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{{Vital article|class=B|level=5|link=Misplaced Pages:Vital articles/Level/5/Society and social sciences|anchor=%7b%7banchor%7cSlavic languages%7d%7d Slavic languages (14 articles)}}
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{{Notice|Arguments about the number of speakers of Macedonian should be directed at ].}}
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== Inaccurate maps ==
== Too much weight given to political views on the language ==


Both the maps of the distribution on the first part of the page and in the dialects part are unsourced and frankly inaccurate, to add up the first shows random dots all over Greece where supposed minority speakers live but this is unsourced and really just false. ] (]) 10:05, 6 September 2023 (UTC)
Good afternoon fellow users. Don't users think this article focuses too heavily on political views on the language while completely neglecting the language's characteristics (the grammar section is insanely short)? By that I mean that there are currently six '''SUPER LENGTHY''' subheadings, namely Classification and related languages, Relationship to Bulgarian, History, Political views on the language that '''HEAVILY''' and '''SOLELY''' discuss political views on the language. There is a separate article where they are much more needed - ] for instance? I still think part of the information can be retained but needs to be significantly reduced as it currently represents almost a fifth of the article. Also, is it really necessary to include such lengthy passages in the references to support claims made in the body? I personally find it super distracting to read and cluttering for the article. For instance, references 89 and 203 have excerpts that are longer than the entire grammar section of the article and surprise, surprise - they focus '''ONLY''' on political views. ] (]) 12:17, 16 March 2020 (UTC)
: Completely agree, feel free to weed out radically. Those overlong footnote quotes are an odious bad habit with some notorious agenda editors who have been active on this and other related pages. ] ] 13:22, 16 March 2020 (UTC)
::Go for it. Edit away. --] (]) 17:21, 16 March 2020 (UTC)
:::{{ping|User:TaivoLinguist}} {{ping|User:Future Perfect at Sunrise}} Okay, I removed what I thought was heavily politicized content that does not primarily belong to this article. Please feel free to add back any information you feel might have been essential or please discuss the changes here if I did something wrong. ] (]) 20:06, 16 March 2020 (UTC)
::::Most of the removed passages were without the scope of the section Political views, i.e. the deletion was de facto non discussed. Can somebody explain what is gong here, please ] (]) 11:13, 17 March 2020 (UTC)
:::::The whole section History of the Macedonian language was deleted too. Is this any kind of cleansing of inconvenient or disliked sections of the article for political or other reasons? ] (]) 11:21, 17 March 2020 (UTC)
::::::The whole section focuses on the history of the country instead of the language itself? A small example is "However, there were pro-Bulgarian groups which advocated independence as a second Bulgarian state, and others, who supported the union with Bulgaria". None of this refers to the language itself and all of it refers to the history of the country. Also, please stop trying to sneak in highly politicized content into every single article you touch by including extremely long passages, citing 6 sources to claim something not primarily stated in the sources provided and so forth. Thank you in advance. ] (]) 11:31, 17 March 2020 (UTC)
: Useful information has now been removed from the article. A "history" section exists in most language articles. There should be a discussion about specific parts that are deemed irrelevant, instead of speedily and indiscriminately removing most of the content of the section. --] (]) 11:51, 17 March 2020 (UTC)
:: I completely agree with you that a history section should be included in the article, however as per how it was previously, the history section did not comply with the rules of history sections in language articles and focused solely on North Macedonia's history. I also asked fellow users to discuss information they deemed important and that I might have removed. So please, if you feel that any of the sections removed discussed the language itself, paste them here and they will be added to the article. ] (]) 12:11, 17 March 2020 (UTC)
: From the article history we can see that you've deleted whole sections, on which the editors of Misplaced Pages worked for years. If you think that they should not be part of this article, we need to find a place form them, not to remove them. Two editors consensus can't revert a long-term work of dozens of editors. So, please revert the changes, as there's obviously not a strong consensus and start discussing them section by section. --] (]) 12:33, 17 March 2020 (UTC)
::The discussed section ''Political views'' was partially reduced, while whole other sections and significant passages from the text were deleted without any consensus. ] (]) 12:41, 17 March 2020 (UTC)
::: {{ping|Jingiby}} In fact two editors agreed that changes should be done (one of them thinks content should be weeded out radically), but I don't see a consensus on the result. --] (]) 12:55, 17 March 2020 (UTC)
: {{ping|DD1997DD}} Two editors has supported you in your attempt to make the changes you want, three editors think that not all of the changes that are done are an improvement, so please revert your changes and start a discussion. You think the grammer section is insanely short, so you decide to remove other sections, so the grammer section doesn't look so short? Maybe it's a better idea just to extend the grammer and other related sections? The Macedonian language is more or less a political construct and it's absolutely normal to have sections for that. --] (]) 12:49, 17 March 2020 (UTC)
:: Wow, tell us how you really feel StanProg. Tell us all of your nationalistic feels and ideas! We would love to hear them. Btw, I also support DD alongside Taivo and Future in the decision. There should be a historical and neutral section, not full of Bulgarian propaganda and directed towards the country rather than the language itself. — <span style="text-shadow:#CCC 0.1em 0.3em 0.3em; font-family: Trebuchet MS">]]</span> 13:27, 17 March 2020 (UTC)
::: I'm not against the decision. Articles should be improved and that's absolutely normal. I'm against what he did - deleting exactly half of the article, including the whole section "History". He added "Along with Bulgarian, Macedonian is a descendant of Old Church Slavonic." and that's the whole history of the language between 9th & 20th century. Do you agree with that as well? --] (]) 13:39, 17 March 2020 (UTC)
:::: There's more to it now. It can be used as a basis for future contributors willing to expand it using reliable, relevant, non-propaganda and non-original material. Cheers. ] (]) 14:19, 17 March 2020 (UTC)
::::: I want a neutrally written section that will focus on the history of the language, rather than politically charged propaganda (from all sides) related to the country, and not to the language per se. — <span style="text-shadow:#CCC 0.1em 0.3em 0.3em; font-family: Trebuchet MS">]]</span> 14:23, 17 March 2020 (UTC)
::::: {{ping|DD1997DD}} I don't see more. I see half of the article destroyed and an original research instead of a well-sourced content that we worked on for years deleted. There's no strong consensus, so you should return the article to the previous state and start discussing before doing drastical changes. That's how Misplaced Pages works. You can't just like that force you POV and original researches. --] (]) 14:30, 17 March 2020 (UTC)
:::::: {{ping|Tomica}} If you want that, work on it. Removing something that you don't like is not the way we do things here, and I'm sure you know it. I agree that there's too much political content in the article and it can be reduced by moving part of the section at ]. Furthermore, if there something that is not NPOV in the History section, it can be improved. I also agree that the grammer section is not good/big enough, but removing other section will not make it better. What I mean is we should work toward improvement and adding new content, not toward removing what we don't like. --] (]) 14:36, 17 March 2020 (UTC)
::::::: It's not about what we like or don't like it's about what belongs/doesn't belong here. You are free to discuss parts of the removed content here that are relevant and we can try to get to a consensus. Until then, you are free to edit ]. ] (]) 14:39, 17 March 2020 (UTC)
:::::::: Deleting half of the article content that have been improved for years and then asking for a discussion on what to be undeleted is not the way things work. Nobody agreed on that specific content, just two editors agreed that there should be changes. As I said, I also agree that the article can be improved in that direction, but the end result is far from acceptable. --] (]) 14:50, 17 March 2020 (UTC)
: The changes must be reverted to the stable version. There are good changes, on which I'm sure we can agree, there is content that could be reduced and the rest moved to other articles, as for the rest - there should be a discussion how to improve the article without removing valuable conent and without forcing an original research, like the current state of the "History" section. --] (]) 14:45, 17 March 2020 (UTC)
*'''Comment:''' I am not interested in the content dispute but any change should have prior consensus on the talk page. ] (]) 13:11, 17 March 2020 (UTC)
*While surely there are those who have in the past sought to slant this page and others so as to question the "legitimacy" of Macedonian as a separate language, we must not forgive that there is also a danger on the other side, whereby Macedonian views are portrayed as the only "legitimate" views in what is in fact a controversial, a slippery slide to ultimately erasing things that are relevant to the history of the development of the Macedonian standard (choosing the western dialects as base which were maximally different than Bulgarian -- this is notable far beyond the "language dispute" as it also explains why the dialect surrounding Skopje was not chosen, for example), and even seeing claims that Pirin Bulgarians, Gollobordas and people in Vernik and Gorans in Albania, and the Slavophones in Greece "actually" speak Macedonian (among other things). I have not yet finished looking at the edits here in depth (I have done some) but there is a Scylla here, not just Charybdis, guys... --] (]) 16:53, 17 March 2020 (UTC)
:: Diff in aggregate ] --] (]) 16:55, 17 March 2020 (UTC)
::: Some comments on specific points will follow. --] (]) 16:56, 17 March 2020 (UTC)


:I tagged the first map. As for the map of dialects, I think there was controversy over it and it was supposed to be updated, but this has not happened. ] (]) 10:58, 6 September 2023 (UTC)
====Changes in the presentation of "Serbianization====
::According to modern Western sociolinguists, the dispute where the border between Bulgarian and Macedonian runs is entirely irrelevant from a modern perspective, as it fails to take into consideration the ethnic and linguistic identity of the speakers. According to ], the question whether Bulgarian and Macedonian are distinct languages or dialects of a single language cannot be resolved on a purely linguistic basis, but should rather take into account sociolinguistic criteria, i.e., ethnic and linguistic identity of the speakers.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Chambers| first1=Jack |last2=Trudgill| first2=Peter| title=Dialectology|url=https://archive.org/details/dialectology00cham_601|url-access=limited| year=1998| publisher=Cambridge University Press| edition=2nd| pages=| quote =Similarly, Bulgarian politicians often argue that Macedonian is simply a dialect of Bulgarian – which is really a way of saying, of course, that they feel Macedonia ought to be part of Bulgaria. From a purely linguistic point of view, however, such arguments are not resolvable, since dialect continua admit of more-or-less but not either-or judgements.}}</ref> ] also opines that the dividing line between Macedonian and Bulgarian should be defined by the linguistic identity of the speakers, i.e., by the state border:<ref>Tomasz Kamusella, Motoki Nomachi, Catherine Gibson as ed., The Palgrave Handbook of Slavic Languages, Identities and Borders, Springer, 2016; {{ISBN|1137348399}}, p. 436.</ref> Even Macedonian linguists as Božidar Vidoeski consider the eastern ] to be transitional to ], including the ].<ref>{{cite book |last1=Vidoeski |first1=Božo |title=Dialects of Macedonian |publisher=Slavica |isbn=9780893573157 |page=33 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=twR-AAAAIAAJ&q=transitional+dialects |quote= the northern border zone and the extreme southeast towards Bulgarian linguistic territory. It was here that the formation of transitional dialect belts between Macedonian and Bulgarian in the east, and Macedonian and Serbian in the north began. |year=2005 }}</ref> According to Riki van Boeschoten, the Slavic dialects of Greek Macedonia are divided into three main dialects (Eastern, Central and Western), of which the ] is used in the areas of ] and ], and is closest to ], the Western dialect is used in ] and ], and is closest to ], the ] is used in the area between ] and ] and is an intermediate between Macedonian and Bulgarian.<ref>Boeschoten, Riki van (1993): Minority Languages in Northern Greece. Study Visit to Florina, Aridea, (Report to the European Commission, Brussels) "The Western dialect is used in Florina and Kastoria and is closest to the language used north of the border, the Eastern dialect is used in the areas of Serres and Drama and is closest to Bulgarian, the Central dialect is used in the area between Edessa and Salonica and forms an intermediate dialect"</ref><ref>{{cite book|last1=Ioannidou |first1=Alexandra |title=Questions on the Slavic Dialects of Greek Macedonia |journal=Ars Philologica: Festschrift für Baldur Panzer zum 65. Geburstag. Karsten Grünberg, Wilfried Potthoff |date=1999 |pages=59, 63 |url=https://www.academia.edu/784444 |publisher=Peterlang |location=Athens |isbn=9783631350652|quote=In September 1993 ... the European Commission financed and published an interesting report by Riki van Boeschoten on the "Minority Languages in Northern Greece", in which the existence of a "Macedonian language" in Greece is mentioned. The description of this language is simplistic and by no means reflective of any kind of linguistic reality; instead it reflects the wish to divide up the dialects comprehensibly into geographical (i.e. political) areas. According to this report, Greek Slavophones speak the "Macedonian" language, which belongs to the "Bulgaro-Macedonian" group and is divided into three main dialects (Western, Central and Eastern) - a theory which lacks a factual basis.}}</ref> Trudgill classifies certain peripheral dialects in the far east of Greek Macedonia as part of the ] area and the rest as ].<ref name=Trudgill>Trudgill P., 2000, "Greece and European Turkey: From Religious to Linguistic Identity". In: Stephen Barbour and Cathie Carmichael (eds.), Language and Nationalism in Europe, Oxford : Oxford University Press, p.259.</ref> ] considers those ], but particularly those spoken as west as ], to be transitional to Bulgarian.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Heine |first1=Bernd |last2=Kuteva |first2=Tania |title=Language Contact and Grammatical Change |date=2005 |publisher=Cambridge University Press |isbn=9780521608282 |page=118 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=npOCs6LP4RgC&pg=PA118 |language=en |quote=in the modern northern and eastern Macedonian dialects that are transitional to Serbo-Croatian and Bulgarian, e.g. in Kumanovo and Kukus/Kilkis, object reduplication occurs with less consistency than in the west-central dialects}}</ref> Per Lindsted the ] splits the Eastern South Slavic (including the region of Macedonia) on a structural grounds and he has assumed that this isogloss that runs from ] to ] may be in fact the dividing isogloss between Bulgarian and Macedonian. In this way this map presents a biased or at least not neutral POV. ] (]) 15:55, 6 September 2023 (UTC)
DD's changes involved a mass purging of almost all the info on the effect of Serbian on the formation of Macedonian. It would be one thing if the things being purged were purely political propaganda from Bulgaria. But they are '''not'''. Here is some of the text loss:
:::The map can be moved to ]. Same with the BAN map of dialects. I think it's best to treat fringe views as separate from the mainstream. ] (]) 16:11, 6 September 2023 (UTC)

{{cquote| ] between Macedonian and Serbo-Croatian reached its height during Yugoslav times when most Macedonians learned Serbo-Croatian as a compulsory language of education and knew and used a mixture of Serbian and Macedonian Serbian, or "pseudo-Serbian."<ref>{{cite book|url={{Google books |plainurl=yes |id=vi_VCm51kpkC |page=515 }}|title=Languages and Linguistics of Europe: A Comprehensive Guide|last=Kortmann|first=Bernd|last2=van der Auwera|first2=Johan|date=2011-07-27|publisher=|page=420|accessdate=2014-08-07}}</ref> There are claims that Macedonian was intentionally ] first during the process of its standardization.{{efn|See:<ref>The Implementation of Standard Macedonian: Problems and Results Victor A. Friedman University of Chicago Published in: International Journal of the Sociology of Language, Vol. 131, 1998. 31-57.</ref><ref>Voss C., The Macedonian Standard Language: Tito—Yugoslav Experiment or Symbol of ‘Great Macedonian’ Ethnic Inclusion? in C. Mar-Molinero, P. Stevenson as ed. Language Ideologies, Policies and Practices: Language and the Future of Europe, Springer, 2016, {{ISBN|0230523889}}, p. 126.</ref><ref>De Gruyter as contributor. The Slavic Languages. Volume 32 of Handbooks of Linguistics and Communication Science (HSK), Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG, 2014, p. 1472. {{ISBN|3110215470}}.</ref><ref>Sociétés politiques comparées, #25, mai 2010, Tchavdar Marinov, Historiographical Revisionism and Re-Articulation of Memory in the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia p. 7.</ref><ref>Lerner W. Goetingen, Formation of the standard language - Macedonian in the Slavic languages, Volume 32, Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, 2014, {{ISBN|3110393689}}, chapter 109.</ref>}} At that time the Bulgarian language was prohibited there.<ref>"''The obviously plagiarized historical argument of the Macedonian nationalists for a separate Macedonian ethnicity could be supported only by linguistic reality, and that worked against them until the 1940s. Until a modern Macedonian literary language was mandated by the communist-led partisan movement from Macedonia in 1944, most outside observers and linguists agreed with the Bulgarians in considering the vernacular spoken by the Macedonian Slavs as a western dialect of Bulgarian''". ], ''Conflict and Chaos in Eastern Europe'', Palgrave Macmillan, 1995, {{ISBN|0312121164}}, p. 143.</ref><ref>''The Macedonian partisans established a commission to create an “official” Macedonian literary language (1945), which became the Macedonian Slavs' legal “first” language (with Serbo-Croatian a recognized “second” and Bulgarian officially proscribed).'' Dennis P. Hupchick, The Balkans: From Constantinople to Communism, Springer, 2002, {{ISBN|0312299133}}, p. 430.</ref> ....}}

{{notelist}}

: While I don't dispute that some deletions may be justified, I do not think this is. The authors here are clearly RS, and not Bulgarian propagandists by any stretch, including notable linguists such as Bernd Kortmann, and the role of Serbian in the formation of Standard Macedonian is ''notable''. --] (]) 17:05, 17 March 2020 (UTC)
::Agreed. Not everything should be deleted, at least not without consensus. I see several editors not accepting recent changes. ] (]) 17:09, 17 March 2020 (UTC)
::Agreed. I would also point to the "History" section of "Bosnian language" article which also includes a significant amount of information regarding influences from other languages, as this information is interesting from a comparative linguistic view, and is not simply political. --] (]) 10:04, 19 March 2020 (UTC)


{{reflist-talk}} {{reflist-talk}}
== "]" listed at ] ==
]
The redirect <span class="plainlinks"></span> has been listed at ] to determine whether its use and function meets the ]. Readers of this page are welcome to comment on this redirect at '''{{slink|Misplaced Pages:Redirects for discussion/Log/2024 February 1#Diferences between the bulgarian and the macedonian language}}''' until a consensus is reached. <!-- Template:RFDNote --> <sub>signed, </sub>] <sup>]</sup> 17:43, 1 February 2024 (UTC)


== Should the article say that the East South Slavic dialect continuum was historically called Bulgarian? ==
====Mac/Bulg: discussion of academic situation prior to codification of standard====
I do agree that the political discussion had gone on too long. I am going to present here the text here on the matter. Some of it was important though, because Standard Macedonian was intentionally designed under Yugoslavia to be distant from Standard Bulgarian (while still reasonably close to most Macedonian dialects -- i.e. I may have said "maximally" distant before but that isn't true). I will comment on each of these blurbs. --] (]) 17:09, 17 March 2020 (UTC)

{{cquote|''Prior to the ] of the ] (]), Macedonian dialects were described by linguists as being dialects of Bulgarian<ref name=foreigners>Mazon, André. ''Contes slaves de la Macédoine sud-occidentale : Étude linguistique ; textes et traduction'' ; Notes de folklore, Paris 1923, p. 4.</ref><ref>Селищев, Афанасий. Избранные труды, Москва 1968.</ref><ref>K. Sandfeld, ''Balkanfilologien'' (København, 1926, MCMXXVI).</ref> or Serbian,<ref name="James Minahan p.438">James Minahan. ''One Europe, Many Nations: A Historical Dictionary of European National Groups'', p.438 (Greenwood Press, 2000)</ref><ref name="Bernard Comrie p.251">Bernard Comrie. ''The Slavonic Languages'', p.251 (Routledge, 1993).</ref> or forming an entirely distinct language.'' . '''Similarly, ] was also widely regarded as Bulgarian.<ref>{{cite book|url={{Google books |plainurl=yes |id=F2SRqDzB50wC |page=129 }} |title=Concise encyclopedia of languages of the world|first= Keith|last= Brown|first2=Sarah|last2= Ogilvie|isbn=0-08-087774-5| page=120 |publisher= Elsevier |date= 2008|accessdate=2014-08-07}}</ref> The boundaries between the South Slavic languages had yet to be "conceptualized in modern terms,"<ref name="Joseph, Brian D. 2002 p.261">Joseph, Brian D. et al. When Languages Collide: Perspectives on Language Conflict, Competition and Coexistence; Ohio State University Press (2002), p.261</ref> and codifiers of Serbian even found it necessary to argue that Bulgarian was not a Serbian dialect as late as 1822.<ref name="Joseph, Brian D. 2002 p.261"/> Many Macedonian intellectuals maintained that their language "was neither a dialect of Serbian nor of Bulgarian, but a language in its own right".<ref>Max K. Adler. Marxist Linguistic Theory and Communist Practice: A Sociolinguistic Study; Buske Verlag (1980), p.215</ref>'''}}

