Talk:Serbo-Croatian phonology

Serbo-Croatian diphtongs

	a-	e-	i-	o-	u-
-a		ea	ia	oa	ua
-e	ae		ie	oe	ue
-i	ai	ei		oi	ui
-o	ao	eo	io		uo
-u	au	eu	iu	ou

--109.93.204.228 (talk) 18:55, 18 August 2010 (UTC)

Refs that these are all diphthongs? — kwami (talk) 20:32, 18 August 2010 (UTC)

There are no diphthongs in standard Serbo-Croatian. Most of the combinations in the table are not even allowed by phonotactical rules. --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 15:21, 20 August 2010 (UTC)

Wrong articulation

T and D are dental (zubnici), and not alveolar. Correct this please. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 93.139.97.213 (talk) 14:14, 16 April 2011 (UTC)

Bosnian/Serbian/Croatian - POV-tag

This article will be renamed to appropriate modern standards, namely B/S/C. Serbo-Croatian is a biased communist relic, and most importantly defunct. 90.230.54.125 (talk) 23:20, 10 January 2012 (UTC)

I would like to inform everyone that I now control a user account on which you may contact me. I did also add a POV-tag yesterday which was promptly removed without further notice by user:Kwamikagami. The fact that user:Kwamikagami and a couple of others have had this issue on the table before does not make it a closed subject protected from further scrutiny. Once the rights of my new account have been updated I will extend the POV-tag to the Serbo-Croatian language article which in reality should redirect to a page with either of the following titles: 'Bosnian/Serbian/Croatian' or 'official language standards of former Yugoslavia'. If any user conflicts with the POV-tag (a right of Wikipedia editors) I shall file a request for the supervision of the articles in question and ultimately a lock-down if necessary. MarcRey (talk) 07:47, 11 January 2012 (UTC)

You say you've been here 7 yrs, but you are apparently unfamiliar with WP naming conventions. We use the WP:COMMONNAME in English. The common name in English for this language is "Serbo-Croatian". There really is no other. Nobody says "I speak Bosnian/Serbian/Croatian" or "I speak official language standards of former Yugoslavia". Until they do, those titles are not appropriate. (And of course the latter is incorrect because it's the wrong topic as well.) — kwami (talk) 07:57, 11 January 2012 (UTC)

What people choose to call things on a colloquial level is irrelevant in encyclopedic contexts, but if you wish to lead the discussion on that level I am convinced no one claims to speak Serbo-Croatian any longer, nor B/S/C, but either Croatian, Serbian or Bosnian separately. Neither have I come across the use of "Serbo-Croatian" in any official setting for the past 10 years. WP:COMMONNAME would not justify incorrect, and outdated, usage despite a supposed occurrence of wide-spread use. If it had, many of the articles on Wikipedia could be given the slang counterparts which are definitely more frequent in everyday language. The POV-tag has been once more removed. If this repeats for more than three times I will be urged to proceed with matters at the office of bureaucrats. To clarify, I am not here to distance the Bosnian language from either Croatian or Serbian, they are the one and same language. But it has been agreed that Serbo-Croatian is an invalid term, and communist relic, which fails to shed objective light on the language of Serbs, Croats and Bosnians/Bosniaks, namely excluding the latter. This has been the cause of armed conflict and the abolishment of Serbo-Croatian as an official standard some 20 years ago. MarcRey (talk) 08:36, 11 January 2012 (UTC)

It's not "slang", and it has not been "agreed" that it is invalid. You say it's one language, but we need a name for that language. The only name in current use is "Serbo-Cratian". Yes, people may avoid saying it in many situations, but when they do speak of it, that's the name they use. And I don't see how its a "Communist" relic when English usage dates to the 18th century. — kwami (talk) 08:50, 11 January 2012 (UTC)

Can you provide a reference to English usage of "Serbo-Croatian" in the 18th century? —Pepsi Lite (talk) 09:04, 11 January 2012 (UTC)

Morfill, 1883, Slavonic Literature. Quoted in the OED.

