balkan

languages, i.e. I serenade Balkan languages' (p. 119)

S bàlkanskim jèzicima divno je žìvjeti. 'It is beautiful to live with Balkan languages' (p. 119)

O, bàlkanski jèzici! 'Oh, ye Balkan languages!' (p. 119)

Ispod čèga je stòlica? 'What is the chair under?'2 (page 120)

Participants in the dialogues are introduced with numbers rather than with A, B, C, as is

customary. Thus, on page 57 we find the question Zašto broj 2 nije žedan? 'Why is number

two not thirsty?'. Numbers cannot be thirsty, but A's, B's, and C's can.

Having examined closely the first 70 pages of the Textbook, I have found enough errors to

show that this book should not have been published, even if it had been heavily edited (a

discussion of all the errors on its 510 pages would no doubt fill a mid-sized book!). The

following are illustrations of different types of errors found on the first 70 pages of the

Textbook.

Wrong allocation of words and/or their meanings to B, C, or S

You don't have to go far in the Textbook to find examples of wrong allocation of words and

grammatical elements to a particlar „language.“ The important and highly frequent yes-no

questions are introduced in Lesson 1. As it happens, BCMS has two forms for these

questions: they can be constructed (a) by using the question marker li immediately after the

finite predicate verb appearing in sentence-initial position, as in Znate li engleski? 'Do you

speak English?', and (b) by using the dummy Da at the beginning of the question and

following it with li, as in Da li znate engleski?. On page 2 in Lesson 1 the former type of yes-

no questions is said to be Croatian, and the latter type Bosnian and Serbian. But the Bosnian

version of the short dialogue on the same page contains the „Croatian“ question Je li tvoja?

How come? Probably smuggled into Bosnian by a Croatian nationalist! On page 10 of the

Grammar volume Prof. Alexander gives a muddled explanation of the use of the two ways of

signaling yes-no interrogative sentences, but the basic message is still that Bosnian and

Serbian use the Da li version of yes-no questions almost exclusively, and Croatian the version

without Da li; apart from the error mentioned above, all the dialogues in the Textbook

observe this „rule“ strictly. There might be a slight preference in Croatian for the version

without Da li, but the truth is that both versions are used in all three „languages,“ with the Da

1 Almost every dialogue in the Textbook contains wrongly accented words. The one on page 115 has

three forms of the irregular plural djèca 'children' – djèci, djècu, djèco – stressed with short rising

accent instead of short falling. Wrong direction of pitch in an accent grates on the native speaker's ear

even more than an accent occurring on a wrong syllable. 2 This question is related to the statement Pod djevojakama su stolice. Since djevojke (girls) are human

beings and not things, the corresponding question, however ludicrous to begin with, should have been

Ispod koga su stolice 'Who are the chairs under?'. The only answer to the question Ispod čega je

stolica? that would make any sense would be Ispod djevojčine stražnjice 'Under the girl's behind'.


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li version sounding slightly more formal in some situations. Clear proof that the Da li version

occurs in Croatian can be found in the major book on Croatian grammar Hrvatska gramatika

by Barić et al. (Školska knjiga, Zagreb, 1997): on page 447 both versions are described and

illustrated with examples from Croatian literature, with no mention of any difference between

them! On the other hand, the „Bible“ of Serbo-Croatian grammar, Savremeni srpskohrvatski

jezik (Contemporary Serbo-Croatian Language) by Mihailo Stevanović (vol. II, aučna

knjiga, Belgrade, 1986) gives numerous examples of yes-no questions without Da li from

works of Serbian writers (see pp. 12–14). If the two grammar books are not accessible to you,

just pick up any work of fiction by a contemporary Croatian or Serbian author, and you will

find both versions of yes-no questions in either „language.“ Questions beginning with Da li

are rarely found in books written by Bosnian Serbs because, in Bosnia, such questions have a

formal ring to them and are rarely used in conversation.

Here is a list of words wrongly allocated to a particular language or languges of the BCS

complex:

Page 3 – Sveska 'notebook' is said to be Serbian, the corresponding Croatian word being

bilježnica and Bosnian teka. The fact is that sveska is used a lot in Bosnia, maybe even more

than teka, which is also commonly used in Croatia. Bilježnica is a formal synonym of teka in

both Croatian and Bosnian, as is the ekavian form of the word, beležnica, in Serbia. In Bosnia,

a workbook is always radna sveska; there is no such thing as radna teka. Besides, Razlikovni

rječnik srpskog i hrvatskog jezika (Dictionary of Differences Between Serbian and Croatian)

by Vladimir Brodnjak (Hrvatska sveučilišna naklada, Zagreb, 1993) tells us that bilježnica is

the ijekavian form of a Serbian word imposed on Croatian during Serb-dominated

Yugoslavia.

