Voodoo Rituals of the Ignorant Legislator

Legend has it that legal language is precise, clean, without embellishments, without excesses and without deficiencies (therefore unambiguous), and that, in its conciseness, it is particularly refined in the texts of constitutions and laws. If the constitution and laws are written by an educated constitutional writer, a connoisseur of legal tradition and language like Valtazar Bogišić, for example, it can indeed be so. However, if the legislator is ignorant and the writer is semi-literate, the language becomes imprecise, ambiguous or meaningless, and the text is unusable. This is the case with the Serbian legislator. In the Law on the Use of the Serbian Language in Public Life and the Protection and Preservation of the Cyrillic Script ("Official Gazette of the RS", No. 89/2021), the two paragraphs of the second article of that Law read as follows: 1. The Serbian language, in the sense of this law, is considered standardized type of the Serbian language, as a tool and common good of national culture. 2. The native alphabet, in the sense of this law, is considered to be the standardized type of the Cyrillic alphabet of the Serbian language, which represents the basis of national identity.

It is impressive that someone manages to cram so much nonsense into 37 words and demonstrate all the splendor of their lack of education and stupidity.

We will leave aside the legal term "within the meaning of this law", which appears in both sentences, although it would be interesting to hear lawyers justifying it. First of all, what has already been said a lot (remembering, therefore, that our ignorant legislator did not listen to anything and did not listen to anyone while writing the law): a letter, by definition, cannot be the basis of identity because a letter is a convention, an agreement, a coincidence . There is no necessity in convention, agreement, coincidence. Identity is a matter of necessity. If, one day, we agree to write the sound "š", for example, differently, nothing will change in us and in the world. It is completely irrelevant how the sound "sh" is spelled, for example: "sh", "ch", "sh", "s", or "*/", or "<#/", because however it is marked, that sound, "š", does not change its nature. Our ignorant legislator, however, is convinced that Cyrillic is something like rooster blood in a voodoo ritual, and that real Serbian women and real Serbs, if they do not sprinkle themselves with the blood of a freshly slaughtered rooster, that is, if they do not write in Cyrillic but, for example, in Latin, would be executed your soul.

Our legislator is convinced that if he knows all thirty Cyrillic characters (well, maybe not really of all thirty), he also knows the language, but he betrays his belief precisely in the attitude with which he touches the language. For him, language is, as it is written in paragraph 1 of article 2 of the Law, funds. A drain unclog? Digestive aid? Means of transportation? Mosquito repellent? Or does the legislator mean something like a hammer, spoon, tweezers, or a 25-centimeter Schroeder ball gun used in gynecological procedures? So, perhaps the legislator believes that language is reduced to an instrument, to that which mediates communication, for example, as the Hartmann ear funnel serves the otorhinolaryngologist to whistle in the patient's ear? It is amusing (though also frightening) that an ignorant legislator, whose mouth is full of identity, does not know that language is precisely the armature of identity, and declares it a mere tool. And language is a convention, of course, but from the time when God got angry with people - because he thought that they wanted to steal his power - and in his anger he destroyed the tower of Babel (which, He suspected, they were building with the intention of ascending to His throne and probably they catch him sleeping), language is a convention that, so to speak, is transmitted through mother's milk and cannot be easily replaced by another language. Language, to that extent, is not a "general good of national culture", as our unfortunate legislator believes, because culture it is language, because language establishes any generality, because language as a value can only be legitimized by language. Language does not stand between man and the world in the same way as a plow, as a tool, as a tool for work, it stands between the one who cultivates the land and the land itself - so when you replace the plow, it does not change either the land or the owner of the plow - nor does language serve merely to transmit information, but it is precisely language that creates the world, what someone is (there is no identity outside of language), thus the armature of identity.

All identification takes place in language. There is no Serb who is not primarily in the Serbian language. If anything determines it, it is determined by the language (not the alphabet). "I'm a Serb" is said in Serbian, just as "I don't feel Serbian" is also said in Serbian. Language precedes ethnic identity. Language is a condition of identity, as is the condition of non-acceptance of identity to the extent that one does not agree to one (nationalist, chauvinist, patriotic) variant of that language. Therefore, a culture that loses its language loses itself and loses the world. Our ignorant legislator, as we can see, makes a significant effort to reduce the Serbian language to the measure of his own illiteracy and lack of culture, to cyrilize that culture, to make it more inaccessible to several million people who do not see themselves as Serbs (although, unfortunately, they speak the same language as Serbs, they only call it differently, they agreed to call it differently, but that language, as we children have learned, will not change because we agreed to call it differently), to close it in itself, to make it palanquin, to deprive it of the exchange of life-giving juices with other cultures, even if it is by banishing the Latin alphabet (perhaps they will understand us, but they will not be able to read us), and finally let it pass away gloriously. The language of our legislator is arbitrary, unbound by logical and grammatical rules for reality, and the world he tries to create is exactly the world according to such and such a language: defiled, senseless, ungrateful, sad, lying, half-dead, hopeless.