I think all of this blurb should have ''stayed''. Much of the synth is done by ], who is a leading scholar on Balkan linguistics. Furthermore, this text is useful, informative, and essential for explaining the context in which Standard Macedonian arose. Moving on.
:That type of info is so much more relevant on the codification page or a separate history page or a separate political views page. It just unnecessarily burdens this article! ] (]) 18:42, 17 March 2020 (UTC)
::Well ''making'' a separate codification page could be a solution here. Presently, it appears one does not exist. --] (]) 15:21, 18 March 2020 (UTC)
::This information is interesting linguistically and not just politically. There is such information in the "History" section of other language articles, one of the clearest examples being the article on the Bosnian language. --] (]) 10:07, 19 March 2020 (UTC)
:::The Bosnian language example is a super bad one as it is probably not even C level; there is 0 coverage of linguistic characteristics. It can comfortably be renamed to Political views on the Bosnian language. Refer to other GAs I mentioned - ] and ] to see good examples of what language articles should look like. Until then, please engage in constructive discussions like only User:Calthinus did on this page. Also, please note that an entire paragraph on the similarities between Macedonian and Bulgarian was kept in the version of the article I proposed with enough room for it to get expanded with facts like the degree of ], mutual or distinguishing features. ] (]) 10:11, 19 March 2020 (UTC)

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====Mac/Blg: dialect choice for standardization of Macedonian====
{{cquote|Prior to the standardization of Macedonian, a number of linguists, among them ],<ref name="autogenerated31">''Antoine Meillet (French, linguist, 1928): Their dialects, differing among themselves, are not truly Serbian nor truly Bulgarian, especially if one is thinking of written Bulgarian, which is based on dialects quite far removed from the Macedonian dialects. In reality these dialects do not properly belong to either the one or the other of the two groups under dispute.''<br />1. Todor Dimitrovski, Blaže Koneski, Trajko Stamatoski. About the Macedonian language; "Krste Misirkov" Institute of the Macedonian Language, 1978; p.31.<br />2. Kulturen Život. Macedonian Review, Volume 10; Kulturen Zhivot., 1980; p.105</ref> André Vaillant,<ref name="autogenerated164">Vaillant, André (1938), ''"Le Problème du slave macédonien'', Bulletin de la Société linguistique, 39, 2(# 116): 194–210, cited in Fishman, J. A. (ed) (1993), ''The Earliest Stage of Language Planning'', New York, p. 164.</ref> ],<ref name="autogenerated1938">Małecki, M. (1938), ''Z zagadnień dialektologii macedońskiej'', Rocznik slawistyczny, 14: 119–144, cited in Fishman, J. A. (ed) (1993), ''The Earliest Stage of Language Planning'', New York, p. 164.</ref> and ],<ref name="autogenerated743">"Несмотря на значительное диаметральное разнообразие, македонские говоры представляют собою единство и заметно отличаются от народных говоров Фракии, Родоп, Мизии и Балкан" whole and differ markedly from the folk dialects of ], ], ] and ]'']. Berstein, S. (1938), '']'', no. 36, p. 743, cited in Bernstein (1944), ''Несколько замечаний о македонском литературном языке'' .</ref> also considered Macedonian dialects as comprising an independent language distinct from both Bulgarian and Serbian. Some linguists, including Otto Kronsteiner<ref>Kronsteiner, Otto, ''Der Zerfall Jugoslawiens und die Zukunft der makedonischen Literatursprache: Der späte Fall von Glottotomie?'' Herausgeber Schriftenreihe Die slawischen Sprachen, Erscheinungsjahr 1992, p. 142-171</ref> and ],<ref>Chris Kostov, ''Contested Ethnic Identity: The Case of Macedonian Immigrants in Toronto, 1900–1996'', Peter Lang, 2010, {{ISBN|3-034-30196-0}}, p. 9</ref> especially in Bulgaria, still consider Macedonian a variety or dialect of Bulgarian,<ref name="Baker 415">{{cite book|last=Baker|first=Colin|title=Encyclopedia of Bilingualism and Bilingual Education|page=415|url={{Google books |plainurl=yes |id=YgtSqB9oqDIC |page=415 }} }} ''"Macedonian is similar to Bulgarian and is sometimes been {{sic}} regarded as a variety of that language. Macedonian is spoken by about 200,000 people in Bulgaria, where it is viewed as a dialect of Bulgaria, and also in the province of Macedonia in northern Greece where the language is called Slavika. However, in the Republic of Macedonia, a separate Macedonian literary language has been in existence since 1944, and most scholars now accept Macedonian as a separate language. The Macedonian standard language is based on a difference group of dialects from the Bulgarian ."''</ref><ref>R.E.Asher, J.M.Y.Simpson (editors), ''Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics'', (1994), vol.1, p.429: "From a strictly linguistic point of view Macedonian can be called a Bulgarian dialect, as structurally it is most similar to Bulgarian. Indeed, Bulgarian scholars reject Macedonian as an individual language, but since it now has the status of a literary language, most other scholars accept its independent existence."</ref><ref>] 53-AAA-h</ref> but this view is ].<ref name="ucla"/><ref>{{Google books |plainurl= |id=id=ppbuavUZKEwC |page=116 |title=Who are the Macedonians?, Hugh Poulton, C. Hurst & Co. Publishers, 2000, ISBN 1-85065-534-0, p. 116. }}</ref><ref>{{cite book|url={{Google books |plainurl=yes |id=EnEFNOcYIrUC |page=281 }} |title=When languages collide: perspectives on language conflict, language competition, and language coexistence|first= Brian D.|last= Joseph|page=281|isbn=0-8142-0913-0 |publisher= Ohio State University Press |date=2003 |accessdate=2014-08-07}}</ref>}}

This blurb I am more ambivalent on, but this should stay too on balance. Presenting the present Bulgarian views is just ''one'' sentence -- it is really hard to call that UNDUE. On the other hand, outright exclusion is almost ] as this is a significant minority view (Asher, Clyne, etc are not Bulgarian propagandists, geez). I agree we should not go into large amounts of text on the matter, but ''one'' sentence is surely due. Then, if we have info on people saying it is Bulgarian, well for balance we do have to list the other, majority, view, that it is at least now an independent language. Moving on ... --] (]) 17:19, 17 March 2020 (UTC)
:I think you are missing the point as to why those parts were removed. While they are relevant works by top-notch scholars, all of these texts are of the following structure: '''Historian X''' said it was a dialect. '''Linguist Y''' said it was not. '''Politician Z said''' "Macedonian was Serbianized". Please refer to a single other language article on this Misplaced Pages that uses historian's quotes to discuss anything in the main language article? I'm really curious about how many readers are interested in reading '''Linguists A, B, C, D, E, F, G said x,y,z''' instead of just reading "past and ongoing political disputes between linguists and historians" and clicking on the relevant pages to read the nitty gritty. ] (]) 18:42, 17 March 2020 (UTC)
::Well you can remove ''politicians'' when they are here. And in this case, yes, there is such demand, including from linguists not from the Balkans, because whether we like it or not, the controversy is relevant to the language's development.--] (]) 15:20, 18 March 2020 (UTC)
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====Mac/Blg: dialect continuum====
{{cquote|Modern questions of classification are largely shaped by political and social factors. Structurally, Macedonian, Bulgarian and southeastern forms of Serbo-Croatian (Torlakian) form a dialectical continuum<ref>{{cite book|url={{Google books |plainurl=yes |id=vi_VCm51kpkC |page=515 }} |title=The Languages and Linguistics of Europe: A Comprehensive Guide |publisher= |date=2011-07-27 |accessdate=2014-08-07}}</ref> that is a legacy of the linguistic developments during the height of the ] and ] literary schools.<ref>Florin Curta.'' Southeastern Europe in the Middle Ages''; 500–1250. ; Cambridge. Pg 216</ref>}}

Absolutely this should not have been deleted. Now the Preslav/Ohrid is totally ''missing'' from the page. And ] is not UNDUE. --] (]) 17:22, 17 March 2020 (UTC)
:Oh no, even though it is now mentioned 4 times in the article that Macedonian and Bulgarian form a language continuum? Maybe we should make the whole article say Macedonian and Bulgarian form a language continuum instead of saying anything else? And I mentioned that I know that many important information were removed (such as the Preslav and Ohrid School) but I also left room for users to expand on. ] (]) 18:42, 17 March 2020 (UTC)
::Dialect continuum is notable (1) for the synchronic situation, where that remains the case, (2) for explaining the emergence of the Macedonian standard language. So ''two'' mentions should stay. This one is necessary. --] (]) 15:19, 18 March 2020 (UTC)
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====Mac/Blg: Prilep-Bitola base dialect choice====
{{cquote|Although it has been claimed that Standard Macedonian was codified on the base of those dialects (i.e. the ]) most unlike Bulgarian,<ref>{{cite book|url={{Google books |plainurl=yes |id=CZUhoFE-OoQC |page=120 }} |title=Sociolinguistic variation and change|first= Peter|last= Trudgill|publisher= Edinburgh University Press|date=2002|isbn=0-7486-1515-6| page=120|accessdate=2014-08-07}}</ref> this interpretation stems from the works of ], who suggested that Standard Macedonian should abstract on those dialects "most distinct from the standards of the other Slavonic languages".<ref>Dedaić, Mirjana N. et al. ''South Slavic Discourse Particles''; John Benjamins Publishing (2010) p. 13</ref> Likewise, this view does not take into account the fact that a Macedonian ] was already in existence.<ref>Bernard Comrie.'' The Slavonic Languages''; Taylor & Francis (2002), p. 251</ref> The codifiers ultimately chose the same dialects, but did so because they were "most widespread and most likely to be adopted by speakers of other dialects."<ref>John Shea.'' Macedonia and Greece: The Struggle to Define a New Balkan Nation''; McFarland (2008), p.208</ref>}}

Actually this passage is if anything Macedonian POV. But it should also stay as it is ''relevant''. --] (]) 17:22, 17 March 2020 (UTC)
:Sure, only 4 words are relevant "most unlike Bulgarian" and they could have been easily added to the dialect section sentence I included where I specifically noted which cities were used as the basis. ] (]) 18:42, 17 March 2020 (UTC)
P.S. Works by John Shea were excluded from Macedonian articles since he is a psychologist. ] (]) 02:03, 18 March 2020 (UTC)
::Agree per Shea. More than just four words are notable, because those alone do not explain the matter. But as I said, this is if anything the Macedonian POV so removing this will likely see the least resistance. --] (]) 15:18, 18 March 2020 (UTC)
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====Mac/Blg: Greece====
{{cquote|Bulgarian linguistics traditionally regards them all as part of the Bulgarian language together with the rest of Macedonian.<ref name=unity>{{Citation |author=Institute of Bulgarian Language |title=Единството на българския език в миналото и днес |publisher=] |year=1978 |page=4 |language=Bulgarian |location=] |oclc=6430481}}; {{Citation |title=Българска диалектология (Bulgarian dialectology)|last=Стойков (Stoykov)|first=Стойко |authorlink=Stoyko Stoykov |origyear=1962 |year=2002 |location=София |publisher=Акад. изд. "Проф. Марин Дринов" |language=Bulgarian |url=http://www.promacedonia.org/jchorb/st/index.htm |isbn=954-430-846-6 |oclc=53429452}}</ref><ref name="Shklifov">Шклифов, Благой. Проблеми на българската диалектна и историческа фонетика с оглед на македонските говори, София 1995, с. 14.; Шклифов, Благой. Речник на костурския говор, Българска диалектология, София 1977, с. кн. VIII, с. 201–205,</ref>}}

This too, is relevant. Actually, something that could be ''added'' is that many of them share many features with Standard Bulgarian and not with Standard Macedonian...--] (]) 17:24, 17 March 2020 (UTC)
:This too is mentioned in the history, relation to Bulgarian, political views, lede. We could also name the entire article '''Macedonian language (which btw is Bulgarian)''' so that it rings in readers' heads even when they go to sleep. ] (]) 18:42, 17 March 2020 (UTC)
::Sorry, I think I misunderstood the first time I read this. Just FYI, the entire section about the number of speakers of Macedonian in Greece should be reedited since many of the sources are now dead and they focused primarily on the Macedonian population instead of the number of speakers. The fact that some of them are also regarded as Bulgarian can maybe be included as a footnote. ] (]) 19:26, 17 March 2020 (UTC)
:::I think that would be good. --] (]) 19:37, 17 March 2020 (UTC)

{{cquote|Most of the language speakers in Greece do not identify ethnically as "Macedonians", but as ethnic Greeks ('']'') or ''dopii'' (locals). Therefore, the simple term "Macedonian" as a name for the Slavic language is often avoided in the Greek context, and vehemently rejected by most Greeks, for whom '']'' has very different connotations. Instead, the language is often called simply "Slavic" or "Slavomacedonian", with "Macedonian Slavic" often being used in English. Speakers themselves variously refer to their language as ''makedonski'', ''makedoniski'' ("Macedonian"),<ref>Lois Whitman (1994): ''Denying ethnic identity: The Macedonians of Greece'' Helsinki Human Rights Watch. p.39 {{Google books |plainurl= |id=JxCnAHCCuxYC |title= }}</ref> ''slaviká'' ({{lang-el|σλαβικά}}, "Slavic"), ''dópia'' or ''entópia'' ({{lang-el|εντόπια}}, "local/indigenous "),<ref name="eurac">{{cite web|url=http://dev.eurac.edu:8085/mugs2/do/blob.html?type=html&serial=1044526702223 |title=Greek Helsinki Monitor – Report about Compliance with the Principles of the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities |accessdate=2009-01-12 |url-status=bot: unknown |archiveurl=https://web.archive.org/web/20030523145306/http://dev.eurac.edu:8085/mugs2/do/blob.html?type=html&serial=1044526702223 |archivedate=2003-05-23 }}</ref> ''balgàrtzki'' in some parts of the region of ], ''bògartski'' ("Bulgarian") in some parts of Dolna Prespa<ref> – Shkifov, Blagoy and Ekaterina Shklifova. Bulgarian dialect texts from Aegean Macedonia, Sofia 2003, p. 28-36, 172</ref> along with ''naši'' ("our own") and ''stariski'' ("old").<ref>Lois Whitman (1994): ''Denying ethnic identity: The Macedonians of Greece'' Helsinki Human Rights Watch. p.37 {{Google books |plainurl= |id=JxCnAHCCuxYC |title= }}</ref> In Kastoria, however, the name "Macedonian" is used as well by the local people.<ref>{{cite book|url={{Google books |plainurl=yes |id=ZmesOn_HhfEC |page=33 }} |title=The Macedonian Conflict: Ethnic Nationalism in a Transnational World|first= Loring M.|last= Danforth| page=62 |publisher= |date= |accessdate=2014-08-07}}</ref>}}

Okay, this one went on far too long. But it is stilli notable. It should be instead one or two sentences, something like : "Most of the relevant communities in Greece do not identify as "Macedonians", nor are they identified as such by the Greek majority, while different communities variously refer to their own speech as "Slavic", "local", "Bulgarian" or "Macedonian". Didn't need to go into the naming controversy issue, but this was notable too if we are going to have the page "claim" Greece's Slavic dialects as Macedonian. --] (]) 17:27, 17 March 2020 (UTC)
:Still notable for the article ] as it talks about the people and how they nationally ID themselves? Indeed. Relevant to a language article? Not so sure about it. (P.S. also this part was kept in the political views section) ] (]) 18:42, 17 March 2020 (UTC)
::This is fair enough actually, this is not relevant here. --] (]) 20:39, 17 March 2020 (UTC)
:::The national identity of Slavic speakers in Greece may indeed not be notable for this article, however at least the names used for the language are. The history of the Slavic dialects in Greece forms a significant part of the history of the langauge, and I don't think we can ignore it entirely. --] (]) 10:15, 19 March 2020 (UTC)
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====Mac/Blg: history discussion that was outside of history section====
...now for the toughest section.

{{ctop|Expand to view, because it's too big.--] (]) 17:33, 17 March 2020 (UTC) }}