Pages 6 and 7 – The vocabulary list on page 6 informs the reader that drug and prijatelj, both

glossed as 'friend', are distributed among the three „languages“ so that drug is not used in

Croatian and prijatelj is not used in Serbian. This is contradicted in a note on page 7, where it

is claimed that „drug is used more frequently in S in the meaning, „friend, companion,“ while

prijatelj is used in this meaning in B and C (and all three use prijatelj in the meaning “life-

long friend”).“ A clear implication of this claim is that drug is used in Croatian too and that

prijatelj can also be used in Serbian! The truth is that both words are used in all three

„languages“ and the dominant factor favoring the use of one or the other is context, which is

hardly ever invoked by the author as a factor in the interpretation of the sense of a particular

word.

Page 26 – The vocabulary list on this page says that 'cash register' is blagajna in Bosnian and

Croatian and kasa in Serbian. Not true – both words are used as synonyms in all three

„languages.“

Page 38 – The Bosnian and Serbian dialogues on this page begin with the greeting Dòbro

veče (Good evening), the Croatian version of the greeting being Dòbra večer. While some

Bosnian upstarts may use the Serbian version of the greeting because they think that Croatian

or Serbian are more „elegant,“ most Bosnians will use the traditional Bosnian version

Dobàrveče, which is a single phonological word stressed on the second syllable with a short

rising accent.

Page 47 – In the vocabulary for Lesson 4 the Bosnian word for Spain is said to be both

Španija and Španjolska. The authors frequently claim that B, C, or S use two (mostly similar)

words for a single thing or notion but tell us nothing about their distribution. Are they in free

variation? Is one of them obsolete? Is one stylistically marked? Is one used by people with

blond hair and the other by dark-haired people? Španjolska is pure Croatian, hardly known by

the masses in Bosnia before the recent war, when Bosnians who could gain by pretending to


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be Croatian – all Bosnian-Croatian politicians and most public figures of Catholic religion or

descent – started using pure Croatian words. The same vocabulary list gives two Bosnian

forms for 'also' – takođe and također. The form takođe has practically vanished from Bosnian

usage, as anybody can see by browsing through a Bosnian newspaper (također is Croatian and

„correct“ Bosnian according to the new Pravopis).

Page 51 – The vocabulary list on this page gives parče 'piece' as both Bosnian and Serbian.

This is a typically Serbian word (though of Turkish origin) that would not even be recognized

out of context by most Bosnians.

Page 67 – The vocabulary list on this page and the dialogues underneath the list show sudija

as the Bosnian and Serbian word for 'judge' and sudac as the Croatian word. This was true of

Bosnian before the war but it no longer is. For reasons that are hard to explain, Bosnian has

been heavily Croatianized since the war. As a result, many Bosnian words which used to be

shared with Serbian have been replaced with the corresponding Croatian words or word

forms. Thus, the Croatian word sudac has practically ousted the former sudija. Another

Croatian word that has been adopted into Bosnian, especially in formal language, is okoliš

'environment' (we even have Ministarstvo okoliša 'Ministry of Environment'). Whatever our

attitude to this strange phenomenon, the new Croatian words used instead of traditional

Bosnian ones are a reality which cannot be ignored and every writer of a textbook for BCS as

a foreign language must state the facts of usage as they are.

The vocabulary list on the same page also includes three words for 'woman doctor', of which

lekarka is designated as S, liječnica as C, and ljekarka as B and (ijekavian) S. In Bosnia a

woman doctor is nearly always called doktorica; if a Bosnian wants to use another word, it

would most likely be liječnica rather than ljekarka. In this vocabulary list, as in many other

places in the Textbook, two variants of the same word are said to be Serbian. Although the

authors state that Serbian is ekavian in Serbia but ijekavijan elsewhere, this information is

hardly sufficient for the student, who must be confused by the maze of „languages“ s/he has

to cope with, which, to top it all, includes two different „Serbians.“ The only right, scientific

approach to this problem would have been to call the language spoken by everbody in Bosnia-

Hercegovina Bosnian in the territorial sense, and then add the information that the language is

officially called Serbian in Republika Srpska.3

The following is the most important instruction to users of the Textbook regarding the

allocation of words and word forms to the individual languages of the BCS complex:

„The vast majority of words in B, C, and S are used by all speakers of B, C, and S with the

same meaning. A number of words, however, are clearly recognized as either Croatian or

Serbian, and these words are marked [C] and [S], respectively, in vocabulary lists. Thus, pairs

like vàni and napolju “outside,” kàzalište and pòzorište “theater,” kìno and bioskop “cinema,”

vlak and voz “train,” and tjedan and nèdelja “week,” are markedly C vs. S words. Sometimes

B will use both (as in the case of “outside”); sometimes it will prefer the Serbian word (as in

the case of “theater” and “train”); sometimes it will prefer the Croatian word (as in the case of

“cinema”); and in a few instances it will have its own word altogether, as in the case of family

terms.“ (p. 70).

The last sentence in this quote tells us that Bosnian uses Croatian and Serbian words, i.e. that

it is a mélange of the other two languages and makes use of its own words only „in a few

3 If the Balkans continue to be as politically turbulent as they have been during the past century or so,

the political map of Bosnia may change again, bringing about a change of the name(s) in the language

of the people of Bosnia. Therefore, the only safe thing to do is to call the language by the geographical

area in which it is spoken.