Sorry, I'm getting dysnumeric. 19th century. — kwami (talk) 09:51, 11 January 2012 (UTC)

What name did they use for this language before 1883? —Pepsi Lite (talk) 10:01, 11 January 2012 (UTC)

"Illyrian", AFAIK. I'm not sure. — kwami (talk) 10:12, 11 January 2012 (UTC)

Croats used to call this language "Illyrian", never Croatian before 1850. Let us call it "Serbian phonology" then everybody will be happy! —Pepsi Lite (talk) 10:19, 11 January 2012 (UTC)

Ironically, calling it Serbian phonology would be more accurate than Serbo-Croatian, because unlike Serbo-Croatian Serbian exists. MarcRey (talk) 18:26, 12 January 2012 (UTC)

It has come to be a slang since it is defunct, abolished, disqualified. Call it what you like. And it is preposterous to maintain that a subjective , unofficial, term should be used simply because there is no better way of naming these languages. This article could have been as easily named Phonology of Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian but I suspect some users insist on Serbo-Croatian since it efficiently omits Bosnian and portrays it as sprung out of Serbian and Croatian. Fishy business. Pepsi, it would not matter if he found a source proving the usage of Serbo-Croatian in the 18th (or rather 19th) century since it would not have been standardized or official anyways. And definitely not justifying the omission of Bosnian from the name. In the 18th century, for example, Bosnia enjoyed a greater independence than Serbia or Croatia and the Bosnians (Muslims) surely did not choose to refer to their language as either Serbian or Croatian. Bottom-line is, the term Bosnian language (as well as Serbian and Croatian) has been in the scope for several hundreds of years before Serbo-Croatian ever saw daylight due to nasty political bias. MarcRey (talk) 09:13, 11 January 2012 (UTC)

So, if I have an opinion that is incompatible with your political goals, then I must be in some kind of conspiracy against you?

Your opinions about a word are not evidence, and that is not our naming policy. — kwami (talk) 09:51, 11 January 2012 (UTC)

It is funny you consider the integrity of the Bosnian language to be a political issue, which in turn is quite revealing of your discrediting attitude towards the originality of the Bosnian language. Views which do not come as any surprise from someone who eagerly wishes to introduce a new (or discontinued, depending on how you wish to observe it) classification standard on Wikipedia. To be frank, your last comment was not of any contribution to the discussion and I take it as a sign of your unwillingness to objectiveness. In due time I will present as part of this discussion contemporary sources (apparent axioms) on why your actions are completely biased and ludicrous in the year of 2012. I suspect many well-read non-Yugoslavian people, predominantly from the western civilization, would not have any difficulties to penetrate the error of your editorial claims, but unfortunately 95% of the users editing ex-Yugoslavian articles are ex-Yugoslavians themselves. In the meantime the POV-tag returns. I shall immediately withdraw my demands for this tag if the current title of the article is replaced with the appropriate one: "Phonology of the Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian language". Inside of the article you may gladly explain that the previous classification for these languages was Serbo-Croatian, and that this term enjoys some continued use. Naturally, this discussion also goes for the Serbo-Croatian article and I will paste this discussion over there in a short while. MarcRey (talk) 18:18, 12 January 2012 (UTC)

In a nutshell: you say "I don't like it, therefore I'll slap a tag onto it until it changes as I see fit", also known as "my way or the highway". If your sole objection is the title of the article, procedure outlined at Wikipedia:Requested moves is the correct venue to test your assertion and change the title following a consensus. Until that, I'm removing the incorrect tag, because I don't see what is POV in a largely technical article about sounds in the language. And yes, since you ask: "integrity of the Bosnian language" is a political issue ipso facto, and it has nothing to do with its phonology, which is a scientific discipline. No such user (talk) 08:50, 13 January 2012 (UTC)

Kajkavian and Čakavian phonology

Where is Kajkavian and Čakavian phonology? Since no one admits or recognizes Croatian language as separate language, then is important to include Kajkavian and Čakavian phonology to this all unifying "Serbo-Croatian" language . Special phonemes to Kajkavian (ɛ, ɔ, ɑ, æ, ɐ, ɪ, ə, ʊ, ʏ, ɦ, ɟ, w, œ) and special Čakavian (ɛ, ɔ, ɕ, ʑ, c). — Preceding unsigned comment added by 46.229.244.226 (talk) 21:07, 18 May 2013 (UTC)

That would be interesting, but someone will have to add it citing one or more reliable sources that say such things about Kajkavian and Chakavian. Moreover, I think such info is actually better placed at the articles about Chakavian and Kajkavian. This article is currently only about Neo-Shtokavian, which means its topic is nicely restricted and clear. --JorisvS (talk) 12:34, 19 May 2013 (UTC)