{{cquote|The historical and linguistic relationships between the Macedonian and Bulgarian languages are special and complicated. Macedonian researchers claim Macedonian is spoken in southwestern Bulgaria, whereas Bulgarian and Greek linguists argue Macedonian is a variety of Bulgarian.{{Citation Needed|date=March 2020}} The ] began to degrade its specific social system, and< especially the so-called ], through constant identification of the religious creed with ethnicity.<ref>{{cite book|url={{Google books |plainurl=yes |id=htMUx8qlWCMC |page=47 }} |title=Europe and the Historical Legacies in the Balkans|first= Raymond|last= Detrez|first2=Barbara|last2= Segaert|first3=Peter |last3=Lang|isbn=90-5201-374-8|pages=36–38 |publisher= |date=2008 |accessdate=2014-08-07}}</ref> The national awakening of each ethnic group was complex and most of the groups interacted with each other. During the ], which occurred in the first half of the 19th century, the Bulgarian and Macedonian Slavs under the supremacy of the Greek Orthodox clergy wanted to create ] and schools which would use a common modern "Macedono-Bulgarian" literary standard, called simply ''Bulgarian''.<ref>{{cite book|url={{Google books |plainurl=yes |id=1jSg3lxgSy8C |page=134 }} |title=Historical Dictionary of the Republic of Macedonia Historical Dictionaries of Europe|first= Dimitar|last= Bechev|publisher= Scarecrow Press|isbn=0-8108-6295-6|page=134|date=2009-04-13 |accessdate=2014-08-07}}</ref> The national elites active in this movement used mainly ethnolinguistic principles to differentiation between "Slavic-Bulgarian" and "Greek" groups.<ref>From Rum Millet to Greek and Bulgarian Nations: Religious and National Debates in the Borderlands of the Ottoman Empire, 1870–1913. Theodora Dragostinova, Ohio State University, Columbus, OH.</ref> At that time, every ethnographic subgroup in the Macedonian-Bulgarian linguistic area wrote in their own local dialect and choosing a "base dialect" for the new standard was not an issue. Subsequently, during the 1850s and 1860s a long discussion was held in the Bulgarian periodicals about the need for a dialectal group (eastern, western or compromise) upon which to base the new standard and which dialect that should be.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.inslav.ru/images/stories/pdf/1990_Venediktov_%20Bolgarskij_literaturnyj_jazyk_epoxi_Vozrozhdenija.pdf |title=Венедиктов Г. К. Болгарский литературный язык эпохи Возрождения. Проблемы нормализации и выбора диалектной основы. Отв. ред. Л. Н. Смирнов. М.: "Наука"|pages=163–170. (Rus.) |format=PDF |date= 1990|accessdate=2014-08-07}}</ref> During the 1870s this issue became contentious, and sparked fierce debates.<ref>Ц. Билярски, Из българския възрожденски печат от 70-те години на XIX в. за македонския въпрос, сп. "Македонски преглед", г. XXIII, София, 2009, кн. 4, с. 103–120.</ref> In 1878, a distinct Bulgarian state was established. The new state did not include the region of Macedonia which remained outside its borders in the frame of the ]. As a consequence, the idea of a common compromise standard was rejected by the Bulgarian codifiers during the 1880s and the eastern ] were chosen as a basis for standard Bulgarian.<ref>{{cite book|url={{Google books |plainurl=yes |id=wawGFWNuHiwC |page=440 }} |title=Pluricentric languages: differing norms in different nations|editor-first= Michael G. |editor-last=Clyne|publisher=Walter de Gruyter & Co.|isbn=3110128551| page=440 |date= 1992|accessdate=2014-08-07}}</ref> ] writers and organizations who continued to seek greater representation of Macedonian dialects in the Bulgarian standard were deemed separatists.{{efn|See:<ref>, Victor Friedman, p. 286</ref><ref>{{Google books |plainurl= |id=I9p_m7oXQ00C |page=145 |title=Nationalism, Globalization, and Orthodoxy: The Social Origins of Ethnic Conflict in the Balkans}}, Victor Roudometof, Roland Robertson, p. 145</ref><ref>"Though Loza adhered to the Bulgarian position on the issue of the Macedonian Slavs' ethnicity, it also favored revising the Bulgarian orthography by bringing it closer to the dialects spoken in Macedonia." Historical Dictionary of the Republic of Macedonia, Dimitar Bechev, Scarecrow Press, 2009, {{ISBN|0-8108-6295-6}}, p. 241.</ref><ref>The Young Macedonian Literary Association's Journal, Loza, was also categorical about the Bulgarian character of Macedonia: ''"A mere comparison of those ethnographic features which characterize the Macedonians (we understand: Macedonian Bulgarians), with those which characterize the free Bulgarians, their juxtaposition with those principles for nationality which we have formulated above, is enough to prove and to convince everybody that the nationality of the Macedonians cannot be anything except Bulgarian."'' Freedom or Death, The Life of Gotsé Delchev, Mercia MacDermott, The Journeyman Press, London & West Nyack, 1978, p. 86.</ref><ref>"Macedonian historiography often refers to the group of young activists who founded in Sofia an association called the ‘Young Macedonian Literary Society’. In 1892, the latter began publishing the review Loza , which promoted certain characteristics of Macedonian dialects. At the same time, the activists, called ‘Lozars’ after the name of their review, ‘purified’ the Bulgarian orthography from some rudiments of the Church Slavonic. They expressed likewise a kind of Macedonian patriotism attested already by the first issue of the review: its materials greatly emphasized identification with Macedonia as a genuine ‘fatherland’. In any case, it is hardly surprising that the Lozars demonstrated both Bulgarian and Macedonian loyalty: what is more interesting is namely the fact that their Bulgarian nationalism was somehow harmonized with a Macedonian self-identification that was not only a political one but also demonstrated certain ‘cultural’ contents. "We, the People: Politics of National Peculiarity in Southeastern Europe", Diana Miškova, Central European University Press, 2009, {{ISBN|963-97762-8-9}}, p. 120.</ref>}} One example is the ], which the Bulgarian government outlawed in 1892. Though standard Bulgarian was taught in the local schools in Macedonia till 1913,<ref>{{cite book|url={{Google books |plainurl=yes |id=KfqbujXqQBkC }} |title=The National Question in Yugoslavia: Origins, History, Politics|first=Ivo|last=Banač |isbn=0-8014-9493-1| page= 317 |publisher=Cornell University Press|date=1988 |accessdate=2014-08-07}}</ref> the fact of political separation became crucial for the development of a separate Macedonian language.<ref>{{cite book|url={{Google books |plainurl=yes |id=itlREOzLnM0C |page=14 }} |title=Papers from the Sixth International Conference on Historical Linguistics, v. 34|issn=0304-0763|first= Jacek|last= Fisiak|isbn=90-272-3528-7| pages= 13–14 |publisher=John Benjamins Publishing|date= 1985 |accessdate=2014-08-07}}</ref> With the advent of ], the idea of linguistic separatism emerged in the late 19th century,<ref>{{cite book|url={{Google books |plainurl=yes |id=T-gHxC8J4PwC |page=161 }} |title=The Earliest Stage of Language Planning: The "First Congress" Phenomenon|first= Joshua A. |last=Fishman|first2= Walter |last2=de Gruyter|isbn=3-11-013530-2| pages=161–162 |publisher= |date= 1993 |accessdate=2014-08-07}}</ref> and the need for a separate Macedonian standard language subsequently appeared in the early 20th century.<ref>{{cite book|url={{Google books |plainurl=yes |id=ZmesOn_HhfEC |page=67 }} |title=The Macedonian conflict: ethnic nationalism in a transnational world|first= Loring M.|last= Danforth |isbn=0-691-04356-6| page=67 |publisher=Princeton University Press|date=1995 |accessdate=2014-08-07}}</ref> In the Interwar period, the territory of today's Republic of Macedonia became part of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, Bulgarian was banned for use and the local vernacular fell under heavy influence from the official Serbo-Croatian language.<ref>{{cite book|url={{Google books |plainurl=yes |id=ycNApODqgRUC |page=143 }} |title=Conflict and Chaos in Eastern Europe|first= Dennis P. |last=Hupchick|isbn= 0-312-12116-4|page= 143 |publisher= Palgrave Macmillan|date=1995-03-15 |accessdate=2014-08-07}}</ref> However, the political and paramilitary organizations of the Macedonian Slavs in Europe and the Americas, the ] (IMRO) and the ] (MPO), and even their left-wing offsets, the IMRO (United) and the Macedonian-American People's League continued to use literary Bulgarian in their writings and propaganda in the interbellum. During the World wars Bulgaria's short annexations over Macedonia saw two attempts to bring the Macedonian dialects back towards Bulgarian. This political situation stimulated the necessity of a separate Macedonian language and led gradually to its codification after the Second World War. It followed the establishment of ], as part of Communist Yugoslavia and finalized the progressive split in the common Macedonian–Bulgarian language.<ref>{{cite book|url={{Google books |plainurl=yes |id=MlXQ5zKb_VQC |page=23 }} |title=Language, discourse and borders in the Yugoslav successor states – Current issues in language and society monographs, Birgitta Busch, Helen Kelly-Holmes, Multilingual Matters, 2004, ISBN 1-85359-732-5, pp. 24–25. |publisher= |date= |accessdate=2014-08-07}}</ref> During the first half of the 20th century the national identity of the Macedonian Slavs shifted from predominantly Bulgarian to ethnic Macedonian and their regional identity had become their national one.<ref>"Up until the early 20th century and beyond, the international community viewed Macedonians as a regional variety of Bulgarians, i.e. Western Bulgarians." {{Google books |plainurl= |id=-7TgkO8utHIC |title=Nationalism and Territory: Constructing Group Identity in Southeastern Europe, Geographical perspectives on the human past : Europe: Current Events, George W. White, Rowman & Littlefield, 2000 }}, {{ISBN|0-8476-9809-2}}.</ref><ref>"At the end of the WWI there were very few historians or ethnographers, who claimed that a separate Macedonian nation existed... Of those Slavs who had developed some sense of national identity, the majority probably considered themselves Bulgarians, although they were aware of differences between themselves and the inhabitants of Bulgaria... The question as of whether a Macedonian nation actually existed in the 1940s when a Communist Yugoslavia decided to recognize one is difficult to answer. Some observers argue that even at this time it was doubtful whether the Slavs from Macedonia considered themselves a nationality separate from the Bulgarians." {{Google books |plainurl= |id=ZmesOn_HhfEC |page=66 |title=The Macedonian conflict: ethnic nationalism in a transnational world, Loring M. Danforth, Princeton University Press, 1997 }}, {{ISBN|0-691-04356-6}}</ref><ref>"During the 20th century, Slavo-Macedonian national feeling has shifted. At the beginning of the 20th century, Slavic patriots in Macedonia felt a strong attachment to Macedonia as a multi-ethnic homeland. They imagined a Macedonian community uniting themselves with non-Slavic Macedonians... Most of these Macedonian Slavs also saw themselves as Bulgarians. By the middle of the 20th. century, however Macedonian patriots began to see Macedonian and Bulgarian loyalties as mutually exclusive. Regional Macedonian nationalism had become ethnic Macedonian nationalism... This transformation shows that the content of collective loyalties can shift." {{Google books |plainurl= |id=6RveDmHbIv8C |page=147 |title=Region, Regional Identity and Regionalism in Southeastern Europe, Ethnologia Balkanica Series, Klaus Roth, Ulf Brunnbauer, LIT Verlag Münster, 2010 }}, {{ISBN|3-8258-1387-8}}.</ref> Although, there was no clear separating line between these two languages on level of dialect then, the Macedonian standard was based on its westernmost dialects. Afterwards, Macedonian became the official language in the new republic, Serbo-Croatian was adopted as a second official language, and Bulgarian was proscribed. Moreover, in 1946–1948 the newly standardized Macedonian language was introduced as a second language even in Southwestern Bulgaria.<ref>{{Google books |plainurl= |id=dVRFMPV02UMC |page=260 |title=Performing Democracy: Bulgarian Music and Musicians in Transition, Donna A. Buchanan, University of Chicago Press, 2006}}, {{ISBN|0-226-07827-2}}.</ref> Subsequently, the sharp and continuous deterioration of the political relationships between the two countries, the influence of both standard languages during the time, but also the strong Serbo-Croatian linguistic influence in Yugoslav era, led to a horizontal cross-border dialectal divergence.<ref>{{cite book|url={{Google books |plainurl=yes |id=vi_VCm51kpkC |page=515 }} |title=The Languages and Linguistics of Europe: A Comprehensive Guide|first= Bernd|last= Kortmann|first2=Johan |last2=van der Auwera|first3= Walter |last3=de Gruyter| ISBN= 3-11-022026-1| page=515 |publisher= |date=2011-07-27 |accessdate=2014-08-07}}</ref> Although some researchers have described the standard Macedonian and Bulgarian languages as ] of a ],<ref>{{cite book|url={{Google books |plainurl=yes |id=iiab62MpOkcC |page=1541 }} |title=Sociolinguistics: an international handbook of the science of language and society|first= Ulrich|last= Ammon|first2=Walter|last2= de Gruyter| ISBN= 3-11-017148-1| page=154 |publisher= |date= 2005|accessdate=2014-08-07}}</ref> they in fact have separate dialectal bases; the ] and ], respectively. The prevailing academic consensus (outside of Bulgaria and Greece) is that Macedonian and Bulgarian are two ]s within the eastern subbranch of the ].<ref>Trudgill, Peter (1992), "Ausbau sociolinguistics and the perception of language status in contemporary Europe", International Journal of Applied Linguistics 2 (2): 167–177</ref> Macedonian is thus an '']''; i.e. it is delimited from Bulgarian as these two standard languages have separate dialectal bases.<ref>{{cite book|url={{Google books |plainurl=yes |id=G2bsJdYrwD4C |page=71 |title= }} |title=The Slavic Languages, Roland Sussex, Paul Cubberley, Cambridge University Press, 2006, ISBN 1-139-45728-4, p. 71 |publisher= |date=2006-09-21 |accessdate=2014-08-07}}</ref><ref>{{cite book|url={{Google books |plainurl=yes |id=h6BjBjMNaiYC |page=66 }} |title=The Changing Scene in World Languages: Issues and Challenges, Marian B. Labrum, John Benjamins Publishing, 1997, ISBN 90-272-3184-2, p. 66 |publisher= |date= |accessdate=2014-08-07}}</ref><ref>Fishman, Joshua. "Languages late to literacy: finding a place in the sun on a crowded beach". In: Joseph, Brian D. et al. (ed.), ''When Languages Collide: Perspectives on Language Conflict, Competition and Coexistence''; Ohio State University Press (2002), pp. 107–108.</ref> The uniqueness of the Macedonian language in comparison to ] is a matter of ] in Bulgaria.<ref>Mirjana N. Dedaić, Mirjana Misković-Luković. ''South Slavic discourse particles'' (John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2010), p. 13</ref><ref>Victor Roudometof. ''Collective memory, national identity, and ethnic conflict: Greece, Bulgaria, and the Macedonian question'' (Greenwood Publishing Group, 2002), p. 41</ref><ref name="ucla"> {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20090311172655/http://www.lmp.ucla.edu/Profile.aspx?LangID=42&menu=004 |date=2009-03-11 }}, UCLA International Institute</ref>
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Overall, yes, this was way, way, way wayyyyyyy too long. ''But'' much of it was also relevant. It should have been about one to three paragraphs. I would suggest a version, but frankly this is just too huge for me to deal with in a timely matter. At the same time, simply deleting all of it is flying off the handle to the other side, and I oppose this, as this is very relevant information for the history of the language, yes, the language, not just politics.--] (]) 17:33, 17 March 2020 (UTC)
:{{ping|User:Calthinus}} I am sorry that it seemed like I was deleting your comments but there was an edit war so I just copied all my comments and pasted them not knowing I had deleted your comments too. It was not on purpose. The current version does not have my points addressing your comments so maybe check the page's history for that? ] (]) 18:15, 17 March 2020 (UTC)
::Ah I see, all good --] (]) 18:17, 17 March 2020 (UTC)
:::@DD, this comment of yours I can restore since you signed it. The rest I cannot, otherwise they will be signed to me.
::::: Exactly, good luck with even reading through that mate. It's an entire novel on its own. Overall, I've replied to all of your points and seeing that all users currently participating in this discussion are either Bulgarian, Greek or Albanian I demand other people's opinions on this issue. ] (]) 18:09, 17 March 2020 (UTC)
:::::: {{u|DD1997DD}} em, you shouldn't comment on peoples' ethnicities, but for the record, there are no Greeks here (I'm not Greek, neither is Fut Perf), there is only one Albanian (Ktrimi -- I'm not Albanian either), and the only two Bulgarians are StanProg and Jingiby (I think, well I know I'm not Bulgarian :) ). --] (]) 18:21, 17 March 2020 (UTC)
::::::: Maybe I shouldn't, but I think it's super important to have a third opinion on topics like this that is as further away from the Balkans as possible because otherwise, there is so much bias involved. ] (]) 18:24, 17 March 2020 (UTC)
:::::::: Welll I am not "from" the Balkans in any sense whatsoever (Mid East/Caucasus/Poland/USA each in different ways, if you need to know, Balkans is a matter of intellectual interest), but really, you should judge people by their actions. Believe it or not every now and then there is someone from the Balkans who doesn't edit to defend their national interests... crazy, right? :) --] (]) 18:31, 17 March 2020 (UTC)
::::::::: Also, I think just reverting my edits and now withdrawing from the discussion {{ping|User:Calthinus}} is not very fair given that you are the only one presenting actual arguments about why the parts should be kept. Other users are just slowing down the process and have not named a single argument as to why the current version of the article should be as it is. I am 100% positive that my version of the article was 10x more balanced than the current one. Given this whole mess that users are creating and judging every single one of my steps detracts me from making actual improvements to this article that's been stuck in the current state for years. ] (]) 19:40, 17 March 2020 (UTC)
:::::::::: I'm not withdrawing. Just not gonna reply to each one as I have said a lot already -- giving others a chance to weigh in. --] (]) 19:43, 17 March 2020 (UTC)
::::::::::: Do you think anyone would take the time to read this messily lengthy discussion? ] (]) 19:46, 17 March 2020 (UTC)
:::::::::::: Point taken. Organized. --] (]) 19:53, 17 March 2020 (UTC)
Okay, for you {{ping|User:Calthinus}} and all other users following this thread, I have included all the points I agree with ] and I have brought back to life the ] article. Please take a look at them and let me know what you think now. Note again that the History section can and will be expanded with both new sources and ones that were found in the current version of this article. ] (]) 02:22, 18 March 2020 (UTC)

==== History ====
This well sourced section, on which dozen of editors worked for years is being completely removed and replaced with periodisation by a Macedonian author, published in a University proceedings article in the beginning of which the author writes: "In this article, we present one '''proposed periodisation''' of the history of the Macedonian written language, starting from the earliest times up to the present time.". That's closer to original research, than to a reliable information. The second source is unrelated to the content of the section. This should be removed and replaced with the original section, so we can discuss the improvement of the section. --] (]) 17:30, 17 March 2020 (UTC)
:Feel free to revert back to the stable version. ] (]) 17:32, 17 March 2020 (UTC)
:: Reverting it myself is not something that will be very productive. It's better if ] realizes that this was not a good idea and to revert it himself. --] (]) 17:41, 17 March 2020 (UTC)
:I agree. This should have been done by incrementally discussing points, not such huge deletions. --] (]) 17:33, 17 March 2020 (UTC)
::Some of the section did go on too long, to be fair, like the last block I noted above. There was a kernel of relevance, that got lost in the weeds. Currently ] redirects here. But maybe it should be created, where we can talk about these things at more length. --] (]) 17:37, 17 March 2020 (UTC)
:::Last input from me before I shut my trap on this for a bit -- we could split off History of to a separate page, and leave a "kernel" here, that resembles ] (a standard that was constructed to bring Norwegian back to its West Nordic "roots" and maximally distance it from Danish, with which it had a degree of intelligibility in part due to long ties to Denmark and Sweden). Interested to hear the input of {{u|TU-nor}} especially on that comparison. --] (]) 17:42, 17 March 2020 (UTC)
::::::I do not think this has much in common with the Norwegian situation. In Norway the whole issue of "Bokmål" vs. "Nynorsk" (and earlier "Riksmål" vs. "Landsmål") has been rooted in a conflict between two fundamentally different ways of creating written standards for one language very rich in dialects. It has always been a language-political question, and the history of the two language forms are therefore mainly a history of language politics, not so much about language development. I do not know much about the historical situation regarding Macedonian (except what I have learnt from Misplaced Pages), so I have not much to contribute with here, but as a general observation I think it would be a good idea to lift out most of the political history stuff to a separate article. Just my intuitive feeling. --] (]) 21:01, 17 March 2020 (UTC)
:::: I agree with that and this is why I think it should be reverted and then discussed. Some of the text that were deleted could be moved to other more detailed articles (redirects or existing), and some could be rewritten/removed/NPOV-ed, etc, but the first step is to have the article reverted to the stable state and then we can discuss further changes. --] (]) 17:48, 17 March 2020 (UTC)
(unindent) I find it '''highly''' ironic that a couple of users that are ok with gutting the entire History section, a few months ago wanted to convert ] into ], i.e. remove everything ''except'' the History section. The lack of consistency is just staggering. ] (]) 18:40, 17 March 2020 (UTC)