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instances.“ This racist view of Bosnian is found in references to Bosnian by extreme Croatian

and Serbian nationalists and needs no further comment, though it should be pointed out that

the earliest lengthy written record of Bosnian predates Croatian and Serbian records of any

significance, and it is quite possible that some Bosnian words found their way into Croatian or

Serbian, rather than the other way around.

Bad or missing BCS grammar in the Textbook and Grammar

On page 1 (in Lesson 1) the learner is presented with the verb zvati se used in BCS to say

what one's name is. This will no doubt be a real „bomb“ for learners who are native speakers

of English; they will wonder:

- Why doesn't this language have something corresponding to my name is; how is it

possible to say 'my/your name is' using just a verb?

- If the infinitive of the „name verb“ is zvati se, why is the present-tense form zovem se?

Where did the o in zovem se come from? Is there a rule explaining this strange

difference between the infinitive and the present tense in the root of the verb, or is it

an exception?; if it is an exception, what is the more general rule? Using an irregular

verb to introduce the regular present tense paradigm could be compared to using took

as the model to introduce the past tense forms in English!

- The authors say that the particle se „accompanies the verb“ – does it accompany every

verb and if it doesn't, which verbs does it accompany? Everything has a function in

grammar – what is the function of this particle?

- The authors say that the particle does not always follow the verb and must be placed in

the „second“ place in the sentence. The particle is not identified as an enclitic at this

point and the reader is referred to a section in Grammar where the placement and

mutual order of enclitics are discussed extensively. Because this segment of BCS

grammar is complex and very important for foreign learners of the language, we will

discuss it in a separate section below.

- All forms of the present tense of the verb zvati – zovem, zoveš, zove, etc. – have the

vowel in the second syllable underscored to show that the e is long. It is true that the e

is long according to standard dictionaries (such as the six-volume one published by the

two Maticas), but accents have changed drastically during the past 50 years or so. In

contemporary Serbian (as spoken in Serbia) and standard Croatian as spoken by

educated people in Croatia, there are no long vowels after the main accent of a word.

In Bosnia a long vowel after the accented one in the present tense of zvati and other

verbs from the same accentual paradigm is a mark of rural origin and lack of

education.

For all these reasons the „crazy“ verb zvati se should have been avoided in the first lesson of a

textbook for beginners.

We will now take up the important matter of proper placement of the particle se and similar

function words used as enclitics. This topic is dealt with in Grammar on pages 13–15 and

350–3. On page 13 the author, Prof. Alexander, introduces the notion of clitic, but shows that

she doesn't know what a clitic is because she uses it as the more frequent synonym of enclitic!

Mistaking clitics for enclitics, she says that they are „short words [....] which never bear

accent in the sentence.“ She doesn't even say whether clitics precede or follow the accented

word but she does liken them to contracted forms of auxiliary verbs in English such as I'm,

she'll, you're. She concludes the paragraph on clitics by saying „This term is sometimes

encountered in the form of enclitic.“ [!!!!!!!!] A Harvard hD in languages doesn't know what

every student who has taken Linguistics 101 knows: clitic is the general term for short


9

unaccented function words occurring immediately before or after accented words; clitics

occurring before accented words are called proclitics, those after the accented word are

enclitics; in some languages the accent of the accented word may shift to the proclitic.

The explanation of the placement of enclitics in BCS sentences given by Prof. Alexander is a

rigamarole of muddled and incorrect statements. She doesn't like any of the rules devised by

previous grammarians over a period of some 200 years, so she decides to set up new rules.

Having said that enclitics must be placed in the „second“ place in the sentence, she goes on to

identify the first place and defines it as first significant unit. Of course, this term is worthless

because significant can be applied to any meaningful stretch of language, from morpheme to

the entire sentence. Then she says „A more precise linguistic term for this significant unit is

constituent.“ Anybody with a basic knowledge of grammar knows that consituent refers to

every functional element in a sentence, regardless of its place, which is part of the next higher

functional element in the hierarchy of the grammatical structure of the sentence. Since even a

single morpheme can be a constituent, it is obvious that this grammatical notion is useless in

determining the place occupied by enclitics in BCS sentences. After this rambling discussion

of possible candidates for „first place in the sentence“ the author says: „When it comes to

clitic placement, in fact, the rules of BCS are so complex that it is better to use a different

term altogether, one chosen specifically for the purpose.“ Having rejected all previous ideas

for determining the „first“ place in the sentence, which can be used profitably for setting up

rules of clitic placement in BCS (constituent just needs to be defined more specifically), she

goes on to set up a new unit, which she calls rhythmic constituent (RC), which cannot be used

in devising those rules!! We all know that rhythm is a pattern of repeated sounds and that an

average-sized sentence in every language can be pronounced with at least 10 different

rhythms. A sentence like Can you believe that she killed two of her husbands? may be

pronounced with only two major stresses, on believe and two, with three major stresses, on

believe, killed, and two, and with four major stresses, on believe, killed, two, and husbands; if

the speaker wants to emphasize the extreme incredulity of her/his statement, s/he may stress

every single lexical word in the sentence. Obviously, every time the pattern of word stresses