"r" is not a trill

The "r" sound is a flap. There's no continuous vibration at least in most dialects. Please correct this. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Vealsh (talk • contribs) 22:07, 23 February 2015 (UTC)

Allophones

As I said, there are just too many allophones enumerated for my taste, some of them so obvious that they almost go without saying. Sometimes less is more, as by omitting near-trivial information we put more emphasis on non-trivia one. Let me go through the whole list:

1. /m/ is labiodental [ɱ] before /f, ʋ/, as in tramvaj [trǎɱʋaj], whereas /n/ is velar [ŋ] before /k, ɡ/ – well, duh! In which world languages words "tramway" and "bank" are not pronounced with [ɱ] and [ŋ]?
2. /t, d, s, z, t͡s/ are dental, whereas /n, l, r/ are alveolar. – fine with me
3. /v/ is a phonetic fricative, although... – fine
4. /t͡s, f, x/ are voiced [d͡z, v, ɣ] before voiced consonants. – another obvious one. Such contacts are, however, phonotactically possible only on word boundaries (save for few foreign words like Afganistan, Mahdi, Šacberg), so it's too IMO too marginal to be mentioned
5. Glottal stop [ʔ] may be inserted between vowels across word boundary, as in i onda – again, a rather normal phenomenon at inter-word hiatus. I'm indifferent to this one.
6. Croatian has more allophones: – as we know, "Croatian" is hardly a linguistic unit for anything, phonology in particular, but let's go into details...
7. /ʃ, ʒ/ are retracted to [ɕ, ʑ] before /t͡ɕ, d͡ʑ/. – yes, this happens, and it's not universal, and not particularly standard. Applies to many Croatian and Bosnian dialects with the tendency of fronting fricatives (Ikavian-Šćakavian), mostly.
8. /x/ is retracted to [h] when it is initial in a consonant cluster – and in many other positions; I'd say that /h/ is a common allophone, and /x/ is generally far less fricative than Russian or Scottish.
9. /ʋ/ is labiovelar [w] before /u/, as in vuk [wûːk]. – I'd call this a speech impediment; I'd hardly expect a native speaker pronouncing [wûːk] except maybe in very lazy speech. No such user (talk) 19:43, 27 March 2015 (UTC)

(Converted to number list for ease in communicating). 1) the labiodental is pretty ubiquitous in all languages (and removing it is fine by me), though the velar assimilation need not happen (although it quite commonly does). 4) is not quite as obvious as it may seem. There are language where 5) is rather uncommon (e.g. Spanish), although still not necessarily wrong. If 7) is not universal (although I'm not sure how easy not assimilating them really is), then it is quite necessary to note in which varieties it occurs. 8) That needs a proper source and, if so, has to be properly mentioned. 9) But what does the source say about this? If it does simply say this, we can't call it a speech impediment here. --JorisvS (talk) 19:58, 27 March 2015 (UTC)

@JorisvS:

Landau et al say nothing more than that "/ʋ/ occurs as [w] before the vowel /u/". — Peter238 (v̥ɪˑzɪʔ mɑˑɪ̯ tˢʰoˑk̚ pʰɛˑɪ̯d̥ʒ̊) 21:00, 27 March 2015 (UTC)

(edit conflict)Most of it is taken from the IPA Handbook of Croatian [1]... often too literally, unfortunately. We could have at least changed the examples...
5) is uncommon in Serbo-Croatian too, but not particularly surprising to hear.
7) Forvo has quite nice contrasts (sr1 sr2 vs. hr), and I'd say that the latter is a quite clear [ɕt͡ɕ], while the former (to me) are closer to [ʂt͡ɕ], but then, Eastern/Serbian fricatives are generally much more retroflex/apical than Western/Croatian (šćakavian), typically palatal. That is sourceable, just need to dig it out.
9) The source does say that, but that's fairly odd to me. When a supposedly reliable source selects such a factoid, it's kind of hard to contradict it - how can I found another reliable source which explicitly says it is not so? (WP:CHEESE in reverse). No such user (talk) 21:11, 27 March 2015 (UTC)

@No such user:

1) Russian 'банк' is phonetically [bank].

4) It's not obvious in Standard Dutch, where 'Hoek van Holland' is phonetically [ˈɦuk fɑn ˈɦɔlɑnt] (with progressive assimilation), not *[ˈɦuɡ vɑn ˈɦɔlɑnt]. In some other cases the assimilation is regressive, e.g. 'wat is dat?" [ʋɑt ɪz dɑt].