==== Thoughts about the removed/rewritten content by DD1997DD ====
* '''Lead secion''' - This part of the article is an introduction and summary of the most important content, so having in mind that the article is controversial, there should be a consensus before changes are being done there.
:The lead section will be properly written in the end and it will briefly mention the most important parts covered in the article.
* '''Alphabet''' - Here I see some "history" related text added, most probably because the history section was removed. My opinion is that the history should be kept in the History section and in this to be introduced the official alphabet from the moment when it was put to use.
:Agreed, those sections will be moved to the history article.
* '''Bibliography''' - I see added a source "Usikova" which is a 10 pages article from a book, with cited page 105, while the article is on pages 221–231. ] can help us solve this mystery. I also did not saw how the text of the article (I reviewed it) supports the claims.
:I will recheck that one and provide the correct source. Apologies for the mistake, the references are still a mess in the entire article and I have tried to fix them in my sandbox.
* '''Classification and related languages''' - The changes there should be discussed. I see also that the text after quote= is removed - while it's always a good idea to quote exactly the text that supports the claims, as some editors may not have access to it.
:I disagree on the quote. I think there should be more focus put on the actual body of the article instead of stuffing the references with long passages that make them look "unkempt".
* '''Relationship to Bulgarian''' - this section could be shorter, the excessive content to be moved to another existing or new article.
:That section was removed from this article and relevant content put in the political views section. Additionally, a paragraph dedicated to the linguistic similarities between the languages was kept in the background section. Any content that refers to grammatical similarities, word comparison, degree of mutual intelligibility, ] and so forth can be added to the section, or a completely different article titled ] (similar to ]) can be created. However, I have not managed to find much content about those things online yet.
* '''Usage''' - No comment on that. It was ok before, it's ok after the change as well.
* '''Vowels''' - A valuable content was added. That's a good contribution.
* '''History''' - Changes to this must be discussed as it was just deleted. It could be short, but should summarize all the content. Some content may be moved to the ].
:I wrote a very short history section that I think succinctly summarizes the most important periods as seen by Macedonists/writers from the international community. That section can also be expanded a bit but I think it's okay for the moment.
* '''Political views on the language''' - This could be made at least twice smaller, and the rest of the content moved to ]. It must stress only on the important information.
:That's exactly what I did with it.
* '''Further reading''' - Good cleanup, but I think at least "Grammar of the Macedonian Literary Language" should stay. It's in English and it gives more detailed information on the grammar.
:Agreed, it is currently included in my sandbox.
* '''Authority control''' - Must be returned.
* '''In general''' - It's not a problem that some sections are bigger than the others, even that the smaller ones are more important. After all we are all volunteers and we edit the topics that we are competent/interested in. We should not remove content from bigger sections, just because none was interested in extending the smaller ones. If you think that the article should have more content in some section - work on it. It will be better if we start discussing the changes one by one and then apply them after the protection ends, else the article could be blocked again. And last, this article is not only a linguistic one, as a language has also history & political aspects. --] (]) 23:17, 19 March 2020 (UTC)
:I agree that the size of the sections does not matter as long as their content is relevant to the article. When I saw this article, I immediately noticed that that has not been the case and that is why these radical changes were undertaken. ] (]) 23:51, 19 March 2020 (UTC)
::I completely disagree with the "political aspects" for this article. That is for articles that focus on politics. There are other articles on the political and ethnic identity disputes between Macedonia and both of its contentious neighbors so the history of those disputes should not be here since language is only a small subset of broader issues. We do not need to replicate any of the details of those disputes here since there are other articles that include them. I daresay that every single political word that was deleted by DD1997DD was in another article where it actually belonged. The only political statement that belongs here is something along the lines of "Language identity has been a part of broader political disputes between North Macedonia and both Bulgaria and Greece" along with links to the relevant articles. The "history" here must be just the linguistic history, not a political history. --] (]) 05:16, 20 March 2020 (UTC)

== Deletion of the History section and Relationships to Bulgarian section ==

Explaining that the section on шге political views on the Macedonian language would be reduced, half of the article was deleted and even sections that were not proposed for reduction were completely deleted. Now I see that it is also not allowed to re-add the information for the serbianization during its codification. But this is not a political or a fringe view, but a view of linguists, including Westerners, and also supported by a lot of scholars in North Macedonia itself. How is that possible? ] (]) 11:35, 17 March 2020 (UTC)
:That type of information belongs primarily to the ] as it discusses information that is a political view instead of focusing on linguistic characteristics. ] (]) 11:37, 17 March 2020 (UTC)
::I do not agree at all. What is happening now was not discussed and has not been debated. Of course, every passage, section or text is potential subject to revision and improvement over time, but deleting it all as wrong only because you don't like it, and maybe for political reasons, it is as if the thief is yelling to keep the thief. ] (]) 11:55, 17 March 2020 (UTC)
:::The reason for removal was irrelevance to this article and none of the other reasons you're mentioning. ] (]) 12:12, 17 March 2020 (UTC)
::::Politics of the country have nothing whatsoever to do with a language history section unless they are specifically focused on the history of the language. 99% of the material that DD1997DD has deleted is nothing more than propaganda (perhaps "history" to some) directed against North Macedonia. That's not language history. No one comes to this article looking for how Bulgarians hate Macedonians. They come here looking for information about the '''''language'''''--grammar, phonology, history of the '''''language''''' in terms of phonological and grammatical changes that distinguish Macedonian from Bulgarian and other South Slavic and Slavic languages, orthography, and references to reliable dictionaries and grammars. DD1997DD was right to delete all the political nonsense from this article without relying on defeating the anti-Macedonian political cabal in order to do so. If the cabal wants this material in Misplaced Pages, then create a new article on the history of Macedonian-Bulgarian relations and put it there. I'm not sure, but there are probably half a dozen articles where that very topic is relevant, and, indeed, all of this "carefully written" material is probably reproduced there already word-for-word because that's the nature of the anti-Macedonian content in Misplaced Pages--it's like a cancer, spreading and copying itself throughout the body. --] (]) 14:56, 17 March 2020 (UTC)
:::::Compare the old state of this article with that of ], for example. There you will find no such political discussion. Look at the history section of ]. The historical section is longer than that of Bulgarian, but it's very tightly focused on the language and its recognition. Look at ] where there is also virtually no history. There is a link to ] where details are more appropriate. DD1997DD's deletions here are completely in line with the content of other nearby Slavic language articles. --] (]) 15:12, 17 March 2020 (UTC)
:::::: {{ping|TaivoLinguist}} I think that we can agree that there's no consensus on the ] radical changes. A solution is the changes to be reverted to a stable version and then discussed. The subject of this article is controversial, so we better discuss before we do radical changes, like removing half of the content. That's the most reasonable solution. --] (]) 16:48, 17 March 2020 (UTC)
:::::: {{ping|User:Future Perfect at Sunrise}} Can you give us your opinion in my proposal? --] (]) 16:59, 17 March 2020 (UTC)
:::::::I think the material from both sections above may be merged. ] (]) 18:14, 17 March 2020 (UTC)
::::::::I agree with ] and ] here. I am afraid the changes were way too drastic and without consulting the others. The article needs to be restored to its last stable version and the matter be discussed in the talk page first. --- <span style="text-shadow:#CCC 0.1em 0.3em 0.3em; font-family: Trebuchet MS">] <sup>(] &#124; ])</sup></span> 23:03, 17 March 2020 (UTC)
* '''Comment''' - The text of this article including references section mentions words starting with ''Bulgar'' for 186 times. More than the article on ] (172 times). --] (]) 23:38, 17 March 2020 (UTC)
:I personally find that insane and as propagandist as propagandist can be. ] (]) 02:58, 18 March 2020 (UTC)
:: There you go, there isn't better evidence that this article is full of Bulgarian POV! — <span style="text-shadow:#CCC 0.1em 0.3em 0.3em; font-family: Trebuchet MS">]]</span> 09:43, 18 March 2020 (UTC)
:::The desire to restore the anti-Macedonian POV in order "to discuss" is tantamount to declaring that the POV section will remain in the article forever in distinction to every other language article in Misplaced Pages. If you have a condensed version that brings this article into line with other language articles, then please present it. Otherwise I do not support the needless political anti-Macedonian material that has nothing to do with the language or its linguistic history or description. If the material were actually relevant to the linguistic history of the language, then leaving it in the article to discuss here on the Talk Page would be appropriate. But since it is irrelevant to the subject matter of this article, then removing it and discussing it here to possibly reinsert all or part of it is more appropriate. The proof that the material is irrelevant to a language article is found in the fact that your only defense of including it is "there's a lot of it and someone worked real hard on it", not its inherent value to the article. It's irrelevant and not appropriate for a language article. --] (]) 09:59, 18 March 2020 (UTC)
::::All I need to present to you about the Bulgarian bias is the following section here on the Talk Page that someone added about a Bulgarian-Greek dictionary. What does that have to do with Macedonian other than to promote a "Macedonian is Bulgarian" agenda. --] (]) 10:04, 18 March 2020 (UTC)
:::::In fact, before 1875 no one in the area had the idea that Macedonian may be a separate language. The very name Macedonia was almost unknown until 1850. Moreover until 1940s its existence was doubtful and it was mostly described as a dialect. One way of dealing is to change the written records. There the description of that language is mostly as Bulgarian if something about its ethnic charackter is ever mentioned. That are most of the cases from 10th till the 20th century. We may simply replace in the original records every mentioning of Bulgarian language with Macedonian language or where it has a meaning of dialect to deny that fact and to insist it means a language. So was done in Communist Yugoslavia for 45 years and continues to be done now in North Macedonia in the next 30 years. The other way is to present the originals and to explain the issue of the development of a group of Eastern South Slavic dialects. They are called after 1850 Macedonian, but continued to be regarded as part of Bulgarian dialectal system until the early 20th century. Afterwards they arose as a separate language that was named Macedonian, especially during the period between 1920-1944. The language itself was finally codified in 1945-1950. ] (]) 10:30, 18 March 2020 (UTC)
I really don't have anything to reply to comments like this. They are by a user who thinks he/she knows more than linguists and historians themselves and just has a version of objectivity they keep repeating and repeating and repeating on every single page they touch. I really don't know how to handle {{ping|User:Jingiby)) and his undying will to maximally Bulgarize every Macedonian article when he arguments like this. ] (]) 11:13, 18 March 2020 (UTC)
: ], the scholarship is often divided in some dubious issues as is the Macedonian one. Many scientists support that view espoused by me above, but there are some researchers who deny even the history of Macedonian before 1940s. And they are definitely not Bulgarians. You perfectly know that. ] (]) 11:32, 18 March 2020 (UTC)
:: ] and also there are some, who say that Macedonian (although not codified) existed even before that, but, you don't want to leave your POV and keep on adding propaganda to the article (huge sections of it!). Also, thank you for the comment Taivo, Bosnian language is a perfect example. — <span style="text-shadow:#CCC 0.1em 0.3em 0.3em; font-family: Trebuchet MS">]]</span> 11:44, 18 March 2020 (UTC)
::The key, ] is to develop a '''''brief''''' comment or couple of sentences that describe the issue and then leave it. The ] article is probably similar and its description is much briefer. Summarize, summarize, summarize. The amount of verbiage that existed in the article previously was three paragraphs (at least) too much. --] (]) 11:39, 18 March 2020 (UTC)
::::::@Taivo Bosnian is not really the best comparison here, imo. In the case of Bosnian, a large number of people ''do'' regard it as one of four standard varieties (each based on the E Shtokavian dialect) of a language varyingly called BCSM, Serbo-Croatian, CSS (Central South Slavic) et cetera. The Macedonian/Bulgarian case is a dialect continuum with standards based on two different dialects, i.e. similar to other situations which are varyingly called different languages (Scandinavian languages) or dialects of one language (Kurdish, see also English/French/Spanish). --] (]) 15:30, 18 March 2020 (UTC)
::::::: @Calthinus, All the South Slavic dialects starting from Slovenia to Bulgaria form a continuum if you go by that logic. As a matter of fact, no one outside Bulgaria has a problem with Macedonian being a separate language (even Greeks, who were only concerned about the name of the language, which is now over with the Prespa agreement)! So if Serbo-Croatian can have 4 different forms (which are pretty much the same language and people are fine with it), Macedonian being distinct from Bulgarian shouldn't (and frankly doesn't) affect the outside world, except Bulgaria and its fellow POV editors on Misplaced Pages apparently. And again, even if there's some political ambivalency towards the language, that belongs in that separate article, not in the main language one. — <span style="text-shadow:#CCC 0.1em 0.3em 0.3em; font-family: Trebuchet MS">]]</span> 15:42, 18 March 2020 (UTC)
:::::::: @Tomica: This isn't, and shouldn't be turned into, a political issue. It's not Bulgarians who claim the language is a Bulgarian dialect, it's various linguists with different ethnic backgrounds. Unfortunately, linguistics has failed until now to produce a mathematical criterion of whether two languages are actually related languages or are dialects of a larger "united" language. So, unfortunately, politics moves in to fill that void in linguistics, but we only need to take into account the politics indirectly (displaying the disagreements between linguists who are influenced by politics), not to go into them ourselves. --] (]) 10:29, 19 March 2020 (UTC)
: @Antondimak: Are you freaking kidding me!? Just look at the section and you will see that it's a Bulgarian POV, filled with quotes and cites of mostly Bulgarian authors (who obv deny the language). And again, that's not the whole issue here. The thing is, that whole section should be cut and reduced for the Macedonian language article and maybe be part of the Political views/eventually History of the language. And I agree with your last sentence, however, if you look neutrally, that's not the case here. Nor with the editors, nor with how that section is written right now. — <span style="text-shadow:#CCC 0.1em 0.3em 0.3em; font-family: Trebuchet MS">]]</span> 10:50, 19 March 2020 (UTC)
::@Antondimak also, I am not arguing that we should completely remove the view that there are linguists (both Bulgarian and international) who consider Macedonian a Bulgarian dialect etc. The argument is that that can be succinctly summarized only in the political views section at the end (not in 4 separate enormous sections as is the case rn), with a paragraph or two (you can see how I tried to handle it in my sandbox ]) and include all the nitty gritty of linguists/historians/politicians who say one thing or the other. ] (]) 11:01, 19 March 2020 (UTC)
:::@DD1997DD That however would mean implying that this is a fringe view, which it isn't (basically ]). We might as well present the language as a Bulgarian dialect in the article while having a footnote that Macedonian nationalists consider it to be a difference language. Both approaches would mean taking a side in the dispute. --] (]) 14:43, 19 March 2020 (UTC)
: @Antondimak Do I need to remind you that we are talking about a globally recognized and registered language with its own ISO code? I am sure we can't do what you are proposing. Also, I invite you to recheck the current references to see if they are balanced. IMO and of several other editors, it's far from balanced. Obviously, Greek and Bulgarians are fine with it. — <span style="text-shadow:#CCC 0.1em 0.3em 0.3em; font-family: Trebuchet MS">]]</span> 15:42, 19 March 2020 (UTC)
:: @Tomica Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian all have different language codes, but there is linguistic consesnsus that they are the same language. There isn't such a thing as "language recognition". Languages aren't states. --] (]) 09:13, 20 March 2020 (UTC)
::: @Antondimak Well, guess what. If you go by that logic, there isn't a linguistic consensus that Macedonian and Bulgarian are the same language, nor that Macedonian is a Bulgarian dialect. And even if there's such, it shouldn't be part of the Macedonian language article (there should be a sentence, two, maybe a paragraph mention), however it can be part of another sister-article of the language Wiki article. — <span style="text-shadow:#CCC 0.1em 0.3em 0.3em; font-family: Trebuchet MS">]]</span> 09:35, 20 March 2020 (UTC)
:::: I do go by that logic and that's why I don't propose for the article to be renamed into "Macedonian Bulgarian" and to be presented as a Bulgarian dialect. --] (]) 17:04, 21 March 2020 (UTC)
: I am done discussing this with you. Obviously, you have a very own nationalistic view about this issue. And obviously, it's not fruitful. — <span style="text-shadow:#CCC 0.1em 0.3em 0.3em; font-family: Trebuchet MS">]]</span> 17:06, 21 March 2020 (UTC)
:::::::: @Tomica: Yes, they form a dialect continuum (there is also a dialect continuum Czech-Slovak-Rusyn-Ukrainian even though Czech and Slovak are West, not East, Slavic), but everyone acknowledges that (mutually intelligible) Macedonian and Bulgarian have a much more intimate relationship. This is far from the only language article with political-historical factors included in it -- see ], ], ], ], see especially ]... et cetera. --] (]) 15:49, 18 March 2020 (UTC)
@Calthinus But all the articles you are citing as examples (except maaaaaybe for ]) are of extremely poor quality. They completely miss the point of the language and go on and on about historical/political topics that can easily be placed in a different article. There is almost no coverage of language characteristics. As a comparison, check ] and ] (both of which are GA) and how succinctly historical and political sections are handled. The latter language does not even mention politics although there is much room for that with the ]. <!-- Template:Unsigned --><small class="autosigned">—&nbsp;Preceding ] comment added by ] (] • ]) 16:06, 18 March 2020 (UTC)</small> <!--Autosigned by SineBot-->
:That might be a bit harsh. ] doesn't seem so bad, though I do think the history section there may be better shortened yes. A well-balanced article that does discuss the history/politics behind the formation of the standard can also be found in ].--] (]) 16:42, 18 March 2020 (UTC)
::Maybe consider reading the articles I listed above which are selected as good articles and compare their content to the politically charged article of Belarussian (I mean there is a discrimination subheading in a language article!! Why does ] not have one in light of all the things happening in the US? Why does ] not have one even though it was banned under Franco? Why does the Catalan language not even go into the relationship between Spanish and Italian even though they're spoken in the same country?). And the ] article is also by no means a well-balanced article for that matter (consult ]). Plus, I don't see the Italian language article going into how similar Italian is to its closest Romance languages e.g. Spanish/French with entire long-ass sections? And mind you that Spanish and Italian are related in the exact same way as Macedonian and Bulgarian when it comes to origins/similarities/dialects merging from one to the other language. ] (]) 17:47, 18 March 2020 (UTC)
:::::::::: @Calthinus With all due respect, please do not compare Macedonian and Bulgarian to Romanian and Moldovan. Those are two separate and different cases. As a native Macedonian speaker, I can sometimes hardly understand Bulgarian (a lot of the vocabulary is different, with sometimes the same words having different meanings). Romanian & Moldovan are a totally different case, where the same language has 2 different names. — <span style="text-shadow:#CCC 0.1em 0.3em 0.3em; font-family: Trebuchet MS">]]</span> 15:56, 18 March 2020 (UTC)
::::::::::: @Tomica: of course not, nor is it like the other examples. These are instead examples of languages with lengthy political historical discussions on their pages. --] (]) 16:00, 18 March 2020 (UTC)
:::It should look like this and not much more, if at all (with appropriate references):
::::"Macedonian and Bulgarian are closely related. According to linguistic tests they are X% mutually intelligible. Macedonian has been recognized as a separate language since X. It is recognized as a separate language by the European Union and by most linguists. Some linguists still recognize Bulgarian and Macedonian as a single language."
:::That's all that is necessary. The politics are completely immaterial to a language article and shouldn't occupy more than a single sentence, if even that much. --] (]) 11:48, 18 March 2020 (UTC)
:::::] in ] are researchers, backed by the Macedonian state, that insist Macedonian was spoken by the Ancient Macedonians in Egypt. ] (]) 11:54, 18 March 2020 (UTC)
: I wish their Bulgarian equivalent was better... unfortunately it's not. Full with nationalism too. — <span style="text-shadow:#CCC 0.1em 0.3em 0.3em; font-family: Trebuchet MS">]]</span> 12:02, 18 March 2020 (UTC)
::I have reverted a strange POV-pushing made by ]. Very interesting is the attempt to elevate the number of Macedonian speakers from 1,5 up to 3,5 Million. ] (]) 14:07, 18 March 2020 (UTC)
:::It was found in ]'s article that was provided as a reference? ] (]) 14:09, 18 March 2020 (UTC)
::::It wold be better to present here a link to your proposal an firstly to give a possibility to other editors to read and to aprove it. ] (]) 14:29, 18 March 2020 (UTC)
: Why would I/he/she/them or whoever seek approval from Bulgarian editors to add data in the Macedonian language Misplaced Pages article? Especially from a source from a credible worldwide famous professor, who I am sure did his research before presenting the evidence. Unlike, that professor at the Bulgarian University of Sofia... — <span style="text-shadow:#CCC 0.1em 0.3em 0.3em; font-family: Trebuchet MS">]]</span> 14:36, 18 March 2020 (UTC)
{{ping|User:Apcbg}} Please discuss why you're reverting my edits? Why are you doing this to every single article I edit, just popping out of nowhere to delete content that I spend hours editing? And it always magically happens after I revert {{ping|User:Jingiby}}. Is it just a sock puppet account? I really don't get this stubborn behavior by users who 1. don't discuss 2. are always there to revert. ] (]) 14:33, 18 March 2020 (UTC)

== Bulgarian-Greek dictionary from the 16th century. ==

] The description of the dictionary and its reference to Bulgarian language is in Greek and can be seen in the enclosed text.