changes, the rhythmic structure of the sentence changes too. This means that there can be no

fixed sentence-initial rhythmic constituent, which we can identify with any precision for the

purpose of placing BCS enclitics in the right place. The idea of using rhythm as the basis for a

grammatical rule is ludicrous in itself and is not worth talking about. What is worth pointing

out, however, is that the author claims that a single short word may be a RC; this incredible

claim is expressed on page 350 of Grammar with the following sentence: „Obligatory RC's

fall into two groups: subordinating conjunctions and question words.“ This implies that a

rhythmic unit – whether in music or language – may consist of a single element!!! This makes

no more sense than saying that a group of people may consist of a single person. Anybody

who thought that the title of this review „An American Linguistic Tragedy“ is too harsh

should reconsider their view after this „finding.“ A comparison of Prof. Alexander's

misleading description of the grammar of BCS enclitics with the thorough coverage of the

same topic in my Bosnian for Foreigners (see pp. 558-65) will convince every unbiased

reader that students at 40-odd American universities where BCS is taught with Prof.

Alexander's book have been duped for the past two years by being deprived of my book

(published in the summer of 2012).

On page 2 of the Textbook we find the following introductory information on the highly

frequent verb biti: „The usual forms of the verb biti “to be” are short, and cannot occur alone

at the beginning of a sentence. They are always placed in the second position of the word or

clause.“ ext to this information is a „box“ containing the paradigm of short forms of biti.

The all-important paradigm of this all-important linking verb is introduced with its short


10

forms in a „usually“ rule!! Imagine a textbook for English as a foreign language in which the

verb to be is introduced with a sentence like „The usual forms of the verb to be are short: 'm,

're, 's, 're“ with no additional information about long forms (which may not exist, for all the

reader knows!). The „short“ forms of biti should have been called by their standard name,

enclitic forms, which would enable the learner to use them properly once s/he learns the rules

covering all enclitics. The authors' short forms are contrasted to „longer“ forms (i.e. full

forms), which are introduced on page 7 of the Textbook in the following way: „There are two

sets of longer forms for this verb, which are given in the chart to the right. One set is used to

express negation and the other is used in questions and for emphasis.“ But of the three types

of questions used in BCS, only one type – yes-no questions beginning with the finite predicate

verb – uses full forms of biti! The other two types of questions – yes-no questions introduced

with dummy Da and standard wh-questions – cannot possibly use full forms of biti! Also, it is

strange to separate the affirmative forms of a verb from the corresponding negative ones and

present them as quite different sets in view of the fact that formal relations between the two

sets of forms are – barring exceptions – systematic in every human language. (The negative

forms of the present tense of biti are generated by a simple rule: merge ni with the enclitic

form of the appropriate verbal form.)

Talking about the formal and informal forms of the BCS word for 'you' on page 2 of the

Textbook, the authors omitted an important but somewhat strange morphological rule: the

second person plural of predicate verbs and adjectives in sentences used in polite address are

always masculine, even when we adress women.

A general observation is called for at this point about the way grammar is presented in the two

books: a majority of strict grammatical rules are expressed in sentences whose predicates are

modified with words like usually, mostly, often, commonly, generally; the predicates

themselves are often expressed with, or include, verbs of indeterminate meaning, such as may

occur, tends to occur, etc. Examples can be found on almost every page of the two volumes

under review.

Talking about prepositional phrases in which the preposition is followed by a noun, the author

says: „For most speakers of BCS the accent remains on the noun, although in a few instances

it can move back onto the preposition. In Bosnian, however, the accent frequently moves back

onto the preposition if the noun object carries a falling accent. These accent shifts do not

occur with all nouns or with all prepositions but they tend to be common with prepositions

that take the accusative case.“ (Grammar p. 26). This rule is worthless on at least three

counts: (a) Indeterminate phrases like:

for most speakers

in a few instances

frequently moves back

do not occur with all nouns/prepositions

they tend to be common

make it impossible to apply the rule in a way that will enable the learner to use the proper

accent on the proper syllable. The language of this rule is typical of weather forecasts and it

must be admitted that grammar and meteorology use very different kinds of discourse. (b)

There is a contradiction in the rule: We are first told that in BCS „the accent remains on the

noun.“ The next sentence begins with „In Bosnian, however, ...“ But if BCS includes Bosnian,

which it obviously does, what is this new contrasting information about Bosnian?! (c) The

only logical interpretation of the statement „the accent moves back onto the preposition if the

noun object carries a falling accent“ is that the accent shifted onto the preposition is also


11

falling. But it is not – it can be rising or falling, the occurrence of one or the other type of

accent being regulated by rules, which are not given in either of the two volumes. Also, a

falling accent can be short or long – does the shifted accent copy the length of the stressed

vowel of the noun or does the vowel of the preposition keep its inherent feature of length?