6) Landau et al state that "the style of speech illustrated is that of many educated speakers of Standard Croatian as spoken in the Republic of Croatia."

7-9) Ok, but that's OR. What is in the article is what the source says. — Peter238 (v̥ɪˑzɪʔ mɑˑɪ̯ tˢʰoˑk̚ pʰɛˑɪ̯d̥ʒ̊) 21:00, 27 March 2015 (UTC)

1) I must say I'm surprised, I find this unpronounceable. ...and so do all 8 Russian speakers at Forvo [2]

4) But such situations in S-C are quite rare, and assimilation is universally regressive.

7-9) I certainly don't want OR, but I'd rather remove contentious material until corroborated by other sources as an important feature. I'm particularly bothered by 9) - Forvo has 11 pronunciations of "vuk" [3] and I don't hear a [w] in either (maybe one Serbian of bad quality). No such user (talk) 21:20, 27 March 2015 (UTC)

1) No source I'm aware of reports the existence of the [ŋ] allophone in Russian. You're probably mishearing [n̪ˠ] for [ŋ].

9) I'm not sure what to do with this. I think Landau et al wouldn't mention the [w] allophone without reason. — Peter238 (v̥ɪˑzɪʔ mɑˑɪ̯ tˢʰoˑk̚ pʰɛˑɪ̯d̥ʒ̊) 22:27, 27 March 2015 (UTC)

@No such user: 1) The Russian speakers at Forvo pronounce [n], not [ŋ]. The problem is that the difference is very difficult to hear for the untrained ear. 4) But because it is not universal in other languages (even mixed voicing can occasionally be found), we should note that it happens. 9) Most examples appear to have at least some labiodental, not bilabial articulation, but that would still be OR. If an otherwise detailed source does not specifically mention [w], that is enough to at least question it (and then it could be removed for that reason, as far as I'm concerned). Doesn't the second of 7) pronounce all as alveolo-palatal? The third does indeed sound [ɕt͡ɕ]. I have a hard time properly making out the first, but its final <ć> does not sound like the [(ɕ)t͡ɕ] of the third. --JorisvS (talk) 09:31, 28 March 2015 (UTC)

1) Not so sure if the two of you aren't pulling my leg :) but I'll concede that I don't hear a slightest difference (compare hr: bankarski Ranko). That confirms they're allophones for me, doesn't it?

4) Still not convinced about WP:WEIGHT, but whatever.

7) Serbian /ʃ/ is generally peculiar, with retroflex/apical elements. Realization of /ʃ/ varies across the SC area, ranging from alveolo-palatal in Dalmatia to almost Mandarin-style retroflex in Slavonia. So it's kind of moot examining its quality only in contact with /t͡ɕ/.

9) I guess i could ping User:Ivan Štambuk if he could inspect Škarić's Fonetika hrvatskog književnog jezika. But in my view [w] is very substandard.

10) And, referring to the anon's comment above, I'm also surprised that Landau et al. don't mention flap as a proper allophone of alveolar trill (I think that's the case with most Slavic languages). @JorisvS: @Peter238:. No such user (talk) 19:42, 28 March 2015 (UTC)

7) The sounds files also seem to indicate that they are pretty variable, which means that, indeed, we've got to try to be more thorough. Removing such a mention altogether makes no sense because that would only hide that variability, but we should present a correct picture. What does Fonetika hrvatskog književnog jezika say about this? --JorisvS (talk) 20:01, 28 March 2015 (UTC)

I'd call this a speech impediment;

Luckily you're not an academic so your claim is of little worth when faced with actual references. It's a perfectly normal realization of the phoneme. Do you also consider final devoicing to be a speech impediment? The article's meant to be descriptive, not prescriptive. 93.139.37.237 (talk) 07:00, 30 March 2015 (UTC)

Luckily, I'm not. Since it's "perfectly normal", you certainly wouldn't have any problems producing a recording of a native speaker doing that?

To save you the effort, I did locate some at Forvo [4]. Out of some 25 words starting with /vu/, I think I hear a [w] in [5][6][7][8][9][10] (I'd be interested in a brief analysis by others, if you feel like it). While "speech impediment" was a tad strong, "very relaxed" would be a more politically correct qualification. In my book, an "allophone" is a phone pronounced by most speakers in a certain position, not just by some, while the others easily differentiate the phonemes.