:This is not an article about Bulgarian. --] (]) 10:01, 18 March 2020 (UTC)
::There was a discussion through edit-summary about that isse on the article itself, wheter the designation Bulgarian is ever mentioned in the original, but the involved edditor does not react now. ] (]) 14:31, 18 March 2020 (UTC)

==Full protection==
Due to the recent significant and controversial changes, I have restored the last version prior to when this content dispute started and fully protected the article for ten days. Can I suggest you use this time to reach consensus on appropriate changes to the article (perhaps copy the article to a sandbox or subpage and work on it there) and once protection has expired, only make changes for which consensus has been achieved. Thanks, ] ]] 17:04, 18 March 2020 (UTC)
:{{ping|Number 57}} Actually over the last 12 hours there has been significant progress toward an acceptable version. The political issues that were the trigger for the large-scale changes have been clarified and removed by and large. The sizes of the changes have been getting smaller and smaller. Your locking is actually interfering with that productive process. --] (]) 17:18, 18 March 2020 (UTC)
::I am not sure that above claim is exact and correct. ] (]) 17:34, 18 March 2020 (UTC)
:::In the last six hours there were seven reverts that involved adding or removing more than 50KB of text. This does not suggest significant progress. I will not be unprotecting the article early unless clear consensus is reached on an acceptable version of the article. The article being locked does not stop you working on another version of it somewhere else. ] ]] 17:42, 18 March 2020 (UTC)
:::: {{ping|User:Number 57}} I am not sure how aware you are of how disruptive ] and ] (I suspect the latter might be a sock puppet account of the former user. It only magically appears and its only input in the last month is reverting edits I have made that are always 100% cited). Additionally, the user who reported me engaged in no discussions whatsoever and without proper explanations on their talk page. Just take a look at the comments these users have been leaving on this talk page and how much they stall the process of this article's progress without bringing any arguments. And please compare them with the constructive discussion points ] brought up which I carefully went through one by one and included in the more neutral version. The quantity of this article does not equal quality. It's just the product of years of stealthy propaganda that gives so much weight to political points of view to both this article and many alike ( at how ] accidentally forgot to add an entire 20.000 kbs worth of article that present an unbiased version of the content but did not forget to add just to support a claim that the Macedonian language was Bulgarian in an article about a simple play). And again User:Apcbg magically appearing two seconds after User:Jingiby reverts me twice. ] (]) 18:18, 18 March 2020 (UTC)
:::::Given that Apcbg has been editing since 2006, I suggest you withdraw the accusation of sockpuppetry. Please resolve this dispute by reaching consensus and stop @ing me. ] ]] 18:24, 18 March 2020 (UTC)
::::::Sure. That would only be possible if one of the users who consistently revert me makes a single constructive comment. That is not happening though. The fact that someone has been editing Misplaced Pages since 2006 does not mean that the content they're adding to every single page is unbiased/contributes to the neutrality of the article. ] (]) 18:27, 18 March 2020 (UTC)
::::I agree with ], there has been a good deal of progression to a logical consensus and I don't think the disruptions of certain persistent editors who obviously are trying to prove some sort of point (I don't know, maybe bg=mk) is sufficient justification to revert all the progress which was actually discussed. I doubt a "clear consensus" requires the approval of ] and ]. ] (]) 11:58, 19 March 2020 (UTC)
:::::If anything User:Jingiby is notorious for his biased editing even . Take a look at disputes he's part of on articles like ] where he's immediately joined by other users to stall the process of reverting his biased edits. ] (]) 12:26, 19 March 2020 (UTC)
: I don't know why, but I am not surprised at all. Hmmm — <span style="text-shadow:#CCC 0.1em 0.3em 0.3em; font-family: Trebuchet MS">]]</span> 12:36, 19 March 2020 (UTC)
::::: {{ping|Beat of the tapan}} There was no progress at all. All my requests the article to be reverted to the stable state, so we can start discussing the changes ended with no answer. So instead of reverting these changes and getting a consensus on the 10+ sections that were either deleted, either heavily changed, we ended up with the same, plus protection for 10 days. I spent some time reviewing changes and will come up with some notes on them. We need to start discussing, and not continuing with personal attacks, dear Macedonian friends ], ] & ]. --] (]) 12:55, 19 March 2020 (UTC)
::::::: Where do you see a personal attack? That's just evidence of who we are dealing with. Oh, and sorry StanProg, I didn't know that you owned the article so everything needs to be filtrated through you before changes are made. Actually, there was a progress (non-Macedonian editors such as Taivo and Future also saw it and agreed on), however, it seems that the propaganda is strong here on Wiki. — <span style="text-shadow:#CCC 0.1em 0.3em 0.3em; font-family: Trebuchet MS">]]</span> 12:59, 19 March 2020 (UTC)
::::::::], I have warned both ] and ] on their talk-pages to assume good faith when dealing with other editors. Here is a place to discus the issue not the editor of the issue. There are another places for that. Thanks. ] (]) 13:11, 19 March 2020 (UTC)
: Pointing evidence about a certain type of agenda =/= discussing an editor. — <span style="text-shadow:#CCC 0.1em 0.3em 0.3em; font-family: Trebuchet MS">]]</span> 13:28, 19 March 2020 (UTC)
::Here is the problem with the original edit, ]. The article had been trashed by anti-Macedonian editors for so long that the politics of pushing a Bulgarian POV had completely overwhelmed the actual linguistic content of the article. This is a '''''linguistic''''' article where politics have no place whatsoever. But the anti-Macedonian cabal in Misplaced Pages will have no changes whatsoever made to the article as is because it pushes the Bulgarian POV so strongly. The only way sometimes to improve an article and to remove rampant POV in certain sections, is to wipe the slate of those sections and start over with the question of "What is and is not relevant to a '''''linguistic''''' article?" But since the anti-Macedonia cabal have such a vested interest in maintaining the Bulgarian POV, they are unwilling to work with neutral editors in improving and in winnowing. That's why it's important to reject the POV of the intrasigent editors by wiping the article and to rebuilt with neutral editors. That was what was happening before the article was shut down by ], who simply and unwittingly dropped the problem text back into place and ignored all the positive work that had been done among the neutral editors. The solution is a simple one. Relying entirely on neutral, non-Bulgarian/Macedonian/Greek reliable sources in the English language literature, it is entirely possible to illustrate that Western linguists are mixed over the last half century as to whether Macedonian and Bulgarian are a single pluricentric language, or two separate languages. There is no need to relitigate the political issue. A single sentence or short paragraph is all that is required: "Macedonian and Bulgarian share a certain level of mutual intelligibility so there are linguists who treat them as two seaparate languages (X, Y, Z) and linguistis that treat them as a single pluricentric language (A, B, C)." Period. That's all that is needed. Readers don't care that the Bulgarians want to claim Macedonian as a Bulgarian dialect. They come to this article to find information about how to conjugate verbs and decline nouns. They come here looking for a reference to a reliable grammar or dictionary. --] (]) 16:24, 19 March 2020 (UTC)

::: Well said. It is clear that the article in it’s stable form is a mess and there is plenty of ] hidden there, which a few fellow editors did a good job of removing before the revert. I agree that neutral points of view should hold the most weight on the topic to dilute political Balkan shenanigans that plagues most articles, but the rules of Misplaced Pages must be respected in the process. For example, editors cannot use C-class articles to justify waiving Misplaced Pages’s rules. The article should be only about the linguistics of the Macedonian language which is clearly distinct to the Bulgarian language, this alone can justify dropping the tremendous amount of references to the Bulgarian language in the article. ] (]) 21:42, 19 March 2020 (UTC)

== Diferences between political, fringe and scientific views about the Macedonian language? ==

Can somebody from the Macedonian editors explain me the difference and how to classify the 3 views below, please? Which kind they belong to and where they must pe placed?

*''"The obviously plagiarized historical argument of the Macedonian nationalists for a separate Macedonian ethnicity could be supported only by linguistic reality, and that worked against them until the 1940s. Until a modern Macedonian literary language was mandated by the communist-led partisan movement from Macedonia in 1944, most outside observers and linguists agreed with the Bulgarians in considering the vernacular spoken by the Macedonian Slavs as a western dialect of Bulgarian"''. For more see: Dennis P. Hupchick, Conflict and Chaos in Eastern Europe, Palgrave Macmillan, 1995, ISBN 0312121164, p. 143.

*''In one respect, however, Macedonian nationalism threw up a problem which the Communist Party could not ignore: the question of the status of the Macedonian language. If, as ] remarked, languages are the pedigrees of nations, then the Slav inhabitants of Macedonia were by any reasonable linguistic criteria part of the Bulgarian nation... The construction and dissemination of a distinctive Macedonian language was the medium through which a sense of Macedonian identity was to be fixed... The past was systematically falsified to conceal the fact that many prominent ‘Macedonians’ had supposed themselves to be Bulgarians, and generations of students were taught the pseudo-history of the Macedonian nation. The mass media and education were the key to this process of national acculturation, speaking to people in a language that they came to regard as their Macedonian mother tongue, even if it was perfectly understood in Sofia.'' For more see: Michael L. Benson, Yugoslavia: A Concise History, Edition 2, Springer, 2003, ISBN 1403997209, p. 89.

*''The Macedonian (anti-Bulgarian) interpretation of their linguistic development is not considerd by Communist party leaders to be an ivory tower matter; the campaign is carried on through the mass media. Numerous articles on the alleged historical differences, some dating back to the middle ages, are carried by newspapers. In an early pamphlet (1950) on this subject, the party expressed concern over the popular failure to acknowledge the separate existence of a distinct Macedonian language in the past...The Macedonian Communists do not deny that the language of Goce Delcev and most other national heroes was Bulgarian, or that Bulgarian was the written Macedonian language generally until the Second World War...A reason for recognizing the Macedonian nationality was to eliminate the Bulgarian consciousness of the vast majority of Vardar Macedonians. Thus, the party has not only recognized the nationality, but also has taken and still undertakes vigorous steps to encourage its culture to differentiate Macedonian from Bulgarian.'' For more see: Stephen E. Palmer, Robert R. King, Yugoslav communism and the Macedonian question, Archon Books, 1971, ISBN 0208008217, Chapter 9: The encouragement of Macedonian culture. <!-- Template:Unsigned --><small class="autosigned">—&nbsp;Preceding ] comment added by ] (] • ]) 19:34, 19 March 2020 (UTC)</small>

::I am not a Macedonian editor, but the answer is easy. That is all historical politics and '''''not relevant for this article'''''. It's not part of the linguistic overview of the Macedonian language or even a linguistic history of the language. Even the quotes tell you that they have nothing to do with linguistics by citing culture and ethnicity. This is part of the cultural history of Macedonian identity and ethnicity, not the Macedonian language. --] (]) 21:36, 19 March 2020 (UTC)
:::On this one I do agree with Taivo. This goes on the "Political aspects of" page or whatever its name is now. --] (]) 17:22, 22 March 2020 (UTC)

== Thoughts on grammar==

Hello fellow users! Any thoughts so far on ]? I think some help expanding the consonants, verbs and syntax sections would be really nice. And I think after that, we can start a discussion about which version is better. Sidenote: I beg all users to refrain from commenting on the current history section included in the sandbox article. Let's please focus on the language's linguistic features for once. I am sure the RfC will be filled with comments on the history section, so please, please, please, don't engage in this discussion if you're not willing to comment on the linguistic features (for the time being). Thank you very much in advance for your cooperation! ] (]) 11:43, 22 March 2020 (UTC)
:The Phonology section is pretty typical and of average length. It doesn't really need as much morphophonology as most people try to slip in. The Noun section is about right except a table with sample case declensions for the most common noun classes (aka genders) would be helpful. The verb section needs work and the syntax section is subheadings only. The syntax section, however, is typically the least useful since syntax is more complex a topic than can really be covered in a Misplaced Pages article. If you want syntax in depth then a separate article is necessary. --] (]) 15:18, 22 March 2020 (UTC)
::So do you think I should leave out the syntax section? ] (]) 15:47, 22 March 2020 (UTC)
:::Yes, for now. --] (]) 16:56, 22 March 2020 (UTC)
::::Ultimately a syntax section will be good to have. Macedonian is more analytic than the typical Slavic language. This is non controversial and notable material to describe. The only reason to leave it out is working on one thing at a time. --] (]) 17:21, 22 March 2020 (UTC)
: I think it's highly inadvisable to make huge changes to the article at once, because we may end up at the position we got into at March 18. Changes should be done section by section. --] (]) 10:20, 24 March 2020 (UTC)
:: No huge changes will be made anymore without a voting consensus. ] (]) 10:30, 24 March 2020 (UTC)
::::So I can make a chart of noun declensions. Should I post them to the sandbox? --] (]) 00:06, 25 March 2020 (UTC)
:::::Yes, of course. ] (]) 06:26, 25 March 2020 (UTC)

Okay, I think I am more or less done with adding content to the grammar part of the article. Any thoughts again? ] (]) 13:54, 27 March 2020 (UTC)
:I will try to give it a look in the next couple of days.--] (]) 05:47, 28 March 2020 (UTC)

== Thoughts on history and political views ==
: At the lead section: "According to scholars of the Macedonian language..." sentence should be removed as there are just single scholars, not a widely accepted periodization. "Linguists distinguish 29 different..." these are the Macedonian linguists, not just linguists. Also regarding the "influences" - the Macedonian language is standardized (raised to language) at 1945 and there are no influences since then up until now from the Bulgarian language - there are only influences from the Serbian, as Socialist Republic of Macedonia was part of a federation, where the Serbian language was the dominant one. In one sentence you mention "Bulgarian and Serbo-Croatian", while in another one "Bulgarian and Serbian" - if we accept Serbian and Serbo-Croatian as separate languages, we should include them both in the two cases, because if if the claim is valid for one, it is valid for the other as well. The rest of this section looks OK. --] (]) 10:41, 24 March 2020 (UTC)
: We should avoid weasel words like "Some authors..." --] (]) 10:46, 24 March 2020 (UTC)
: History section: "According to Macedonian scholars..." again weasel words, as it's just one specific scholar that "proposed" that periodisation. This should not be even mentioned, as it's just a proposal published in the local University magazine. "The "canonical" Old Church Slavonic..." you are relying again on one proposed periodisation of Lyudmil Spasov. Later on "Macedonian recension" is actually "Ohrid recension", as you have clarified later "referred to as such due to works of the Ohrid Literary School". Furthermore "Ohrid Literary School, current-day North Macedonia" is anachronism. A better wording will be "Ohrid Literary School, First Bulgarian Empire". "this version can also be referred to as Old Macedonian Church Slavonic" is referred as such by the Member of the Macedonian Academy of Sciences member Victor Friedman and other Macedonian linguists. At the "Medieval" subsection you can' write about "Macedonian language" as such did not existed - you can write only of local (Slavic) dialects. In the "Modern era" you also can't write about "Macedonian language". In general this section is not so bad, but still there's a lot work to be done. --] (]) 11:32, 24 March 2020 (UTC)
:I think you have several valid points. However I mentioned in this thread: '''please, please, please, don't engage in this discussion if you're not willing to comment on the linguistic features (for the time being)'''. As you mentioned, I still have to work on that section and provide an unbiased version. ] (]) 11:37, 24 March 2020 (UTC)
::There is no such thing as "being raised to language". That's just political nonsense. A language becomes recognized as a language for many different reasons, but it becomes a language through natural linguistic processes of change. Macedonian was standardized in 1945. Period. Standardization is a common linguistic event when a particular form of a language becomes the adopted formal variant. Some languages are standardized by common practice (as English), other languages are standardized by official edict (as the languages of the former Yugoslavia). Any further comments about that event are political commentary and should be removed. What should we say about standardization? The simple statement that Macedonian was standardized in 1945. What should we say about the issue of whether it is linguistically recognized as a separate language or a regionally standardized variety of a single pluricentric Macedo-Bulgarian language? Nothing political whatsoever. Everything should be linguistically focused. "While before 1945 Macedonian was most commonly described as a dialect of Bulgarian (refs), modern linguists are divided over whether Macedonian is a divergent dialect of a common Macedo-Bulgarian language (refs) or a separate language (refs)." The references should, as much as possible, exclude Macedonian, Bulgarian, and Greek sources (there are enough such references in western published linguistic literature to suffice). The whole point of this exercise is that there were, indeed, huge changes needed to remove the vast amounts of anti-Macedonian political bias that had been inserted into this article over the years since North Macedonia gained its independence. We'll discuss them, but we must be careful with every word and phrase to scrub the bias (such as with "raised to language"). --] (]) 15:51, 24 March 2020 (UTC)
:::Guys this talk page section is not for the political debate, this one is about linguistic properties. Stay on topic or post it elsewhere. --] (]) 19:40, 24 March 2020 (UTC)

====Again====
I have disputed two section from proposed article on the talk. However there is no consensus about the content of these sections. Afterwards I have indicated it as lack of neutrality with tags. However they were removed with a comment : ...''don't edit the article anymore''. This is obviously biased edit. I am indicating here the lack of consensus and neutrality. ] (]) 07:47, 28 March 2020 (UTC)
:I addressed your comments on the talk page of the sandbox. What you wanted to add is related to the Bulgarian language or its use on the territory of North Macedonia. That belongs to other articles, not to the development of the Macedonian language. ] (]) 07:55, 28 March 2020 (UTC)
::You try to manipulate the issue. That above is simply not true. For example I have made, did not mention the term Bulgarian. ] (]) 10:27, 28 March 2020 (UTC)
:::Basic comment on "consensus". You can take it as given that I will support any edits made by ]. I agreed with his original edits here and at the Sandbox. I will have to go through Jingiby's edits carefully because his Bulgarian bias tends to be excessive. (Our university just switched from F2F to on-line because of COVID-19, so I've been busy there and haven't had a chance to interact here as much.) --] (]) 14:28, 28 March 2020 (UTC)
::::Sigh, please refrain from those Taivo ("his Bulgarian bias tends to be excessive"). Having a Bulgarian personal POV is not a crime. The best articles are made by people of opposing POVs working together.--] (]) 19:32, 28 March 2020 (UTC)
::::I too agree with ]'s edits/proposals. --] (]) 10:33, 29 March 2020 (UTC)
:::::In just the last couple of days, significant progress has been made toward improving the article at . --] (]) 14:20, 29 March 2020 (UTC)
::::::Do you think we can start up an RfC already? I think the most contended parts have been removed and if anything new is added it will be to the grammar section. ] (]) 11:58, 30 March 2020 (UTC)
:::::::Yes. The worst thing is if the serious editors continue in the Sandbox and people start hashing through here in a different direction. --] (]) 12:09, 30 March 2020 (UTC)
::::::::Yeah, let's hope that does not happen again. ] (]) 12:23, 30 March 2020 (UTC)