Since the falling accent also shifts from verb forms to the negative particle ne, one would

expect that all cases of accent shift would be dealt with in one place in the book, because the

relevant rules are the same. But the shift of falling accent in a verb to the particle ne is

described – you won't believe it: in the Preface (p. xvi) – along with Acknowledgments,

Guide for students, Organization of lessons, and such other orientational paraphernalia. The

authors claim that only present tense forms shift their falling accent to the negative particle,

when in fact every verbal form which can be preceded by the particle ne and has a falling

accent on the first syllable shifts the accent to the particle. The authors say that the shifted

accent on ne is always short rising – not true: most negated aorist forms have a short falling

accent on ne! The shift of falling accent to the proclitic is thoroughly described in several

places in Ridjanović (2012) but mostly on pages 517-8.

On page 20 of the Textbook we read the following „rule“: „Nouns take different endings to

indicate different functions. When a person is being addressed, the ending -e is often added to

a masculine name (for instance, Mehmede!), and the ending -a on a feminine name is

sometimes replaced by -o (for instance, Nado!).“

The authors try to avoid the grammatical term case, which is unavoidable because a noun

with the same ending, i.e. the same case, may have many different functions. The wrong

introductory sentence of this „rule“ is then followed by an „often“ rule and a „sometimes“

rule.

On page 21 of the Textbook the authors introduce BCS personal pronouns by showing the

nominative case for each pronoun and the enclitic form of the accusative, without previously

giving the full forms! Still, the accusative is introduced as follows: „There are two types of

accusative case object pronouns [sic] – “clitic” (short form) and “full” (long form).” Of

course, the reader longs for long forms but is disappointed because s/he is not even told where

they can be found in the book! Then comes another sloppy rule: „The clitics, which are used

in most instances, are unaccented...” How is the learner to know in which instances s/he

should use the clitics?! The use of BCS clitics is regulated by grammatical rules of the

strictest kind; there is no regional or social variation in their use, and a breach of any clitic

rule grates badly on native speakers’ ears. Though it is true that clitics are unaccented (which

both books repeat umpteen times, although the statement is redundant because clitics are

unaccented by definition), the authors omitted to say that there is a grammatical environment

in which we must use full but unaccented forms of personal pronouns: in prepositional

phrases in which the object of the preposition is a personal pronoun, the accent is on the

preposition and the pronoun, though unaccented, must occur in its full form, e.g. zà_mene ‘for

me’, òd_tebe ‘from you’, kòd_na:s ‘with us’, dò_va:s ‘next to you’ (I mark vowel length with

a colon). Learners should be warned that although full and corresponding clitic forms of

personal pronouns are very different (mene – me, njega – ga), the accusative forms of first

and second person plural pronouns differ only in the length of the nuclear vowel; hence the

long vowels in the pronouns in kòd_nas and dò_vas.

A boxed paradigm of personal pronouns on this page shows only nominative and accusative

clitic forms. What about genitive and dative/locative forms? – asks the reader. Well, s/he is

referred to page 87 of Grammar, where we find both full and enclitic forms of the genitive

and dative/locative cases. Obviously, full accusative forms are missing and cannot be found

anywhere in the two volumes! Something else that is missing and is very important is the


12

information that the genitive and accusative forms, both long and short, are identical (as in

animate masculine nouns ending in a consonant). The “icing on the cake” of the Textbook

story about personal pronouns is the following “gem”: “There are two forms for the feminine

singular accusative, je and ju. Croatian uses both, more or less interchangeably. Bosnian and

Serbian, however, use ju only in certain past tense constructions.” While it is true that ju is

used in colloquial Croatian in ways which break the rules of standard Croatian, the rules for

the use of ju in all three standard variants are very strict and simple: use ju in place of je

whenever this form has to occur before the enclitic form je occurring as the auxiliary in the

compound past tense; for instance, On je je vidio ‘He saw her’ corresponds to the standard On

ju je video.

„Rules“ for fleeting a are presented in the two books in about half a dozen places (which is

nothing compared to the gentive case, explained in no fewer than 37 places!). Prof. Alexander

calls one and the same fleeting a in BCS 'fleeting vowels'!! Her „rules“ are tidbits, each

dealing with a particular case of the fleeting a occurring in the dialolgue of a particular lesson.

Thus, the fleeting a in adjectives is discussed, briefly and incorrectly, on page 23 of the

Textbook, the fleeting a in nouns is mentioned first on page 24, where the authors relate its

use to a morphological rule, and again on page 48, where it receives only a passing mention.

A two-page section in the Grammar book (pp. 373-4), entitled „Fleeting vowels“, is devoted

to the „theory“ of the fleeting a in BCS. There are two approaches to the analysis of fleeting

vowels in Slavic languages. One starts from the truncated stem of a noun or an adjective,

obtained by deleting the ending of an oblique case form of the noun or the feminine or neuter

ending of an adjective, and inserting the fleeting a between the two final consonants of that

stem; for instance, the truncated stem of vrabac 'sparrow' is vrapc-; if we insert a between the

last two consonants of this stem, we get *vrapac, which is wrong because the nominative is

vrabac! ow the advocates of this approach will cry out: „The truncated stem is vrabc- in

underlying structure!“ Fine, it may be, but how is the learner to know that (or, for that matter,

how is the child acquiring the language to know that?). The second approach starts from the

citation form of a noun or adjective, the other forms being made by dropping the fleeting a.

