[kleton]

'Цовид-19' has to be one of the laziest transliterations I've ever seen. Coronavirus is spelled with an initial К in every Cyrillic-using language I'm aware of, not a Ц (ts) sound in English. It's basically a keyboard IME transliteration, since in Serbian, "c" would be the Roman equivalent of "ц".

[disabled]

Yep, Serbo-Croatian (technically Bosnian-Montenegrian-Croatian-Serbian) "K" for "koronavirus". The only difference between languages is Latin versus Cyrillic.

Croatia, for example has its official coronavirus webpage as https://koronavirus.hr

[ithkuil]

> The only difference between languages is Latin versus Cyrillic.

"a language is a dialect with an army and a navy"

There are definitely more differences between the lexicon and grammar of those languages apart from the alphabet they are written with.

Not very big differences, mind you. But ignoring them altogether or making them bigger than what they are enters the realm of politics.

Anyway, the english wikipedia article does a decent job capturing a few key differences in the dialect continuum https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_standard_Bosnian...

[disabled]

Thank you for pointing this out. I kept out these differences on purpose, because it culturally divides us.

I am well aware of them: Croatian is not my native language. But, I learned it and I am conversational in the Shtokavian (Štokavian) dialect. I am Štokavski. This is the standard dialect of Croatian, in Croatia.

My family however were Čakavski. They spoke the Chakavian (Čakavian) dialect. They are from the islands of Croatia. Unfortunately, it is a dying dialect of Croatian that is Venetian in origin. It is not mutually intelligible with Štokavian, but everyone in Croatia seems fond of it.

[anotherblue]

Čakavski dialect is not Venetian in origin. It is Slavic, like rest of Croatian dialects, but with many loanwords of Italian and Venetian origin (or, more likely, from extinct Dalmatian [romance] language). While many romance loanwords and particular unique sound shifts make it sometimes hard to understand to rest of Croatian/Serbian/Bosniak crowd, it is not that you need a translator

[bnt]

Well, we read C as K, and most people spell English as they pronounce it, hence koronavirus :-)