== RfC ==
<div class="boilerplate archived" style="background-color: #EDEAFF; padding: 0px 10px 0px 10px; border: 1px solid #8779DD;">{{Quote box
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| quote = There is a clear consensus that option 2 is version of the article that RfC participants prefer.<p>] (]) 00:00, 3 May 2020 (UTC)
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:''The following discussion is closed. <span style="color:red">'''Please do not modify it.'''</span> Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.''<!-- from Template:Archive top-->
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As you all probably already know, there has been a lot of contrasting views on how this article should look like in the past few weeks. I have decided to work on it and give more weight to linguistic rather than historical and political sections in my sandbox. Therefore, I am inviting you to vote on which version of the article is better:
*'''Option 1''': the current version as of 30 March 2020
*'''Option 2''': ].
Thank you in advance for participating! ] (]) 12:28, 30 March 2020 (UTC)
*'''Option 2'''. This version has been conscientiously worked on by editors on both sides of the above discussion that triggered the article lockdown in the first place. It is a solid linguistics article now with just enough of the politico-historical controversy to give context, but not so much as to overwhelm the description of the language. ] has done an excellent job of expanding the grammar sections of the article to actually make it useful as an overview of the language itself. There is still some grammar and referencing cleanup to be done, but that should not detract from the very good work that has been done to improve this article. --] (]) 15:00, 30 March 2020 (UTC)
*'''Option 2'''. Without any doubt, I vote for option 2. Option 1 is just a mess and unorganized. DD1997DD did an amazing job with the grammar part and condensed the history section, as well, within the standards of a language article on Misplaced Pages. I am glad I had the chance to give minimal input into shaping it :). — <span style="text-shadow:#CCC 0.1em 0.3em 0.3em; font-family: Trebuchet MS">]]</span> 15:06, 30 March 2020 (UTC)
*'''Option 1''' and then working on the different aspects, discussing them and working towards a consensus. Completely replacing an article with another one is very bad idea. First, you can't track the progress and the authors. I'm not sure that such vote for replacing an article with another is even according to the principles of Misplaced Pages. In fact, the article will have 1 single author, an editor registered few months ago, already blocked for edit warring who barely knows the basic principles of Misplaced Pages. Highly unacceptable. Second, because this usually does not solves the problems the article, while creating a new ones and fueling new conflicts. Strongly oppose Option 2. --] (]) 17:27, 30 March 2020 (UTC)
::Your fears are easily addressed. Rather than replacing the article wholesale with the fixes that have been made by editors from both sides of the issue in DD1997DD's sandbox, they can be inserted here section by section. Your problem is then solved. This is done all the time on Misplaced Pages and is encouraged--lengthy edits, especially new content, should be made in a Sandbox, crafted, and perfected, and then inserted as a block in existing articles. That's all that happened here. --] (]) 17:40, 30 March 2020 (UTC)
:::Have you actually looked at and read the edited version? --] (]) 17:48, 30 March 2020 (UTC)
:::: Of course I read it. I even commented part of the content. Voting on "which article is better" is not a common practice at all, in fact as it makes no sense, as we can't just replace an article developed a doesen of years with a one, written mostly by a single editor. That's why I proposed this to be discussed section by section and changes done one by one. In the leading text we have 4 paragraphs, and the only information confirmed by source is a trivial one, such that none objects "Standard Macedonian was codified in 1945 and has developed modern literature since.". --] (]) 00:20, 31 March 2020 (UTC)
:::::Perhaps you missed my previous comment. I'm not surprised since you have done little to improve the article, just fought to preserve the massive Bulgarian POV intact. The Sandbox version was created through discussions by several editors on the Talk Page there. Perhaps you need to read the Talk Page as well. While ] may have done the writing on the Sandbox version, much of it was the result of discussions and suggestions made by others. So do you object to the Grammar enhancement? Nouns? Verbs? Do you object to the superior lead and the reduction of redundancy in the classification section? Perhaps it's the fact that the endless detail of the History and Recognition sections that overtly pushed the Bulgarian agenda was reduced to an appropriate level and made the sections conform to NPOV? As I suggested above, we can move that content here section by section so that you are not offended by others working to improve this article. I don't see that you have done anything whatsoever in that regard other than reverting honest attempts to improve it and make it conform to NPOV. And your comment about "dozens of years" means nothing whatsoever. Some of the worst-written articles, most loaded with POV, nonsense, outdated references, and conflicting sections, are those that have accumulated bits and pieces over "dozens of years". Just because the POV-pushing has been accumulating over time doesn't make it any more acceptable. --] (]) 04:01, 31 March 2020 (UTC)
::::::You're also probably not aware that leads don't need extensive sourcing if it is found in the appropriate sections of the text. Extensive sourcing, if needed at all (which it usually isn't) should be in the appropriate section of the article, not in the lead. And the minute discussion and sourcing of every word of the history and politics sections (which need to be reduced in size by 90%) is a ridiculous level of sourcing. So sourcing does not need to be replicated in the lead. --] (]) 04:28, 31 March 2020 (UTC)
*'''Option 2''' looks great, thanks to everyone who contributed to it. --] <sup>]</sup> 17:42, 30 March 2020 (UTC)
*'''Option 2''' This is a vast improvement in my perspective. Beautifully concise, good job. ] (]) 08:35, 31 March 2020 (UTC)
*'''Option 2''' I perceive it to be an excellent improvement. ] (]) 21:04, 16 April 2020 (UTC)
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== Vocabulary POV ==
The paragraph starting with "The language of the writers at the turn of the 19th century abounded with Russian..." is a an early (1968) communist propaganda (POV) if Todor Dimitrovski and an attempt to distance the newly codified language from the Bugarian. Example:
{| class="wikitable"
|-
! Russian !! Bulgarian
|-
| действие || действие
|-
| лицемерие || лицемерие
|-
| развитие || развитие
|-
| определение || определение
|-
| движение || движение
|-
| продолжитель || продължител
|-
| убедительный || убедителен
|}

It's very surprising how exactly these carefully selected words that are pretty much the same between Bulgarian and Russian are given as an example of Russian words with which the new standard language is abounded with. The Institute for Bulgarian language at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences () is very clear on exactly this author, article & claims: ''"This fact, which, of course, is not isolated is aimed at artificially distancing the written norm in Socialist Republic of Macedonia from the Bulgarian literary language, is a rare attempt in linguistics to break with a word-forming tradition established in writing."'' --] (]) 16:04, 31 March 2020 (UTC)
: And we should trust the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences why? Because they are not trying to create propaganda about the language right and are super neutral of the language issue? — <span style="text-shadow:#CCC 0.1em 0.3em 0.3em; font-family: Trebuchet MS">]]</span> 17:31, 31 March 2020 (UTC)
::With any word in Macedonian there are several options:
::*It is inherited from Proto-Slavic through Proto-South Slavic through Proto-Eastern South Slavic (Macedo-Bulgarian, Old Church Slavonic)
::*It is inherited from a new word in one of the intermediate stages including Proto-Eastern South Slavic
::*It is borrowed from its closest relative, Bulgarian
::*It is borrowed from its Slavic neighbor, Serbian
::*It is borrowed from a more distant Slavic language, e.g., Russian
::*It is borrowed from an Indo-European, non-Slavic neighbor, Greek or Albanian
::*It is borrowed from a distant Indo-European language, e.g., English
::*It is borrowed from a non-Indo-European language, e.g., Turkish
::*It is a new creation within Macedonian using native word-forming processes (derivation, compounding, semantic shift, etc.)
::The evidence isn't always obvious, but usually clear in a linguistic analysis. BUT one must always consider the political agenda of the published etymology. In the (mostly) very scholarly Hungarian etymological dictionary produced in the 1960s it lists the origin of the words 'traktor' (tractor) and 'kombajn' (combine) as Russian, for example. So in comments about the origin of these Macedonian words, neither source discussed above sounds above repute as far as the political agenda is concerned. Unless there is a compelling reason that these words should be used in this article as examples of Russian loanwords, then they should be removed as from a questionable source. They may be Russian loanwords, they may be Bulgarian loanwords, they may be Serbian loanwords, they may be legitimate Macedonian constructions that Bulgarian nationalists claim for political reasons, they may be from Old Church Slavonic. They can be easily removed from the article since they don't really add significant content. --] (]) 17:49, 31 March 2020 (UTC)
::: That's ok as a solution, as specific POV is not pushed. Regarding the the "Bulgarian folk poetry" in the same section () I will not insist "Bulgarian" to be added, but just for information the Miladinov brothers did not worked in Macedonia - this state was not yet established (that happened 90+ years after that). They worked in the Ottoman Empire, released their work in the Austrian Empire and named it "Bulgarian folk songs" (having in mind that "songs" means "poetry" in the present meaning). In a letter Dimitar Miladinov wrote - ''"In fulfilling your recommendations, I spare no effort to encourage the development of the Bulgarian language and Bulgarian folk songs ... Meanwhile, my efforts for our Bulgarian language and Bulgarian folk songs according to your order are very great. I continue to keep my promises to your mercy, because we Bulgarians, spontaneously strive for the truth"''. --] (]) 20:59, 31 March 2020 (UTC)
::::You know exactly what I meant by Macedonia. They worked in the region of Macedonia, whatever it was called at the time. Read the Misplaced Pages article on the brothers (]) and the very first sentence says "in the region of Macedonia". They were working with the Macedonian dialects of Macedo-Bulgarian exclusively, not Bulgarian ones. That's why they were honored by Macedonian nationalists. Remember that the label "Bulgarian" during the 19th century often was just a label for the entire Macedo-Bulgarian dialect chain, not a scientific statement that Bulgarian = Macedonian. They may have called them "Bulgarian tales", but the language that they collected them in was Macedonian. --] (]) 23:36, 31 March 2020 (UTC)
::::: So, Dimitar Miladiov claims he's Bulgarian, he wrote in Bulgarian language and collected Bulgarian folk songs (all according to himself) and yet, it's a problem to call this "Bulgarian folk poetry", only becase he and his brother worked in the geographical region of Macedonia? --] (]) 20:09, 1 April 2020 (UTC)
::::::If you are not capable of understanding the difference between scientific reality and political claims, then please refrain from posting here. It doesn't matter what those brothers said they were doing. Period. They were admittedly part of a Bulgarian nationalist movement and made no apologies for it. They were using the labels that supported their agenda. But the scientific reality is that they were in Macedonia collecting folk tales from the local people in the local dialect. Today we recognize that those dialects in Macedonia are distinct from the dialects of Bulgaria and we call them "Macedonian" now. To revert to the political POV of the brothers and to push 19th century labeling that supports a modern Bulgarian agenda, is violating Misplaced Pages's NPOV policy. We are trying to keep this article NPOV and to scrub the major Bulgarian POV that has infected this article over the years. Unlike other editors who are supporting the removal of the heavy-handed Bulgarian POV, you are trying to preserve the Bulgarian-heavy-handedness of the past. If that's the direction you want to go, then you are part of the problem, not the solution. --] (]) 23:01, 1 April 2020 (UTC)
::::::: I added it in the most possible neutral way, by adding directly the name of the work ] and you reverted it claiming it's a POV. How could a name be POV? The reality is that their work is called '''Bulgarian Folk Songs''' which is not a political claim - it's a fact. ''"They were using the labels that supported their agenda."'' - who said that? The folk songs they collected were not only from the region of Macedonia, but from ], Srednogorie and other regions. That's why they named them '''Bulgarian Folk Songs'''. The dialects has nothing to do with the songs as well, as I can write Bulgarian folk songs in any dialect or language I want - this will not change them to British or German folk songs. Violation of NPOV is removing the name of the work '''Bulgarian Folk Songs''' and replacing it with "folk poetry", avoiding the word Bulgarian, which may be according to the teachings of the Macedonism, but is not neutral at all. You are trying to force a specific POV, while I'm adding directly the name of the collection of songs they did - ''']'''. Again, how could the name of the work ('''Bulgarian Folk Songs''') be a POV?
::::::::You clearly have no understanding of the nature of POV. Calling these Macedonian folk songs "Bulgarian" just because the Bulgarian nationalists who recorded them in the 19th century called them "Bulgarian" is the epitome of POV. The majority of what they recorded were Macedonian without any doubt in the scientific world (except for in the Bulgarian world, of course). --] (]) 03:05, 2 April 2020 (UTC)
::::::::: ], when the collection was recorded there were neither ethnic Macedonians, nor Macedonian language, and the very name Macedonia was still unpopular. Moreover this collection encompasses also songs collected without the borders of the modern region called Macedonia, and without North Macedonia itself. In some of the collected folk songs the characters are called Bulgarian, but there are no Macedonian characters in them. The collectors identified their language, ethnicity and country of origin as Bulgarian. They called the collection Bulgarian Folk Songs. Just putting modern ethnic, linguistic ans geographic distinctions into the past is also biased POV. ] (]) 09:46, 2 April 2020 (UTC)
::::::::::], you don't understand my point. My point is that the dialects that later coalesced into modern Macedonian were '''''already''''' distinct from the dialects that coalesced into modern Bulgarian in the 19th century. There was already dialect diversity within Macedo-Bulgarian so to call all of them "Bulgarian" is POV and misleading to readers who then assume that modern Bulgarian is intended and that Macedonian is somehow a fictional construct of the 20th century. It is not. Labelling these Macedonian dialects "Bulgarian" and making a purposeful edit to force the word "Bulgarian" into the sentence when it is '''''completely unnecessary''''' in the context of the paragraph is POV in the extreme and quintessential ]y editing. Had I replaced the word "Bulgarian" with "Macedonian", that would also be POV and ]y. I did not. The NPOV version of the sentence is to simply say that there was a movement within the Macedonian language to replace borrowed Russian words with older forms that were found in the Macedonian poems recorded by the brothers in the 19th century. They were, indeed, Macedonian forms because they were recorded from the Macedonian dialects, whether the brothers used the word "Macedonian" or not or whether they used the word "Bulgarian" or not. The brothers were from Macedonia and they recorded Macedonian dialects (obviously it wasn't modern Macedonian, but one of the dialects that later coalesced into modern Macedonian). It doesn't matter if they also recorded 19th Bulgarian dialects as well. The point of the paragraph is that modern Macedonian replaced Russian loanwords with archaic forms from the Macedonian dialects recorded in the 19th century by the brothers. So to draw irrelevant attention to the title of the brothers' book for no other reason than to put the word "Bulgarian" into the sentence is POV pushing and misleading to our readers. --] (]) 10:18, 2 April 2020 (UTC)
:::::::::::I obviously haven't read the poems in the original language, but from what I've read about the brothers, they even recognized the difference in the dialects by referring to the Macedonian dialects as "Western Bulgarian". These are just labels, of course. Our modern label for their "Western Bulgarian" is "Macedonian". So they already recognized that the Macedonian dialects were different than the Bulgarian dialects within the Macedo-Bulgarian dialect chain. That makes it even more inappropriate POV-pushing to shoehorn the word "Bulgarian" artificially into the sentence. --] (]) 10:33, 2 April 2020 (UTC)
::::::::: ''Calling these Macedonian folk songs "Bulgarian"...'' As you can see, with my last contribution that you reverted, I added the name of the work since this is the most NPOV way. With this contribution I'm not calling this songs with any name. --] (]) 10:39, 2 April 2020 (UTC)
::::::::: What you're doing with your disruptive behaviour (reverting every contribution that you do not like) is not different than the communist revisionism that was implemented in the Socialist Republic of Macedonia and that they continue to do on a smaller extend in North Macedonia - trying to remove every word "Bulgarian" or to replace it with something else, just to illustrate your Macedonistic POV. --] (]) 10:53, 2 April 2020 (UTC)
:::::::::: And honestly, is not any different from what you are doing. Trying to remove every 'Macedonian' adjective and replace it with 'Bulgarian'. So please, StanProg, instead of pretending to be a victim here, stop with your POV Bulgarian agenda. Taivo is actually someone who is not from the Balkans and is not connected to the region (except his linguistical expertise ofc). But, it's not hard for him to realize your "Bulgarization" of every single article related to Macedonia. Please take your frustrations elsewhere and try to be more neutral towards the outside world as we are all trying here on Misplaced Pages. — <span style="text-shadow:#CCC 0.1em 0.3em 0.3em; font-family: Trebuchet MS">]]</span> 11:13, 2 April 2020 (UTC)
:::::::::::], the '''''only''''' reason you added the name of the work was to call the language "Bulgarian". Period. Don't play stupid or innocent. You are neither in this case. --] (]) 13:04, 2 April 2020 (UTC)
:::::::::::: {{ping|Tomica}} TaivoLinguist is pro-Macedonian/anti-Bulgarian. You can see our discussions from 2008 at ] where I had to step back, because he didn't wanted to move even an inch from his opinion. This is what he's doing at the moment as well - not a single attempt toward a consensus. I added Bulgarian, he reverted, I started a discussion and added the NPOV name of the work, he again reverted it. He usually counts on a Macedonian editors like you, DD1997DD & Beat of the tapan to support him and that's how the communist-era Macedonistic POV is being pushed. The fact is that the work is called ''']''' and this can't be POV. --] (]) 13:39, 2 April 2020 (UTC)
::::::::::::: Can you please stop addressing Macedonian editors as we are some brainwashed "communist" idiots who forgot "that they are Bulgarian"? If you blindly believe in that, continue, but don't try to teach me history here. Honestly, if you again mention us in that context, I am going to report you. No one here is pushing anything, except maybe you and your friend Jingiby, and that's not hard to see (people should just check out your contribution history). As per Taivo, why would he be a pro-Macedonian? He just has his opinions and believes which supports. And wow, imagine you had to step back, how unusual of you and your POV pro-Bulgarian agenda. — <span style="text-shadow:#CCC 0.1em 0.3em 0.3em; font-family: Trebuchet MS">]]</span> 15:16, 2 April 2020 (UTC)
:::::::::::: {{ping|TaivoLinguist}} The only reason I added it, because I work toward a consensus (something that you're avoiding to do and trying to force your anti-Bulgarian POV by constant reverting of all my contributions) by using the neutral name of the mentioned work. I will ask you for 3rd time, how could a name of a literary work that is mentioned in the article be POV and isn't removing of the name of the work just because it contains the word "Bulgarian" in it a POV? Please, take your time, look into the discussion and see who is working toward a consensus and who is constantly reverting, at some points in violation of the Misplaced Pages principles. --] (]) 13:56, 2 April 2020 (UTC)
:::::::::::::{{ping|StanProg}}. There is so much nonsense in your post it's hard to know where to start. Why is your edit a massive case of POV-pushing? Because the title of this 19th-century work is completely and totally irrelevant to the content being discussed.
::::::::::::::*Fact: The brothers did the majority of their work in the region of Macedonia and collected the material in the local dialect of Macedo-Bulgarian
::::::::::::::*Fact: The brothers recognized that the dialects of the region where they worked were already distinct from eastern dialects so they called them "Western Bulgarian"
::::::::::::::*Fact: Since these dialects are today called "Macedonian" and not "Bulgarian" we do not rely on 19th-century labels for things, so calling them "Bulgarian" is unscientific
::::::::::::::*Fact: The paragraph cites the brothers' work, not because of the value of the title of their work, but because they collected archaic forms in the Macedonian dialects
::::::::::::::*Fact: Macedonian linguists wanted to replace Russian loanwords with archaic forms and they used the brothers' work with 19th-century Macedonian dialects as a source
:::::::::::::Given these incontrovertible facts, '''''adding''''' the word "Bulgarian" either in terms of labeling the Macedonian dialects or in terms of "innocently" citing the title of the brothers' book is a violation of ] and a serious case of ]y editing to make your point that you are a Bulgarian nationalist and will always push a Bulgarian political agenda. I have not added the word "Macedonian" a single time. Your protestations that "I'm just trying to compromise and adding the title of the work" rings utterly hollow and is a thinly-veiled conceit that you are somehow editing within Misplaced Pages NPOV standards. You have not compromised one single, solitary inch. You simply added the word "Bulgarian" in a different format. The brothers' use of 19th century Bulgarian linguistic labels is irrelevant in this context. The facts are clear that most of their work was among Macedonian dialects (no matter what they called them) and to push the 19th-century label "Bulgarian" on those dialects is a linguistic lie and Bulgarian nationalist propaganda. --] (]) 15:36, 2 April 2020 (UTC)
::::::::::::::I simply cannot let this stupid statement stand without comment: "The fact is that the work is called Bulgarian Folk Songs and this can't be POV." Facts cannot be POV or NPOV. What is POV in this case is using the fact in a place '''''where it is not relevant to the context'''''. By using that fact in that particular place, you are simply pushing the word "Bulgarian" into a place where it does not belong. '''''That''''' is POV, your '''''use''''' of the fact in a particular place where you want to say "Bulgarian" outright, but have been blocked from doing so. It is a propaganda trick that might fool inexperienced editors, but not me. --] (]) 16:14, 2 April 2020 (UTC)
:::::::::::::::Here's how I know the truth of my comment about your POV editing: If the title of the brothers' work had been "Folk Songs from the Balkans" you would never have suggested adding it. The thought would never have crossed your mind. You only want to add it because it says "Bulgarian". '''''That''''' is the essence of POV editing. --] (]) 19:46, 2 April 2020 (UTC)
::::::::::::::: The book that is object of the sentence is ], but we can't indicate that, because it contains the word Bulgarian? So we will strip the reader of the ability to just go to the article about the book, just because it is named '''Bulgarian Folk Songs'''? Would you added the book name and link if it was named "Macedonian Folk Songs"? I think we both know the answer of that question. I choose not to use the term "Bulgarian folk poetry", because it's POV according to you (although that the Bulgarian brothers, writing in Bulgarian language collected Bulgarian folk song - all according to themselvs), but you can't accept the fact that using the book name with the link is NPOV. I'm not taking any side, but simply adding the full name of the book and link to the article, while you have a problem with the first word of the book. So we will write about the book, but we'll not mention it's name and we'll not put a link to the article, because you think this is POV? I'm not "blocked from doing so", but I will not go edit warring, just because my POV is different, unlike you. At at last, I'm far from Bulgarian nationalist and this is '''an insult''' to me. --] (]) 20:02, 2 April 2020 (UTC)
::::::::::::::::: Is this last sentence a joke or something? I mean, it doesn't take a lot; just a quick glance through your comments and edits to realize that you are indeed a POV pushing nationalist. If you weren't, a situation like this wouldn't matter that much and you would not create a big fuss over something that's bizarre and irrelevant in the context of the article. But, unfortunately, here we are, fighting nationalism in the 21st century. — <span style="text-shadow:#CCC 0.1em 0.3em 0.3em; font-family: Trebuchet MS">]]</span> 21:03, 2 April 2020 (UTC)
:::::::::::::::: ''''That is the essence of POV editing.'''': I understand. My thoughts/intentions are POV, but the name of the book that I added is NPOV, because this is just the name of the book that the text is related to? We're discussing the specific text, not my thoughts/intentions, because you just can't know what they are. If it was named "Folk Songs from the Balkans" I would have added it as well. I have no problem for example adding the play name ], if it's subject of a paragraph - point me an article that talks about it and I will gladly add it. That's the difference between my contributions and yours - I would like the readers to have all the information and link to the work in subject, while you would like this only if does not have something "Bulgarian" in it. --] (]) 20:13, 2 April 2020 (UTC)
:::::::::::::::::Your notion that adding the name of a book that's not actually under discussion isn't POV? LOL. Your notion of what is and is not POV is bizarre to say the least. The paragraph in which you want to push your Bulgarian nationalism isn't about books or even that particular book, it's about replacing Russian loanwords with archaic Macedonian vocabulary. Pushing that book name, even though it isn't the subject of the paragraph or even the sentence, is POV pushing. And I don't believe you when you claim that you would put the name of the book in there even if it weren't named "Bulgarian". How do I know this? Because you '''''never inserted the name in the past''''' until we removed the word "Bulgarian" from the text. Then, all of a sudden, it becomes extremely important to you to add the name of the book. That's simply pushing your Bulgarian POV in another form. You're trying to tell us that you aren't pushing a Bulgarian POV when every single edit you make to this article inserts or preserves the word "Bulgarian" in each of the hundred or more places where it occurs in an article on '''''Macedonian'''''. Your crocodile tears over not being able to include the word "Bulgarian" via the name of the book aren't fooling anyone about your underlying aim. --] (]) 21:40, 2 April 2020 (UTC)
:::::::::::::::::: "...which was found in certain examples of folk poetry collected by the Miladinov Brothers...". Miladinov Brothers have released only one book with collection of folk poetry - ], so these "certain examples" are from exactly this book. This book is the primary subject of the sentence, but since it has "Bulgarian" his it's name, you're removing it. After you did that huge edit (), I reviewed the contribution and added Bulgarian, which seemed pretty normal since the collection of the folk poetry is actually called "Bulgarian Folk Songs", then you claimed it's POV, so I decided (instead of reverting the change, like you usually do), to make it even more NPOV and added the actual name of the book. There's no POV to mention the name of the book with a link to existing article. As you can see, since then we're discussing the NPOV of the section and I have not done even a single revert of any content (unlike you). "Every single edit" - I've done 2, adding Bulgarian so it will be more concrete and when you reverted me, I added the name of the book - "Bulgarian Folk Songs", which you also reverted. So who is pushing what? What is the problem of adding the name of the book that is the primary subject of the sentence? --] (]) 22:05, 2 April 2020 (UTC)
:::::::::::::::::::In other words, every single edit that you have made is to add the word "Bulgarian". --] (]) 22:14, 2 April 2020 (UTC)
You are also working under an entirely unscientific worldview because of your insistence that since the brothers called the language of their folk tales "Bulgarian", even though they are primarily from Macedonian dialects, that we must preserve that usage uncritically. No scientist does that--using 19th century terminology for things. No one calls sodium "natrium" anymore, no one calls potassium "kalium", etc. No one calls Ukrainian "Little Russian" and Belarusian "White Russian". Indeed, no one even uses the term "Byelorussian" for Belarusian and that change is even more recent. So your insistence that we call the Macedonian dialects that the brothers recorded in the 19th century "Bulgarian" just because they did is utterly ridiculous and completely unscientific. There's simply no reason for your insistence other than rabid Bulgarian POV-pushing. --] (]) 22:32, 2 April 2020 (UTC)
===Acceptable Compromise===
Here is the current text in question:
:*Serbianisms and Bulgarianisms, which had become common due to the influence of these languages in the region were rejected in favor of words from native dialects and ]s. One example was the word for "event", ''настан'' {{IPA|}}, which was found in certain examples of folk poetry collected by the ] in the 19th century,...
If you're going to insist on inserting the book title, then it '''''must''''' be contextualized in the following way:
:*Serbianisms and Bulgarianisms, which had become common due to the influence of these languages in the region were rejected in favor of words from native dialects and ]s. One example was the word for "event", ''настан'' {{IPA|}}, which was found in certain examples from folk poetry in Macedonian dialects collected by the ] in the 19th century (who called the Macedonian dialects "Western Bulgarian") and included in their book ],...
Just throwing the title of the book in there without contextualizing that the dialects they were recording as "Western Bulgarian" were Macedonian dialects of Macedo-Bulgarian is POV of the grossest order. This contextualization preserves the precious title of the book (in your POV) while letting the readers know without any confusion that there were also Macedonian folk tales in that book despite its title. --] (]) 22:12, 2 April 2020 (UTC)
: With all my good faith that have left, and willingness to find a compromise solution, the only thing that could be removed from the proposal is the duplication of "Macedonian" regarding the dialects in the 2nd sentence. It could be ''who called the dialects "Western Bulgarian"'', as it's clear that it's about the Macedonian dialects that are mentioned before in the same sentence. --] (]) 22:41, 2 April 2020 (UTC)
::Done. --] (]) 23:31, 2 April 2020 (UTC)
::: I still find that addition cumbersome. What those dialects were called by the collectors of those folksongs is completely extraneous to the topic of the passage. ''Of course'' the language of the folk songs was the language that the standardization movement was all about, and ''of course'' that language, before the standardization, was referred to as whatever it had been referred to at the time – We are aleady stating that that was "Bulgarian", so why the obsession with cramming that info in here once more? The only important thing about those folksongs in this context is that they were ''local''. But there's another issue about the passage that strikes me as potentially POV-ish, and where I would find objections from the Bulgarian editors more understandable. Talking about "Serbianisms and Bulgarianisms, which had become common due to the influence of these languages" seems to imply these were alien, foreign influences. To make sense of these statements, we might want to clarify that these were "alien" not insofar as they were Bulgarian as such, but (if anything) insofar as they were associated with the Bulgarian standard rather than the local dialects. So, I'd suggest replacing "Serbianisms and Bulgarianisms" with "words that were associated with the Serbian or Bulgarian standard languages". ] ] 06:09, 3 April 2020 (UTC)
::::Good call. I'll make the change. --] (]) 10:48, 3 April 2020 (UTC)