Thus, vrabac drops the second a to become the truncated stem vrabc- used for making the

other case forms. But there is a general phonological rule in BCS, called regressive

assimilation rule, by which clusters of obstruents must have the same voicing feature; the rule

works „backwards“ so that a later obstruent gives its vocing feature to the preceding one(s).

This rule makes the stem vrabc- into vrapc- and everything is as it should be. I will not pass

judgment on this debate but would urge teachers of BCS as a foreign langage to use the

second approach, as it allows us to make simple and comprehensive rules (found in

Ridjanović (2012) on pages 399-402 and 492-4).

The major rule for the fleeting a in adjectives, appearing on page 23, is worded as follows:

„The masculine nominative singular form of many adjectives ends in a consonant preceded by

–a; this -a- is called a “fleeting vowel” because it disappears in all other forms of the

adjective; for instance pametan, pametno, pametna. If this vowel appears in the suffix -ak, its

loss will sometimes cause the preceding consonant to shift to another consonant; for instance

nizak, n sko, n ska.“

This „rule“ doesn't tell us whether the fleeting vowel is short or long. The fact is that only the

short a may be fleeting. This is mentioned in the Grammar on page 373 but only in passing,

and will probably be missed by most readers. We are then told that the fleeting vowel

disappears in all other forms, which suggests that the disappearance of the fleeting a is

morphologically conditioned. (The author's other fleeting a rules are also explained

morphologically.) But the fleeting a is a purely phonological phenomenon, the major rule

being simply „Drop the fleeting a in nouns and adjectives whenever the final conosonant is


13

followed by a vowel in a related (grammatical) word.“ The final sentence of the authors' rule

mentions the suffix -ak, i.e. a morphological entity, to explain why nizak becomes nisko. The

learner is again told that this suffix „will sometimes cause the preceding consonant to shift to

another consonant.“ To what other consonant? When „sometimes“? In warm weather? Is it

possible that a sane person can do what Prof. Alexander does: she talks about voicing

assimilation in one place, defines it (however incompletely), and then doesn't refer the reader

to that place in the book when talking about it on several other occasions?

In the dialogues on page 26 of the Textbook, participant „1.“ asks the salesperson in a

bookstore if they have a new German dictionary, to which the salesperson replies: Imamo ga.

Želite li ga? 'We have it. Do you want it?'. The first of these two sentences is ungrammatical

in the context in which it is used (it should have been just Imamo), and the second one would

have been acceptable only if Želite li ga had been followed by kupiti 'to buy'; without this

complement verb, željeti means 'desire', and we don't normally desire dictionaries. A little

later in the same dialogue the same participant asks the salesperson if s/he can buy a wordlist

notebook, and the salesperson answers Imamo je (because teka 'notebook' is feminine), which

is also ungrammatical. Every normal native speaker of every language will tell you if a string

of words in her/his language is grammatical or not. Prof. Alexander is not a native speaker of

BCS, although her co-author of the Textbook, Ellen Elias-Bursać (a Croat), is. This is a case

of sheer negligence on the part of the authors, which brought them to the verge of obscenity

because Želite li ga? may refer to a man and can therefore be interpreted as 'Do you desire

him?'!!!

The following sentence appears on page 54 of the Textbook: „Evo, eno – The person or thing

being identified is usually [emphasis mine] marked by genitive case endings.“ Evo is close in

meaning to 'Here is/are' and Eno to 'There is/are' (and to French 'Voici' and 'Voilà') and must

be followed by a complement nominal in the genitive case. Using a different case ending of

the nominal would be a gross grammatical error and would sound like „English“ *Here is

their decisions and *There are my book!!!

We said on page 12 that the present tense forms of the verb zvati se as accented in the

Textbook reflect a dying, mostly rural pronunciation. Both books are filled with wrong accents

of every kind (I include length marks under accents): non-existent accents, obsolete or archaic

accents, accents on wrong syllables, missing accents. If we consider all the different types of

incorrect accentuation, we might say that about every fourth BCS word has a wrong accent

mark. Prof. Alexander's greatest mistake was to copy the accents from „standard“ BCS

dictionaries. A large proportion of accents in such dictionaries are either obsolete or artificial,

having resulted from „rules“ concocted within the neogrammarian tradition. We have

previously mentioned cases of wrong accents in the Textbook; we now give other examples of

incorrect accentuation in the same volume:

All three genders of the adjective dobar on page 4 and drag on page 22 are without accent

marks, which means that they bear a falling accent. Not true – only the masculine form has a

falling accent, the feminine and neuter have short rising accents in dobar and a long rising one

in drag.

Page 7 – Enclosed in a box on this page are the negative and the full affirmative forms of the

present tense of biti 'to be'. All six forms of the negative paradigm have wrong accents: the

proper accent is long rising in all forms except the 3rd person singular, which has a short

falling accent. While the latter form (nije) may be pronounced with a rising accent by some

people, by far the most frequent pronunciation of this form in standard BCS is with short

falling accent.