The information from Landau seems to very closely match Ligorio, Orsat (2010). "Fonemika dubrovačkoga govora". Croatica et Slavica Iadertina (VI): 35–36.. Does Landau perhaps cite Ligorio? No such user (talk) 09:02, 30 March 2015 (UTC)

The third is, I'd say, not [w]. --JorisvS (talk) 09:08, 30 March 2015 (UTC)

Landau et al is 11 years older than the document you link to. Maybe it's Ligorio who is citing Landau et al, but not the other way around. — Peter238 (v̥ɪˑzɪʔ mɑˑɪ̯ tˢʰoˑk̚ pʰɛˑɪ̯d̥ʒ̊) 11:23, 30 March 2015 (UTC)

@No such user: Here's the proof of the nonexistence of the [ŋ] allophone in Russian: "Note that Russian does not have (...) [ŋ] (...) before the velar plosives /k, ɡ, kʲ, ɡʲ/. Thus, the /n/ is still denti-alveolar in such words as [bank] банк (bank), [ɐnˈɡlʲijskʲɪ(j)] английский (English)." Source: Jones, Daniel; Ward, Dennis (1969), The Phonetics of Russian, Cambridge University Press, p. 160. Peter238 (talk) 19:09, 2 April 2015 (UTC)

OK, I concede the defeat... (although I still don't hear a slightest difference between Russian and SC in those recordings... or English for that matter) :-$ Although I don't know about any other WP phonology article going into such details about allophones. I still consider it too much volatile and dialect-specific detail for a broad overview. No such user (talk) 14:39, 3 April 2015 (UTC)

• Allophony in Serbo-Croatian is an under-researched phenomena of such a minor importance that it's barely even mentioned in the grammar books (even extensively detailed ones). [w] in vuk seems like a correct analysis to me. Two minor objection though: 1) Ligorio's paper deals with the local dialect not the standard language. 2) Article by Landau et al. in the IPA Handbook lists no sources. --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 21:58, 28 May 2015 (UTC)

/v/ and /ʋ/

The article says that the /v/ in SC is a fricative. It then goes on to transcribe it as a labiodental approximant throughout the article, and in the text at the bottom. It's also described as a labiodental approximant in various literature (in some of which it is put in direct contrast to its regional realization as a fricative /v/). Mat765 (talk) 11:35, 3 April 2015 (UTC)

Remove Cyrillic?

Would anyone mind if I remove the Cyrillic spellings from the article? The Latin alphabet examples do the job just fine, at least to an English speaker for which the article is intended, and Cyrillic just presents a visual distraction (even for me as a native speaker) and makes it a pain to read. It's even worse in Serbo-Croatian grammar, so I'll ask the same question there. No such user (talk) 14:52, 3 April 2015 (UTC)

I agree, it does not seem to serve any encyclopedic value here. --JorisvS (talk) 14:56, 3 April 2015 (UTC)

No, Serbian is officially written in Cyrillic script. You would also expect Chinese characters in an article on Chinese. It's just natural. --2001:16B8:31F4:9B00:A135:BDE4:D76B:B202 (talk) 21:54, 18 July 2018 (UTC)

No, it's officially written in Cyrillic and Latin. No standard variety of Serbo-Croatian is written in Cyrillic alone. Kbb2 (ex. Mr KEBAB) (talk) 21:55, 18 July 2018 (UTC)

You're mistaken. Serbia has a preference for Cyrillic for anything that is remotely official. And your second sentence sounds like Cyrillic and Latin could be used in the same text. Despite being a native speaker, OP is probably not accustomed to seeing Cyrillic and abuses the argument that it has to be easy to look at from an English speaker's standpoint to disguise the fact that their only motivation to advocate for such a change stems from being Croatian (obvious by looking at the profile). Croatian is known to be linguistically conservative/purified and prefers the Latin script due to Catholicism. Cyrillic is part of the Orthodox identity and Vuk Karadžić, the biggest contributor to Serbo-Croatian phonology, was Serbian. Thus, the active purge of the Cyrillic script is a huge bias and not neutral encyclopedic work. I can't fathom what encyclopedic value the second poster was preaching. I'm not Serbian, but this is a description of what probably happened here, deception with ethnic, religious and political motives. Since this choice was not heavily discussed, you all went along with it. --2001:16B8:31A7:6B00:310D:586C:96B8:B9E4 (talk) 08:19, 3 May 2020 (UTC)