== Article content replaced again ==
After all these discussions and improvements ] has overriden all the work since the blocking of the article, the improvement, the consensus information, etc with his own sandbox. {{ping|DD1997DD}} Could you please check the talk page before doing massive changes? --] (]) 12:46, 3 April 2020 (UTC)
:Yes, the consensus for now is '''option 2'''. ] (]) 12:57, 3 April 2020 (UTC)
:: The question was "which version of the article is better", not should I replace the whole article and with my sandbox. We already worked on the article and as you can see above we had e consensus on specific section and you override them all with your sandbox. These should be done section by section, with a discussion and consensus, just like Taivo started to apply the changes. Now you've just reverted all our work, efforts and consensus content. --] (]) 13:04, 3 April 2020 (UTC)
::: I assume "better article" implies that it is more presentable and should go to the main page. I did not see a relevant discussion - I only saw you being disruptive and trying to distract others from all the problems that were present in the article. ] (]) 13:09, 3 April 2020 (UTC)
: You had a consensus on a specific sentence. Don't make a drama out of it. Just copy it in the article per the consensus. — <span style="text-shadow:#CCC 0.1em 0.3em 0.3em; font-family: Trebuchet MS">]]</span> 13:14, 3 April 2020 (UTC)
:: It's a whole section. The first sentence was changed (based on ] comments). The second was changed and some text was removed before that based on my discussion with ]. All this was overrden. Still I don't see a voting on replacing the whole content, but one on "which is better". --] (]) 13:20, 3 April 2020 (UTC)
::: Then re-do it. I am pretty sure you know how to navigate a history section on a Misplaced Pages article. — <span style="text-shadow:#CCC 0.1em 0.3em 0.3em; font-family: Trebuchet MS">]]</span> 13:23, 3 April 2020 (UTC)
:::: Assuming is one thing, a consensus and voting on replacing a whole article is another thing. After all the article was blocked after your previous attempt to replace the content with your own without a consensus on that replacement. Your actions are disrupting the progress. We already had a consensus on specific content, (look the section above) and you've overriden it based on a voting with misleading purpose (as we can see clearly from the question and the actions). --] (]) 13:20, 3 April 2020 (UTC)
::::: I am not reverting anything as I am completely convinced that the sandbox version of the article is at least ten times better than how it was before. Four other users completely agreed with me. You are the only one protesting. The changes are there to stay until I see that more people vote for Option 1. ] (]) 13:24, 3 April 2020 (UTC)
:::::: The question is not if it's better or not. You can't just override the works of other editors, including ones that said that your sandbox version is better, based on misleading RfC question. More people vote that your version is better, not that your version should override the current article completely. That's two different things. Here's what was improved since the article was unblocked: . All these efforts and improvements are blindly overriden by your sandbox version. --] (]) 13:29, 3 April 2020 (UTC)
: {{ping|Tomica}} '''Then re-do it.''' The problem is not of redoing few changes. The problem is not even mostly in in the text that overrides the article. The problem is that based on misleading question in RfC, the whole article content was replaced. The problem is that the work of multiple editors since the unblocking of the article is erased: . The problem is that although this could have been done section by section with discussion and consensus (if such are raised), this was done again by brute-forcing the article content. Such behaviour is unproductive and is disrupting the progress that we've gained since the protection of the article. This all could have been done step by step, so it's more stable in time. I'm too many years Wikimedian to know that such behaviour usually leads to more problems in future and this is what I'm trying to prevent. --] (]) 13:59, 3 April 2020 (UTC)
::{{ping|StanProg}} you're the only person panicking. I'll just replace the miniscule changes that we had made. "All our work" was almost entirely you trying to force your POV into the article and we changed one sentence. --] (]) 14:06, 3 April 2020 (UTC)
::: I'm not panicking, just when we finally started to have a productive discussion and contributing, again the same person based on misleading RfC questions brute-forces the article. "All our work" are these changes that are being done for a week, from the unprotection until the article replacement: . I can count about 10 different persons contributing during that time which work was overriden. It's not the content, it the behaviour. --] (]) 14:12, 3 April 2020 (UTC)
:::: Cut the drama, please. We don't need this in our lives right now. We are dealing with enough drama in the outside world with corona. There you go, the consensus is back in the article. I don't know why are you creating this fake panic fuss when it only took 2 edits for everything to come back to its place (last point where we discussed it). — <span style="text-shadow:#CCC 0.1em 0.3em 0.3em; font-family: Trebuchet MS">]]</span> 14:23, 3 April 2020 (UTC)
::::: I don't even know why users even started the discussion about the use of a Russian word by 1 author when 1. the source provided is unreliable (misirkov.org) 2. it never mentions the word ''собитие'' 3. it is a SINGLE WORD that doesn't prove anything. Mentioning collections, novels and literary work in that section is also something that should not have been done in the first place - that section should focus on the lexicon of the language not the language used by individual cherry-picked authors. ] (]) 14:30, 3 April 2020 (UTC)
::::::], "finally started to have a productive discussion and contributing" makes me laugh. That "productive discussion" consisted entirely of you complaining about not getting to put the word "Bulgarian" into play in a single sentence, trying to justify why it wasn't POV, including your misuse of a POV template. The result was something which Future and I agree is a nightmare sentence that repeats information that has already been stated, but at least avoids your out-of-context insertion of the word "Bulgarian" in the resulting sentence. If that's your idea of "productive discussion and contributing", then I applaud what DD1997DD did to short-circuit months of listening to you "productively discussing" every sentence. Now if there is something that you want to discuss "section by section" to improve on the new text, then we can listen and consider. In the end, DD1997DD pointed out (above) that the example isn't even accurate so I removed the whole sentence. --] (]) 14:32, 3 April 2020 (UTC)
::::::: {{ping|TaivoLinguist}} Take your time and read carefully how and why the template ] is being used, also check when it can be removed and you could see that you're the one that you had no reason to remove it. Yet, trying to hide the POV issues, you removed it several times. At the end, the only consensus that we come up to (proposed by you) was after that removed by yourself, obviously by "rethinking" your compromise in style "when there's no sentence, there's no problem". And by "productive discussion" I meant your only attempt on a compromise solution at "Acceptable Compromise"- the rest was mostly "the book name is POV and period". --] (]) 16:25, 3 April 2020 (UTC)
::::::::Your use of the POV template was inappropriate because you wanted to insert one word that had nothing to do with the paragraph as a whole. The POV template is for a paragraph that is rife with POV problems, not because you weren't getting your way about inserting a POV word. --] (]) 18:09, 3 April 2020 (UTC)
:::::::::], I would like you to assume good faith while interacting with other editors. Thank you. ] (]) 18:13, 3 April 2020 (UTC)

== Consonants section ==

I am currently more or less satisfied with the length of all sections in this article except for the consonants section. I feel like that section is a bit disordered and does not present a lot of phonological properties of Macedonian. I would like it to look more like the respective section in the ] article but I personally don't have the knowledge to do that. There is a but I just don't see how to present it. I remember {{ping|User:TaivoLinguist}} told me that this section in language articles is usually messy on Wiki and tries to present too much info so I really don't know how to approach it. Any help is more than welcome. ] (]) 10:04, 4 April 2020 (UTC)
::{{u|DD1997DD}} imo "too much" info is not bad. If it gets too long, we just move it into ] and congrats you will have just helped expand that article, whose consonants section is too small. --] (])


The article currently says that "Macedonian developed out of the western dialects of the East South Slavic dialect continuum, whose earliest recorded form is Old Church Slavonic. During much of its history, this dialect continuum was called 'Bulgarian'".
== Nationalism among the South Slavic people? ==