14

Page 12 – The vocalic r in Crna, appearing in the name of the country Crna Gora

Montenegro, is shown as long. Even at the time of Vuk Karadžić, the long vocalic r was

limited to rural areas in Bosnia, Serbia, and Montenegro but has since completely vanished so

that now all vocalic r's are short and are phonetically realized as a combination of schwa plus

an alveolar flap, which together function as one phoneme. Other wrongly accented words on

this page are Albànija, which should be Àlbānija, and Italija, Mađarska, and Jadransko

Adriatic, shown as stressed with a short falling accent on the first syllable but in fact have a

short rising accent on that syllable.

The authors rarely give rules which would explain changes of accent in a paradigm,

inflectional or derivational. Thus, several names of nationalities are given on page 6 of the

Textbook in which there is a change of accent as the masculine noun is changed to feminine:

Amerikà:nac – Amerìka:nka American, Bosà:nac – Bòsa:nka Bosnian, Crnogò:rac –

Crnògo:rka Montenegrin. Any careful observer, even one who is not lingustically trained, can

see that the masculine noun in each gender pair is stressed on the penultimate syllable with a

long rising accent and that the feminime form in each case is obtained by stressing the

preceding antepenultimate syllable with a short rising accent, while keeping the penultimate

syllable long but unstressed. This is a very wide ranging rule, which also applies to dozens of

common nouns with the same accentual pattern (such as gimnazijà:lac – gimnazìja:lka 'high

school student'). This accentual rule, along with all major rules governing changes of accents

in paradigms of individual lexical categories, can again be found in Ridjanović (2012).

In conclusion, I would like to say that I am absolutely convinced that a student who tries to

learn BCS using Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian, a Textbook: With Exercises and Basic Grammar

and its companion volume Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian, a Grammar: With Sociolinguistic

Commentary would produce hundreds, if not thousands, of wrong BCS word forms, phrases,

or sentences.

My own Bosnian for Foreigners: With a Comprehensive Grammar has been available for

purchase since August 2012. There has been only one order from the United States. The book

was announced on the American Slavic Linguistic Society website in December 2012 and on

the Linguist List in March 2013. Information about the purchase of the book can be obtained

at http://www.rabic.ba/english.html.

This is what Professor Wayles Browne of the Department of Linguistics at Cornell

University, one of the world's leading Slavists, said about my book:

"The book is a product of many years of research and writing. Professor Ridjanović brought

to bear his life-long involvement in language teaching and linguistics on a book that he

modesty calls a textbook, although the 345-page grammatical part is a full-fledged grammar

which includes many rules that were not observed in two centuries of grammatical

investigation of the language now called by four different names."

The book's main parts are: 40 lessons each with about ten exercises (255 pages), Bosnian

grammar (345 pages), Bosnian-English glossary (100 pages), and a brief English-Bosnian

glossary. It comes with a CD on which are recorded most of the lessons. There is an electronic

version of the grammatical part of the book, which was produced at the request of the

international translation and marketing company Lionbridge and is being used by them in the

construction of BCS language technologies; the version is entitled Bosnian Grammar and can

be purchased on my website at http://midhatridjanovic.ba/book-preview/.

American teachers of BCS who may have been put off by „Bosnian“ in the title of the book

have said more about themselves than about the book. They fell victim to the propaganda of

the fascistoid governments of the new Balkan states that the people who speak what used to

http://www.rabic.ba/english.html


15

be called Serbo-Croatian should be divided into four nations, each with a language of its own.

This artificial, politically motivated division of a single language into four is, of course,

rejected by all sane people living in former Yugoslavia. My own view on the matter is

expressed in an excerpt from the Preface to Bosnian for Foreigners, quoted on page 1 of this

review.

Among the victims of the nationalist propaganda forced on the masses by the new power-

hungry Balkan politicians is Melissa Witcombe of the Slavic Department at Indiana

University, the author of the only review of my book (published in South and East European

Journal, Volume 57, Number 3, pp. 516-7). Introducing the book, she says: “Bosnian for

Foreigners should serve as an essential resource for learners of Bosnian, particularly students

who have prior experience with Serbian and/or Croatian.” How would you react if you were

to read the following sentence in the preface to a textbook of American English: “American

English for Foreigners should serve as an essential resource for learners of American English,

particularly students who have prior experience with British and/or Canadian English.”

Several American friends of mine said they would think that someone is trying to be funny.

The only proper approach to the “languages” descended from Serbo-Croatian is to say that

Bosnian is another word for Croatian, Serbian, and Montenegrin, i.e. that former Serbo-

Croatian now has four names. Isn’t it interesting, and rather disgusting, that the same

politicians and their academic sycophants who now vehemently argue for the independence of

the language of their particular fiefdom never even questioned the integrity of the Serbo-

Croatian language (realized in two variants, eastern and western (not even Serbian and

Croatian!)) before the last Balkan wars?

How does one teach a polycentric language to foreigners, i.e. a language which has two or

more standard variants? Normally, one teaches the variant used in the country where the

language is taught or the variant that students want to learn for whatever reason. I claim that

teaching two variants in the same course, let alone three or four, is impossible, and is bound to

create a mess in the student’s mind, which will make her/him produce occasional mixtures of

variant forms. (Of course, textbooks whose titles tell naive prospective buyers that they will

learn three variants of a language sell a lot better than ones which teach you only one variant!)