Obviously, what I meant is that there is no variety of Serbo-Croatian that doesn't use the Latin alphabet. Serbo-Croatian isn't just Serbian. Take a look at WP:ENGVAR, a related policy that says that no variety of English is preferred in Wikipedia articles, unless the article has strong ties to a particular country. Consequently, we don't have to write "favor / favour" or "favo(u)r" instead of either "favor" or "favour" in Wikipedia articles. This situation is analogous, and I too see no encyclopedic value in reinstating Cyrillic. There's no harm in using the Latin alphabet alone. And before you accuse me of having bias towards Croatian: I'd have no problem with using Cyrillic instead of Latin if the Croatian standard also used it. It's just a matter of being practical, that's all. Kbb2 (ex. Mr KEBAB) (talk) 09:48, 3 May 2020 (UTC)

One rare case where we should use Cyrillic is when discussing e.g. the ambiguity of ⟨nj⟩, which can stand for the palatal nasal or /nj/, depending on the word. There's no such ambiguity in the case of Cyrillic. But whether this is the appropriate article to discuss that is another question. Kbb2 (ex. Mr KEBAB) (talk) 16:37, 4 May 2020 (UTC)

Tooltip removal

While the use of tooltip to indicate word meanings was clever, I found it to have serious readability issues. Not all readers will be capable of utilizing the mouseover feature (particularly those using phones and tablets). Moreover, combining the tooltip feature with wiktionary links created an inaccurate mousover display. Even with a properly working mouseover feature, readers are slowed down considerably as they have to move the mouse over each word. Using parenthetical glosses works fine and allows for links within the glosses, as I did with ephod. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[lɛts b̥iː pʰəˈlaɪˀt]} 22:55, 5 September 2015 (UTC)

I agree, thank you for actually taking time to fix it. No such user (talk) 11:21, 7 September 2015 (UTC)

Palatalization

Unfortunately, I think there's been a mistake. /g/ is not palatalized into /dʒ/, but to /ʒ/. That should be fixed. 92.36.175.43 (talk) 15:44, 25 November 2016 (UTC)

NON-IPA symbols for Serbo-Croatian pitch accent

Wikipedia articles for Serbian, Croatian and Slovenian sadly use symbols which are not international. Diacritics as on ǎ, ê, ȕ are taken from the local tradition. Incredibly, they are even labelled in these artcicles as IPA. But they have never been part of IPA, they are inconsistent, non-iconic, and unintelligible to phoneticians who haven't learnt these languages and haven't dealt with local studies in South-Slavic linguistics. Even on a phonemic/tonemic level, they make no sense. Viktor Laszlo (talk) 21:27, 1 July 2017 (UTC)

Agreed, they make absolutely no sense. Also, the article is full of wrong accent markings. 156.20.22.141 (talk) 21:35, 20 November 2017 (UTC)

@Viktor Laszlo: On the contrary, the diacritics ◌̌ and ◌̂ are valid IPA. See International Phonetic Alphabet#Suprasegmentals. They indicate rising and falling tone respectively. ◌̏ is also valid IPA, but the article does not use it in IPA transcriptions, only in Serbo-Croatian text. — Eru·tuon 00:23, 21 November 2017 (UTC)

Yes, ◌̌ and ◌̂ exist in IPA, but they apply to individual syllables, as typical of Asian languages (e.g. ◌̌ for the second tone in Mandarin, ◌̂ for the third tone in Thai https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Chinese_phonology#Tones, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thai_language#Tones). In Serbian, Croatian, Slovenian, Swedish and Norwegian, tonal contours are spread over sequences of syllables or even entire words. In the case of ◌̏, in present-day (2015) IPA, this marks an extra-low tone (again on an individual syllable), therefore it is totally inadequate in "pitch" languages like Serbian, Croatian, Slovenian, Swedish and Norwegian. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pitch_accent Viktor Laszlo (talk) 14:12, 17 December 2017 (UTC)

@Viktor Laszlo: As you're aware, the non-IPA symbols ⟨ȅ, ȇ, è, é, ē⟩ are not the same as the IPA symbols ⟨ê, êː, ě, ěː, eː⟩. They point to the same phonological units, yet are completely different. I think most of us are perfectly aware of how the former are used in the IPA. The question is, where do you see them labelled as IPA in this article or any other articles?

