BiH - Language Log

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I've been familiar with the country name "Bosnia and Herzegovina" for quite some time, but until this morning I've never seen it referred to as BiH.  I came upon this usage in news reports about the delivery of PRC medical supplies to that country, e.g., here.  Although the Chinese printing on the boxes in the background of the photograph in this report is small and blurred, we can verify from other sources (e.g., here) what it says:

wànlǐ shàng wéi lín, xiāngzhù wú yuǎnjìn 万里尚为邻，相助无远近 ("ten thousand miles but still neighbors, mutual assistance has no far or near")

Other recent uses may be found here and here.

Can anybody transcribe and translate the printing in Roman letters (Bosnian? Croatian?) that is also on the boxes?

Back to BiH (also written as BIH, B&H, etc.).  Dictionary.com says that it is also "an abbreviation of the word bitch".

Wikpedia's disambiguation page gives the following:

• Bih language
• Benign intracranial hypertension, a neurological disorder
• Bihari language, ISO 639 alpha-3 language code bih
• Bosnia and Herzegovina, ISO 3166-1 alpha-3 country code BIH
• Bounding interval hierarchy, a partitioning data structure for computer graphics acceleration
• British International Helicopters, an airline based in England, United Kingdom
• Bureau International de l'Heure (International Time Bureau)
• Eastern Sierra Regional Airport, IATA location identifier
• An abbreviated slang form of the word "bitch"

Here's the etymology of the name:

The first preserved widely acknowledged mention of Bosnia is in De Administrando Imperio, a politico-geographical handbook written by the Byzantine emperor Constantine VII in the mid-10th century (between 948 and 952) describing the "small land" (χωρίον in Greek) of "Bosona" (Βοσώνα).

The name is believed to have derived from the hydronym of the river Bosna coursing through the Bosnian heartland. According to philologist Anton Mayer the name Bosna could derive from Illyrian *"Bass-an-as"), which would derive from the Proto-Indo-European root "bos" or "bogh"—meaning "the running water". According to English medievalist William Miller the Slavic settlers in Bosnia "adapted the Latin designation […] Basante, to their own idiom by calling the stream Bosna and themselves Bosniaks […]".

The name Herzegovina ("herzog's [land]", from German word for "duke")[19] originates from Bosnian magnate Stjepan Vukčić Kosača's title, "Herceg (Herzog) of Hum and the Coast" (1448). Hum, formerly Zahumlje, was an early medieval principality that was conquered by the Bosnian Banate in the first half of the 14th century. The region was administered by the Ottomans as the Sanjak of Herzegovina (Hersek) within the Eyalet of Bosnia up until the formation of the short-lived Herzegovina Eyalet in the 1830s, which remerged in the 1850s, after which the entity became commonly known as Bosnia and Herzegovina.

On initial proclamation of independence in 1992, the country's official name was the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina but following the 1995 Dayton Agreement and the new constitution that accompanied it the official name was changed to Bosnia and Herzegovina.

(source)

I suspected that the "i/I" between "B" and "H" must mean "and" in the official languages, and so it is in Bosnian and Croatian, и in Serbian (I already knew that from Russian).

[Thanks to Jim Fanell and Ross Darrell Feingold]

April 11, 2020 @ 12:39 pm · Filed by Victor Mair under Abbreviation, Names

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