Add Serbocroatian language to l.d.o

Well #956594: Croatian as an alias for Serbo-Croatian? sounds like a proposal to rename the Croatian package? Maintaining a copy of it under a different name sounds like bit of an overkill isn't it? Would this translation actually be different?

What's the point of doing a translation for a language that hasn't been in official use for 20 years?
I (as a Serbian speaker) would have no idea what the "correct" way of saying something would be in serbo-croatian (especially considering the state of IT the last time a serbo-croatian dictionary came out).

It sucks that there's are plenty of very similar translations, but I'm not sure this is a solution.

Croatian and Serbian are two separated languages; they have two different language codes, and while Serbian can be written using the Cyrillic or the Latin script, Croatian is written using a Latin script.

The Serbo-Croatian is considered, from the point of view of language codes, a macrolanguage. Looking at the history of the Slavic languages, Wikipedia reports the following text:

After the ethnic tensions of the 1970s, and after the easing of political pressure in the 1990s and the democratisation of the Yugoslav political system, the policy of forced merging of these languages was finally allowed to end, and speakers could call their languages whatever they wanted. The Croatians officially returned to using the name they had used for the language before the dissolution of Yugoslavia (officially, they had called it Croatian until the mid 1970s). The Serbs officially called it Serbo-Croatian until 1997, when the Matica srpska made the Dictionary of the Serbian language. Since then Serbs have called it Serbian, but unofficially. The Constitution of Serbia (1990–2006) called the official language Serbo-Croatian, while the Constitution of Montenegro (1993–2007) called it Serbian with ijekavian pronunciation.

@eiland: I get your irony. If you look from a bit different angle though, lolspeak, occitan and esperanto are all different languages. There are not the same language under different names. They are worked on by separate people. My understanding of your request is that you'd set up a fork of the Croatian language, because they were first and you have issues with the naming. But then whoever contributes to Croatian will not contribute to Serbocroation and vice versa. It is not just confusing for users (which one should I pick?) it is also a lot of manual work to keep these in sync. Do you think that this is in line with the debate about naming of the language and we should not even try to reconcile the naming?

In #2 above, you've alleged even if we open a discussion, they would never agree to rename Croatian. If you consider site end users, Drupal can import .po files to any language regardless of the language name/code. You can import Japanese translation files under the French language. So you should be able to set up your site languages under any name and language code, you just import the language translations you want to assign to those. If you happen to use the l10n_update module, that does not yet support automated mappings of local vs. remote language codes (see #580260: Map local language codes to remote language codes), but that was requested by other language teams as well. I think that would be a very worthwhile thing to work on.

We can obviously copy the Croatian language pack anytime, it is open source. But then the copy starts its own life. It will not get updates from the Croatian translations, and any translations added to the copy will not be submitted to Croatian. Since how you explain this, the two languages would be entirely identical except their names, I think copying is the wrong solution and fragments the community and the contributors. If you don't use l10n_update (yet), Drupal core already supports what you want. If you use l10n_update, I think our efforts are best spent on implementing aliases like in that issue, it will be useful for many others too.

There is no "SH language page" that I know of. If we create an SH language on localize.drupal.org it will show up with all projects and the front page and will show it is 0% ready indefinitely. Only those who'd actually venture to read the description for the team would be able to tell it is only there to inform them that they should use Croatian. Not sure this sounds like a great strategy, does it?

For the module to be worked on, I've already said it is l10n_update, not i18n. i18n has nothing to do with this and it does not manage language packages for the interface. I'd suggest you focus your efforts on helping to solve that issue (not necessarily wait for it to be solved, but if you have no other choice, that is an option too).

I would also like to have serbocroatian language as that was and still is something that is common denominator for people from former Yugoslavia.

Although, yes that language is not official anywhere and due to tensions probably will never be official in any way, still we all understand each other very well (Serbian, Croatians, Bosnians, Montenegrins, other minorities living in region and even others, Macedonian and Slovenian can understand it) as it was supposed to be standardized however hard or impossible was that.

Of course, there are differences on what that construct actually is, some will lean more toward some Croatian common words and others will go for Serbian as there are many words that were not share but was part of same language heritage (like word for bread is "hleb" (sr) "kruh" (hr)) and sometimes there are even more words for same thing.

Unlike Croatian that uses only Latin script, Serbian uses both Latin and Cyrillic script. In order for Serbian site to be more accessible to other former Yugoslavians (yeah, I'm just waiting for someone to shoot me for using that! :) it is better to be using Serbian in Latin because in Cyrillic even Hungarian minority in Serbia that understand Serbian (spoken) will be unable to read site as they generally do not practice Serbian in Cyrillic script.

As I had discussion somewhere else with you about having two scripts for same translation that would be ideal for us in Serbia, we usually and more easily just deal with Latin Serbian as Serbocroatian as offered in Drupal Languages and it is also more close to truth as it is also aimed at Croatians and others willing to read that variant.

The truth is, however politics and everyday speech is changing and differentiating it could be resembled as "difference of the same language" because of its roots and fact that although using different words we still easily understand each other as we used to in the past.

As being supported in Drupal itself (Regional -> Languages -> Add language -> Serbocroatian) and for reasons that (i believe) every Serbian site with Latin and Cyrillic consider Latin to be Serbocroat for reasons explained, I'd really like to have it on l.d.o.

The sad truth for us all is that all translation effort combined (even if possible) is miserable (Bosnian: 7 contributers 0.61% translated, Croatian: 20 people 2% done, Serbian: 10 people 0.1%, Montenegro: does not exist). Unfortunately, those can't be combined and one of the major obstacles is major disagreement on what should be really translated and what just held in English due to lack of any domestic equivalent term (for instance 'file' should it be 'datoteka', 'fajl' or something else?).

So it is nightmare..