I think the traditional Vukovian approach is overly complicated by the way. The falling vowels are basically the same as the stressed vowels found in Czech, minor phonetic differences aside. It's the rising accents that are marked, not least because they're the product of Neo-Shtokavian retraction before which all vowels were falling (or neutral) in nature. See my last edits to this article. I think it's better to differentiate between neutral and rising accents, but we obviously need to follow the sources. The rising accents differ from their non-rising counterparts in that the first post-stressed syllable is realized with a high tone carried over from the preceding stressed syllable. That's literally the only important difference. Mr KEBAB (talk) 16:04, 17 February 2018 (UTC)

Description of pitch accent misleading?

The description of the rising accent given here ("If the high tone of the stressed syllable is carried over to the first post-tonic syllable, the accent is perceived as rising") seems to be slightly misleading, since it implies that the post-tonic syllable is level with the tonic syllable. But pitch tracks in this article: Zec, D., & Zsiga, E. (2010). "Interaction of Tone and Stress in Standard Serbian" (Formal Approaches to Slavic Linguistics 18, 535–555. Ann Arbor, Mich.: Michigan Slavic Publications) show that (except sentence-finally, cf. fig. 2) the post-tonic syllable is higher than the tonic syllable. I think therefore that the sentence needs to be re-worded. Also, in the current version of the article there is no reference given to the book Lehiste, I. and Ivić, P. (1986) Word and Sentence Prosody in Serbocroatian (Cambridge: MIT Press), which is presumably being quoted here, only to a different work by Alexander. Kanjuzi (talk) 08:11, 15 April 2018 (UTC)

@Kanjuzi: Feel free to fix it (if you haven't already). I'm not claiming that I perfectly represented what can be found in the source. Kbb2 (ex. Mr KEBAB) (talk) 13:58, 5 February 2019 (UTC)

@Kbb2: I don't know enough about Serbian and Croatian and have not read enough of the literature to feel confident to fix it, but I can see that the description of the pitch contours summarised here from Lehiste and Ivić doesn't match the illustrations of pitch tracks in Zec and Zsiga. I suggest therefore that someone who knows Serbian and has seen both works should marry them up. Also the reference to Lehiste and Ivić which is summarised here needs to be added. (Presumably you know what it is, since you say you are the one who summarised it.) An illustration such as Zec and Zsiga's pitch tracks would also be helpful for those of us who don't know Serbo-Croatian but are interested to know what its pitch-accent sounds like. Kanjuzi (talk) 05:45, 15 February 2019 (UTC)

Articulation of e, o, s, z

It says in the article that e and o are articulated [e] and [o] respectively. When I say Serbocroatian words like that it sounds really awkward and when I hear Serbs/Croats/Bosnians talk, they definitely do not talk like that. They clearly say [ε] and [ↄ] respectively (opened), or at least half-opened. Have I understood something about the IPA completely wrong? This confuses me a lot right now...

Also, are s and z actually dental? I'm pretty sure I've never heard Serbs/Croats/Bosnians talk like Spaniards... 92.211.45.217 (talk) 02:46, 31 January 2019 (UTC)

The closed [eː] and [oː] can be used by some speakers when the vowel is long. I think that (some) Bosnians do talk like that. But I agree that ⟨ɛ⟩ and ⟨ɔ⟩ are rather more appropriate symbols.

They are, but they're not lisped. Here, dental means that you put the tip of your tongue on lower teeth (rather than below them) and make a strong non-lisped sibilant with the portion of the tongue which is slightly behind the tip. Some English speakers pronounce their /s, z/ like that, others don't. In Serbo-Croatian the dental articulation is very consistent (as it is in other languages such as Polish or Russian) and some of the English variants of /s, z/ can sound too much like /ʃ, ʒ/ in Serbo-Croatian. Kbb2 (ex. Mr KEBAB) (talk) 12:39, 6 February 2019 (UTC)

Presence or absence of retroflexion

Whereas the article authoritatively claims that Serbo-Croatian š ž č dž are retroflexes and cites only sources that confirm this, this is far from the consensus. There exist multiple works that describe them as alveolopalatal or "postalveolar", and at least one (Hamann 2002) was brought to my attention today, specifically investigating and refuting this claim based on the criteria the author sets up for retroflexion. If there is no objection, I'll edit the article to use the more conventional /ʃ ʒ tʃ dʒ/ symbols and add citations both for and against a retroflex analysis. Kneelian (talk) 01:46, 11 January 2024 (UTC)