I think that the only thing we can do when teaching polycentric languages to foreigners is

what I did during my time as Fulbright lecturer at Ohio State University in 1984-85. I taught a

course in Serbo-Croatian attended by about half a dozen students. There was a Croatian

student, who expressed a wish to be taught Croatian. He was quite happy with how I taught

him Croatian: when I came across a Serbian word which was different from the corresponding

Croatian one, I simply told him what the Croatian word was and he simply wrote it down! An

American teaching American English to foreigners could do a parallel thing in a class which

included students who, for one reason or another, sought at least passive knowledge of British

English - s/he can just tell the students that American movies is British pictures, that truck is

lorry, etc. An alternative approach to teaching polycentric languages could be one implied by

Melissa Witcombe in her review of my book; if consistent, she would give the following

advice to a foreign learner of English: “First learn American English, and then take a course

in British English; your experience with American English will be a good resource in learning

British English.”

I was able to make contact with Melissa before she started writing her review of my book. I

called her attention to some new syntactic rules which I discovered for BCS, and which, as far

as I was able to ascertain, had parallels in other Slavic languages, including Russian, but had

not yet been discovered in the other languages. They include nine functions of the particle se,

what I call “futile” perfect and pluperfect (indicating actions which took place in the past but

have been undone before the time of speaking), čovjek ‘man’ as a “modal” and a generic


16

pronoun, new insights into the use of verbal aspects, the use of absolute comparative and

superlative in Slavic languages, and several other rules that are most likely valid in other

Slavic languages. It is, of course, impossible for me to claim with certainty that my new rules

are new in other Slavic languages, but I strongly suspect that they are. Melissa, however,

didn’t even try to confirm or dispel my suspicion.

Why has my book been ignored in the United States? I think the main reason is to be found in

the new mentality of most Americans, created by probably the cruelest capitalist system in the

world, to which they are doomed. The American working masses have to struggle to survive

and, in doing so, try to save their energy, both mental and physical, because they need every

bit of it just to make ends meet. The psychologists’ principle of least effort has been converted

by toiling Americans to the “minimum effort that I can get away with.” So if I am teaching,

say, Croatian using a textbook entitled Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian, I am okay. Questions

about the quality of the textbook s/he is using or about the availability of other BCS textbooks

hardly ever cross the mind of the teacher because nobody seems to care how s/he is teaching,

so why bother? S/he either hasn’t heard of my book because s/he doesn’t keep up with

developments in the academic disciplines related to her/his job, or s/he has heard of my book

but ordering it is a bit of a hassle, and if s/he did order it and started using it, s/he wouldn’t

gain anything by it and the possibility for her/him to improve the quality of her/his teaching

doesn’t even go through her/his mind - who cares about quality in this day and age?!

I came to know two American professors of BCS, who happened to be native speakers of the

language. Both displayed rather weak linguistic knowledge. In my correspondence with one

of them, a double PhD and a professor of Slavic languages and applied linguistics at Arizona

State University, I discovered that he didn’t know exactly what a grammatical rule is. In

January 2013 I sent him an e-mail to tell him about the publication of Bosnian for Foreigners.

He acknowledged receipt of my mail and said that he had watched the very complementary

video that Prof. Browne sent me for the launch of my book. But he never ordered a copy of

the book! It seems that once you get installed as a professor at an American university, you

become untouchable and don’t need to worry about improving your performance, either in

teaching or research.

I understand that there are close to ten Bosnian-American teachers who teach BCS at

American universities. They, at least, cannot use the excuse that the textbook Bosnian for

Foreigners is not the textbook of their „native“ language. Still, after hearing of my book none

of them bothered to even ask me about it (my e-mail address has been on my website for

years now). Apart from lethargy, one reason for their indifference is no doubt their extremely

low level of linguistic education. There is a folk belief that native speakers of a language can

teach the language to foreigners better than people who are not native speakers. I think that

the ONLY factor by which we can measure the quality of a foreign-language teacher is her/his

linguistic sophistication. Being a native speaker of a language you are teaching to foreigners

may be a disadvantage. Language is the product of an instinct, just as digestion is. Does the

fact that we digest food mean that we can teach the biochemistry of digestion?

This is not a promotional plea for my book. The book is selling quite well and the first edition

of 500 copies may soon be out of print. I doubt that any of those who teach BCS in the States

or who make decisions about teaching BCS will be moved by this review or by the

information that the textbook currently used in the US to teach the language is trash, while

there is another textbook on the market which could seriously compete for the best foreign-

language textbook ever published. The atmosphere of lethargy prevailing in today’s America

cannot be cured overnight; in fact, I believe it cannot be cured at all within the foreseeable

future - on the contrary, it can only get worse because the factors which brought it about are

increasing in both number and intensity.


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Review of Alexander 2006, Alexander & Elias-Bursac 2010

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Transcript of Review of Alexander 2006, Alexander & Elias-Bursac 2010