Blaže Koneski, his successors and the peculiar narrative of a “late standardization” in the Balkans. In a recent article about the standardization of the Macedonian language, 1 the distinguished polish linguist, Zuzanna Topolińska notes: “One of the great advantages of late standardization is the possibility of learning from the experience of predecessors in order to avoid their mistakes. Macedonian codifiers, foremost the central personality responsible for this process, the linguist and poet Blaže Koneski, demonstrated acute ability to find apt solutions and ensure a strong beginning to the implementation process. The two main and important decisions were: (a) the acceptance of, as a starting point, the living grammatical structure of an idiom maximally evolved and, at the same time, understandable and reasonably easy to learn for the speakers of other Macedonian dialects. Likewise, the grammatical structure of the WestCentral dialect was accepted as a whole, at all of the relevant levels: segmental phonology, prosody, inflection, basic categorical paradigms with their functional loads, while the contribution of other dialects was allowed in the lexicon and word-formational patterns.(…) (b) the acceptance of the so-called phonetic spelling; it is de facto a phonological spelling after the principle “one phoneme > one graphem”…” etc. etc.2 One of the most interesting books about contemporary culture in the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia is “Razgovori so Koneski” (Conversations with Koneski) by Dzane Andreevski, published 1991 by “Kultura”. The particular book which comprises a series of interviews made with the distinguished linguist, philologist, poet and novelist Blaže Koneski from 1985 to 1990, offers a splendid overview of the literary Macedonian language formation since the 1940s, if not for other reasons, surely because Koneski can be considered the most active, dedicated and abiding intellectual in matters of 1
Zuzanna Topolińska, “Advantages and disadvantages of late standardization”. STUF 2008(61), 2: 170176. 2 ibidem, p. 173
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