The article cites the following source for this claim: Dennis P. Hupchick, "Conflict and Chaos in Eastern Europe", Palgrave Macmillan, p. 143. You can read the source for free here: https://archive.org/details/conflictchaosine00hupc. This claim should be removed because page 143 of the cited source simply does not support it.] (]) 17:14, 1 July 2024 (UTC)
With this passage is made an attempt to change the idea of the author whose article is quoted. Raymond Detrez does not mention the Southern Slavs anywhere in the cited article “Between the Ottoman Legacy and the Temptation of the West: Bulgarians Coming to Terms with the Greeks.” In the source are mentioned explicitly Bulgarians, neither Croats, Serbs, Montenegrins, nor Macedonians or other South Slavs. The national revival among them was quite different. The topic there is the Bulgarian-Greek rivalry in the field of religious and culture based on the growing Bulgarian nationalism. Moreover, Detrez has other articles on the subject, where he argues that at least until the middle of the 19th century the Macedonian Slavs were full participants in the Bulgarian National Revival, without any differences between both communities. He claims these groups had common revival and Macedonian Slavs were part from Bulgarian National Revival. For more see: The Bulgarian-Macedonian Divergence: An Attempted Elucidation (pp. 165–193). In: Raymond Detrez and Pieter Plas, eds. Developing Cultural Identity in the Balkans. Please stop illogical edit-war. Thanks. ] (]) 12:08, 12 May 2020 (UTC)
: And according to the cited source, what do you think the author says? He definitely has an idea, and since it can't be quoted verbatim, to avoid infringing his copyright, it should be written what he meant. ] (]) 08:46, 2 July 2024 (UTC)
::There is no need to include this source. It states the Greek and Bulgarian nationalist position that the Macedonian language is a dialect of Bulgarian. This view is not widely held among ] today.
::To quote the leading scholar of Macedonia Loring M. Danforth in his article "Claims to Macedonian Identity: The Macedonian Question and the Breakup of Yugoslavia", ''Anthropology Today'', 9:4 (1993), p. 8:
:::"Similarly, the Greek claim that there is no linguistic evidence to support the view that Macedonian is a distinct language and not just a dialect of Bulgarian ignores the widely accepted sociolinguistic insight that the decision as to whether a particular variety of speech constitutes a language or a dialect is always based on political rather than linguistic criteria. The existence of the Macedonian language is accepted by linguists everywhere in the world except in Serbia, Bulgaria and Greece."
::Put another way, the mainstream view among ] is that ]. Both Macedonian and Bulgarian are dialects within the South Slavic dialect continuum that became languages when they "acquired armies" (i.e. became sponsored and standardized by a government).] (]) 13:06, 2 July 2024 (UTC)
:"Should we erase history in order to appease my nationalistic POV" is what you're asking.
:No. No, we shouldn't. There is very clear consensus on how the Macedonian language came to be and was codified, erasing the historicity of this process just because you don't like it is not how Misplaced Pages works. ] (]) 17:45, 2 July 2024 (UTC)
::I don't have a nationalistic POV. Please read ], which you are obviously violating.
::Regarding the "clear consensus", I have provided an authoritative source supporting my suggested change. Per ], the article should be based on such sources. You have presented no sources, merely wild accusations and uninformed assertions.
::I would appreciate input from editors capable of rational argument! ] (]) 19:18, 2 July 2024 (UTC)
:::You have a very clear nationalistic POV. You have presented no argument about the explicit exclusion of the information that the terminology for the dialect continuum was "Bulgarian" in the past. In fact, in your argument, you specifically lied, right here: "It states the Greek and Bulgarian nationalist position that the Macedonian language is a dialect of Bulgarian" - the article includes no such statement and the source is not added in support of this statement. This is simply a lie.
:::The fact that the Macedonian language was developed from a dialect continuum called Bulgarian by both linguists and common people, both inside and outside of the region of Macedonia is just that - a fact. It's consensus. Erasing that fact erases the process of development of the language and serves no scientific or encyclopedic purpose; instead, it serves only a POV purpose. You have supported your nationalistic POV with a source and quote that support no such thing - the only thing they support is that Macedonian exists today and now, which nobody on Misplaced Pages disputes. Neither your source, nor your quote support your agenda to erase the consensus that the continuum was, in fact, called Bulgarian in the past.
:::Also, an account that has 30 edits in the past 3 days all ultra-specifically connected to a single nationalistic POV and has been warned numerous times about disruptive editing is very much questionable regarding good faith. ] (]) 20:00, 2 July 2024 (UTC)
::::The article currently cites page 143 of ''Conflict and Chaos in Eastern Europe'' by Dennis C. Hupchick to support the claim that the East South Slavic dialect continuum was historically called Bulgarian. This page ''says no such thing'' - the article is lying about the content of the source. Anyone interested can read the source ] to confirm this.
::::I've been editing Macedonia-related articles because there is an ''epidemic'' of dishonesty about the content of sources on such articles. I have no particular view about the Macedonian language, but I strongly believe that Misplaced Pages shouldn't lie about the content of sources!
::::If you want to make the claim that the East South Slavic dialect continuum was historically called "Bulgarian" in the article, please provide a source. If this is indeed a "consensus" and "fact", this should be easy, although you have failed to do it thus far!
::::As I made clear above, it is the Hupchick book that adopts the standard Greek and Bulgarian nationalist position that Macedonian is a dialect of Bulgarian. As Danforth shows, this position is widely rejected by scholars today.] (]) 20:49, 2 July 2024 (UTC)
:::::The quote provided in the article is literally verbatim the same as in the book and supports the statement in the article. What is now known as East South Slavic continuum was historically known simply as Bulgarian language. Once again, you are clearly lying. In fact, here is the entire quote on the page:
:::::"An interesting historical argument arose in support of an independent Macedonian nationality that ultimately reached its maturity only after World War II and Tito's construction of a federated Communist Yugoslavia composed of six independent "historic" republics, of which one was Macedonia. The Macedonian nationalists quite simply stole all of the Bulgarian historical argument concerning Macedonia, substituting "Macedonian" for "Bulgarian" ethnic tags in the story. Thus Kuber formed a "Macedonian" tribal alliance in the late seventh century; Kliment and Naum were "Macedonians" and not "Bulgarians"; the medieval archbishopric-patriarchate of Ohrid, which Kliment led, was a "Macedonian," not a "Bulgarian" independent church, as shown by the persistence of Glagolitic letters in the region in the face of the Cyrillic that were spawned in Bulgaria; and the renowned Samuil led a great "Macedonian," rather than a "western Bulgarian," state against Byzantium (giving Slav Macedonia its apex in the historical sun). Under control of the revived Bulgarian state, and later under the Serb Dušan, the Macedonians had maintained their ethnic differences from their "foreign" masters, as demonstrated by their "king" Vukašin, who had died attempting to keep an independent Macedonia free from the Ottoman Turks. When ethnic-national consciousness reawakened among the Macedonian Slavs in the nineteenth century, the cultural revivalists, such as the Miladinov brothers, were consciously "Macedonian," and not "Bulgarian," in their efforts. The obviously plagiarized historical argument of the Macedonian nationalists for a separate Macedonian ethnicity could be supported only by linguistic reality, and that worked against them until the 1940s. Until a modern Macedonian literary language was mandated by the socialist-led partisan movement from Macedonia in 1944, most outside observers and linguists agreed with the Bulgarians in considering the vernacular spoken by the Macedonian Slavs as a western dialect of Bulgarian. In the interwar period (1918-39) the official language of Macedonia had been Serbian by compulsion, with the use of Bulgarian forbidden. The World War II socialist parti- sans in Macedonia proceeded to establish a commission to create the new "official" Macedonian literary language, which was presented to the world the following year (1945). From then on, it became the legal first language of the Macedonian Slavs, with Serbo-Croatian a recognized second language and Bulgarian officially proscribed... Led by the Skopje socialist linguist Blaže Koneski, and given international recognition in 1952 by Yale-produced Harvard Slavic professor Horace Lunt, the artificially created and structured Macedonian literary language ultimately provided the socialist-mandated ethnic validity for an independent Macedonian nationality. Over four decades of state socialization and education of Macedonian Slav children in that concept may have succeeded in creating such a creature in actual fact."
:::::Given that the entire quote is far more damning to the Macedonian position and what is presented here on Misplaced Pages is very, very tame in comparison, and given you insist on sticking to the sources, how about we edit the article per source? Macedonian is an "artificially created" language based on a "Bulgarian dialect" with a specific "nationalistic purpose" of nation-building supported by "obviously plagiarized historical argument"...
:::::The quote is verbatim the same and the text is very clear.
:::::"I've been editing Macedonia-related articles because there is an epidemic of dishonesty" - thanks for so eloquently proving my point by confessing your POV and your own lack of good faith. ] (]) 21:36, 2 July 2024 (UTC)
::::::What your quote shows is that Hupchick states the standard Greek and Bulgarian nationalist position on the Macedonian language, as I said above. However, this position is widely rejected by linguists and historians and so should receive little weight in the article, per ]. On the rejection of this position, please see:
::::::*Loring M. Danforth, "Claims to Macedonian Identity: The Macedonian Question and the Breakup of Yugoslavia", ''Anthropology Today'', 9:4 (1993), p. 8, as quoted above.
::::::*], "Macedonian Language and Nationalism During the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries", ''Balkanistica'' 2 (1975), pp. 83 - 98.
::::::*Victor Friedman, "The Sociolinguistics of Literary Macedonian", ''International Journal of the Sociology of Language'' 52 (1985), pp. 32 - 35.
::::::*Victor Friedman, ''Macedonian'' (Munich: Lincolm Europe, 2002), pages 5 - 6.
::::::I see you've abandoned the claim about the East Slavic dialect continuum!] (]) 22:29, 2 July 2024 (UTC)
:::::::An academic with a position you don't like doesn't make him a nationalist. Even more nonsensical is your claim he's a nationalist for two nations at the same time. I don't see the need to continue this pointless discussion when you confessed your POV and lack of good faith. The source is valid and cited correctly. ] (]) 13:53, 3 July 2024 (UTC)

Revision as of 09:16, 10 July 2024

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Inaccurate maps

Both the maps of the distribution on the first part of the page and in the dialects part are unsourced and frankly inaccurate, to add up the first shows random dots all over Greece where supposed minority speakers live but this is unsourced and really just false. 194.30.254.75 (talk) 10:05, 6 September 2023 (UTC)

I tagged the first map. As for the map of dialects, I think there was controversy over it and it was supposed to be updated, but this has not happened. StephenMacky1 (talk) 10:58, 6 September 2023 (UTC)
According to modern Western sociolinguists, the dispute where the border between Bulgarian and Macedonian runs is entirely irrelevant from a modern perspective, as it fails to take into consideration the ethnic and linguistic identity of the speakers. According to Peter Trudgill, the question whether Bulgarian and Macedonian are distinct languages or dialects of a single language cannot be resolved on a purely linguistic basis, but should rather take into account sociolinguistic criteria, i.e., ethnic and linguistic identity of the speakers. Jouko Lindstedt also opines that the dividing line between Macedonian and Bulgarian should be defined by the linguistic identity of the speakers, i.e., by the state border: Even Macedonian linguists as Božidar Vidoeski consider the eastern Macedonian dialects to be transitional to Bulgarian, including the Maleševo-Pirin dialect. According to Riki van Boeschoten, the Slavic dialects of Greek Macedonia are divided into three main dialects (Eastern, Central and Western), of which the Eastern dialect is used in the areas of Serres and Drama, and is closest to Bulgarian, the Western dialect is used in Florina and Kastoria, and is closest to Macedonian, the Central dialect is used in the area between Edessa and Salonica and is an intermediate between Macedonian and Bulgarian. Trudgill classifies certain peripheral dialects in the far east of Greek Macedonia as part of the Bulgarian language area and the rest as Macedonian dialects. Victor Friedman considers those Macedonian dialects, but particularly those spoken as west as Kilkis, to be transitional to Bulgarian. Per Lindsted the yat border splits the Eastern South Slavic (including the region of Macedonia) on a structural grounds and he has assumed that this isogloss that runs from Thessaloniki to Velingrad may be in fact the dividing isogloss between Bulgarian and Macedonian. In this way this map presents a biased or at least not neutral POV. Jingiby (talk) 15:55, 6 September 2023 (UTC)
The map can be moved to Political views on the Macedonian language. Same with the BAN map of dialects. I think it's best to treat fringe views as separate from the mainstream. StephenMacky1 (talk) 16:11, 6 September 2023 (UTC)

References

  1. Chambers, Jack; Trudgill, Peter (1998). Dialectology (2nd ed.). Cambridge University Press. pp. 7. Similarly, Bulgarian politicians often argue that Macedonian is simply a dialect of Bulgarian – which is really a way of saying, of course, that they feel Macedonia ought to be part of Bulgaria. From a purely linguistic point of view, however, such arguments are not resolvable, since dialect continua admit of more-or-less but not either-or judgements.
  2. Tomasz Kamusella, Motoki Nomachi, Catherine Gibson as ed., The Palgrave Handbook of Slavic Languages, Identities and Borders, Springer, 2016; ISBN 1137348399, p. 436.
  3. Vidoeski, Božo (2005). Dialects of Macedonian. Slavica. p. 33. ISBN 9780893573157. the northern border zone and the extreme southeast towards Bulgarian linguistic territory. It was here that the formation of transitional dialect belts between Macedonian and Bulgarian in the east, and Macedonian and Serbian in the north began.
  4. Boeschoten, Riki van (1993): Minority Languages in Northern Greece. Study Visit to Florina, Aridea, (Report to the European Commission, Brussels) "The Western dialect is used in Florina and Kastoria and is closest to the language used north of the border, the Eastern dialect is used in the areas of Serres and Drama and is closest to Bulgarian, the Central dialect is used in the area between Edessa and Salonica and forms an intermediate dialect"
  5. Ioannidou, Alexandra (1999). Questions on the Slavic Dialects of Greek Macedonia. Athens: Peterlang. pp. 59, 63. ISBN 9783631350652. In September 1993 ... the European Commission financed and published an interesting report by Riki van Boeschoten on the "Minority Languages in Northern Greece", in which the existence of a "Macedonian language" in Greece is mentioned. The description of this language is simplistic and by no means reflective of any kind of linguistic reality; instead it reflects the wish to divide up the dialects comprehensibly into geographical (i.e. political) areas. According to this report, Greek Slavophones speak the "Macedonian" language, which belongs to the "Bulgaro-Macedonian" group and is divided into three main dialects (Western, Central and Eastern) - a theory which lacks a factual basis. {{cite book}}: |journal= ignored (help)
  6. Trudgill P., 2000, "Greece and European Turkey: From Religious to Linguistic Identity". In: Stephen Barbour and Cathie Carmichael (eds.), Language and Nationalism in Europe, Oxford : Oxford University Press, p.259.
  7. Heine, Bernd; Kuteva, Tania (2005). Language Contact and Grammatical Change. Cambridge University Press. p. 118. ISBN 9780521608282. in the modern northern and eastern Macedonian dialects that are transitional to Serbo-Croatian and Bulgarian, e.g. in Kumanovo and Kukus/Kilkis, object reduplication occurs with less consistency than in the west-central dialects

"Diferences between the bulgarian and the macedonian language" listed at Redirects for discussion

The redirect Diferences between the bulgarian and the macedonian language has been listed at redirects for discussion to determine whether its use and function meets the redirect guidelines. Readers of this page are welcome to comment on this redirect at Misplaced Pages:Redirects for discussion/Log/2024 February 1 § Diferences between the bulgarian and the macedonian language until a consensus is reached. signed, Rosguill 17:43, 1 February 2024 (UTC)

Should the article say that the East South Slavic dialect continuum was historically called Bulgarian?

The article currently says that "Macedonian developed out of the western dialects of the East South Slavic dialect continuum, whose earliest recorded form is Old Church Slavonic. During much of its history, this dialect continuum was called 'Bulgarian'".

The article cites the following source for this claim: Dennis P. Hupchick, "Conflict and Chaos in Eastern Europe", Palgrave Macmillan, p. 143. You can read the source for free here: https://archive.org/details/conflictchaosine00hupc. This claim should be removed because page 143 of the cited source simply does not support it.Anonymoususer95 (talk) 17:14, 1 July 2024 (UTC)

And according to the cited source, what do you think the author says? He definitely has an idea, and since it can't be quoted verbatim, to avoid infringing his copyright, it should be written what he meant. Jingiby (talk) 08:46, 2 July 2024 (UTC)
There is no need to include this source. It states the Greek and Bulgarian nationalist position that the Macedonian language is a dialect of Bulgarian. This view is not widely held among WP:RS today.
To quote the leading scholar of Macedonia Loring M. Danforth in his article "Claims to Macedonian Identity: The Macedonian Question and the Breakup of Yugoslavia", Anthropology Today, 9:4 (1993), p. 8:
"Similarly, the Greek claim that there is no linguistic evidence to support the view that Macedonian is a distinct language and not just a dialect of Bulgarian ignores the widely accepted sociolinguistic insight that the decision as to whether a particular variety of speech constitutes a language or a dialect is always based on political rather than linguistic criteria. The existence of the Macedonian language is accepted by linguists everywhere in the world except in Serbia, Bulgaria and Greece."
Put another way, the mainstream view among WP:RS is that a language is a dialect with an army. Both Macedonian and Bulgarian are dialects within the South Slavic dialect continuum that became languages when they "acquired armies" (i.e. became sponsored and standardized by a government).Anonymoususer95 (talk) 13:06, 2 July 2024 (UTC)
"Should we erase history in order to appease my nationalistic POV" is what you're asking.
No. No, we shouldn't. There is very clear consensus on how the Macedonian language came to be and was codified, erasing the historicity of this process just because you don't like it is not how Misplaced Pages works. TzCher (talk) 17:45, 2 July 2024 (UTC)
I don't have a nationalistic POV. Please read WP:AGF, which you are obviously violating.
Regarding the "clear consensus", I have provided an authoritative source supporting my suggested change. Per WP:RS, the article should be based on such sources. You have presented no sources, merely wild accusations and uninformed assertions.
I would appreciate input from editors capable of rational argument! Anonymoususer95 (talk) 19:18, 2 July 2024 (UTC)
You have a very clear nationalistic POV. You have presented no argument about the explicit exclusion of the information that the terminology for the dialect continuum was "Bulgarian" in the past. In fact, in your argument, you specifically lied, right here: "It states the Greek and Bulgarian nationalist position that the Macedonian language is a dialect of Bulgarian" - the article includes no such statement and the source is not added in support of this statement. This is simply a lie.
The fact that the Macedonian language was developed from a dialect continuum called Bulgarian by both linguists and common people, both inside and outside of the region of Macedonia is just that - a fact. It's consensus. Erasing that fact erases the process of development of the language and serves no scientific or encyclopedic purpose; instead, it serves only a POV purpose. You have supported your nationalistic POV with a source and quote that support no such thing - the only thing they support is that Macedonian exists today and now, which nobody on Misplaced Pages disputes. Neither your source, nor your quote support your agenda to erase the consensus that the continuum was, in fact, called Bulgarian in the past.
Also, an account that has 30 edits in the past 3 days all ultra-specifically connected to a single nationalistic POV and has been warned numerous times about disruptive editing is very much questionable regarding good faith. TzCher (talk) 20:00, 2 July 2024 (UTC)
The article currently cites page 143 of Conflict and Chaos in Eastern Europe by Dennis C. Hupchick to support the claim that the East South Slavic dialect continuum was historically called Bulgarian. This page says no such thing - the article is lying about the content of the source. Anyone interested can read the source ] to confirm this.
I've been editing Macedonia-related articles because there is an epidemic of dishonesty about the content of sources on such articles. I have no particular view about the Macedonian language, but I strongly believe that Misplaced Pages shouldn't lie about the content of sources!
If you want to make the claim that the East South Slavic dialect continuum was historically called "Bulgarian" in the article, please provide a source. If this is indeed a "consensus" and "fact", this should be easy, although you have failed to do it thus far!
As I made clear above, it is the Hupchick book that adopts the standard Greek and Bulgarian nationalist position that Macedonian is a dialect of Bulgarian. As Danforth shows, this position is widely rejected by scholars today.Anonymoususer95 (talk) 20:49, 2 July 2024 (UTC)
The quote provided in the article is literally verbatim the same as in the book and supports the statement in the article. What is now known as East South Slavic continuum was historically known simply as Bulgarian language. Once again, you are clearly lying. In fact, here is the entire quote on the page:
"An interesting historical argument arose in support of an independent Macedonian nationality that ultimately reached its maturity only after World War II and Tito's construction of a federated Communist Yugoslavia composed of six independent "historic" republics, of which one was Macedonia. The Macedonian nationalists quite simply stole all of the Bulgarian historical argument concerning Macedonia, substituting "Macedonian" for "Bulgarian" ethnic tags in the story. Thus Kuber formed a "Macedonian" tribal alliance in the late seventh century; Kliment and Naum were "Macedonians" and not "Bulgarians"; the medieval archbishopric-patriarchate of Ohrid, which Kliment led, was a "Macedonian," not a "Bulgarian" independent church, as shown by the persistence of Glagolitic letters in the region in the face of the Cyrillic that were spawned in Bulgaria; and the renowned Samuil led a great "Macedonian," rather than a "western Bulgarian," state against Byzantium (giving Slav Macedonia its apex in the historical sun). Under control of the revived Bulgarian state, and later under the Serb Dušan, the Macedonians had maintained their ethnic differences from their "foreign" masters, as demonstrated by their "king" Vukašin, who had died attempting to keep an independent Macedonia free from the Ottoman Turks. When ethnic-national consciousness reawakened among the Macedonian Slavs in the nineteenth century, the cultural revivalists, such as the Miladinov brothers, were consciously "Macedonian," and not "Bulgarian," in their efforts. The obviously plagiarized historical argument of the Macedonian nationalists for a separate Macedonian ethnicity could be supported only by linguistic reality, and that worked against them until the 1940s. Until a modern Macedonian literary language was mandated by the socialist-led partisan movement from Macedonia in 1944, most outside observers and linguists agreed with the Bulgarians in considering the vernacular spoken by the Macedonian Slavs as a western dialect of Bulgarian. In the interwar period (1918-39) the official language of Macedonia had been Serbian by compulsion, with the use of Bulgarian forbidden. The World War II socialist parti- sans in Macedonia proceeded to establish a commission to create the new "official" Macedonian literary language, which was presented to the world the following year (1945). From then on, it became the legal first language of the Macedonian Slavs, with Serbo-Croatian a recognized second language and Bulgarian officially proscribed... Led by the Skopje socialist linguist Blaže Koneski, and given international recognition in 1952 by Yale-produced Harvard Slavic professor Horace Lunt, the artificially created and structured Macedonian literary language ultimately provided the socialist-mandated ethnic validity for an independent Macedonian nationality. Over four decades of state socialization and education of Macedonian Slav children in that concept may have succeeded in creating such a creature in actual fact."
Given that the entire quote is far more damning to the Macedonian position and what is presented here on Misplaced Pages is very, very tame in comparison, and given you insist on sticking to the sources, how about we edit the article per source? Macedonian is an "artificially created" language based on a "Bulgarian dialect" with a specific "nationalistic purpose" of nation-building supported by "obviously plagiarized historical argument"...
The quote is verbatim the same and the text is very clear.
"I've been editing Macedonia-related articles because there is an epidemic of dishonesty" - thanks for so eloquently proving my point by confessing your POV and your own lack of good faith. TzCher (talk) 21:36, 2 July 2024 (UTC)
What your quote shows is that Hupchick states the standard Greek and Bulgarian nationalist position on the Macedonian language, as I said above. However, this position is widely rejected by linguists and historians and so should receive little weight in the article, per WP:WEIGHT. On the rejection of this position, please see:
  • Loring M. Danforth, "Claims to Macedonian Identity: The Macedonian Question and the Breakup of Yugoslavia", Anthropology Today, 9:4 (1993), p. 8, as quoted above.
  • Victor Friedman, "Macedonian Language and Nationalism During the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries", Balkanistica 2 (1975), pp. 83 - 98.
  • Victor Friedman, "The Sociolinguistics of Literary Macedonian", International Journal of the Sociology of Language 52 (1985), pp. 32 - 35.
  • Victor Friedman, Macedonian (Munich: Lincolm Europe, 2002), pages 5 - 6.
I see you've abandoned the claim about the East Slavic dialect continuum!Anonymoususer95 (talk) 22:29, 2 July 2024 (UTC)
An academic with a position you don't like doesn't make him a nationalist. Even more nonsensical is your claim he's a nationalist for two nations at the same time. I don't see the need to continue this pointless discussion when you confessed your POV and lack of good faith. The source is valid and cited correctly. TzCher (talk) 13:53, 3 July 2024 (UTC)
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