When I had a short interview for my high school at age eleven, I was asked what I wanted to be when I grew up. A weatherman, I said. “You’re the first person to say that.” My grandmother worked in the Met Office for the RAF, and she told me about weather balloons and anemometers and such like. I always liked the weather maps and fronts and isobars that appeared on TV and in the newspapers. The BBC forecasts always highlighted freezing temperatures (zero or below) in blue, while 25 degrees or above was coloured orange. That was where hot started. Anything much above that – which was rare – and the whole country would descend into a collective madness of buckling train tracks and heatstroke. So here’s this week’s forecast for Cambridge, where I was born:
Cambridge actually holds the UK’s current record (39), set just three years ago.
Today and tomorrow, the southern part of the UK (i.e. where most of the people are) will get extreme, and in some cases lethal, temperatures. The UK is hopelessly unprepared for this. They’ve got politicians telling people to wear sun cream and enjoy the sunshine. Oh yes, what fun. Others are saying, “I survived 1976, so I’ll be fine.” Well, this will be a much sharper, more intense heat than the neverending summer of ’76 which my mother often talks about, and if you remember ’76 (as Damon Albarn does in this song), you’re no spring chicken. This hellish heat will become more and more commonplace in the UK. Of the five who remain in the race to be the next prime minister, only one of them gives half a shit about climate change and the environment, and he’ll probably be eliminated today.
I played tennis twice – singles with the older guy – at the weekend. Not so hot, in more ways than one. On Saturday I won the first set 6-2, but even at the end of that set I was starting to tire. I really had to dig deep to win the second 7-5. In the third I was 5-1 down, and struggling physically, when time ran out. A similar story last night when I won the opening set 6-3. Then Domnul Sfâra, aged 87, made a guest appearance. We hit with him for a while; I was mostly in awe of him being on the court at all. He shuffled off and left us to it. I won the second set 6-1, but then he attacked relentlessly in the third, which he won 6-3.
I’m trying to learn some Italian before I go away. I won’t have many opportunities to use it immediately, but I hope I can go back to Italy for a longer time next year.
This afternoon’s lesson with the young couple was a no-go after their son got sick, then tennis got washed out, so I finally got round to watching the 2011 film Contagion on Netflix. It wasn’t in the same league as Station Eleven, the brilliant pandemic-based book that I read 18 months before Covid, but it would have been instructive had I seen it in the early days of our real-life pandemic. Some things were strikingly similar. In the film, Forsythia was touted as a miracle cure on social media, just like ivermectin is right now, at the expense of vaccines that really do save lives. There were bats and what looked like wet markets. There was much talk of R-rates. There was someone complaining that spring and summer had been stolen from her, just like people have done in real life. (I found spring 2020 to be blissful.) An interesting idea in the film was a Vietnam War-style vaccine lottery where people get the jab earlier or later depending on what day of the year they’re born. Actually, it would be an utterly crazy idea when you think about it for five seconds, but it does make the assumption that the population would be desperate to get their hands on the stuff.
Daily Covid deaths in Romania are hovering around 300. This morning on the news I heard the L-word (in English, while everything else was in Romanian) for the first time during this dreadful third or fourth wave, however you prefer to count these things. I’d be all for a lockdown. The mess we’re in is due to the unvaccinated people, but the rest of us (the minority!) are massively impacted by this too. When hospitals are stretched to this extent, it’s not just Covid that could kill us.
Even though I’m fully jabbed, I’m still keeping the hell away from people. Luckily I can in a way most people can’t. Last night one of my students said he’d been to the gym. It seems utter madness that gyms should be open right now, even if you’ve got your green thingy. This morning I went to an open-air market; mask wearing was universal among shoppers although not among stallholders. I was in and out in 15 minutes. That’s the limit to how exposed I choose to be right now. But most people seem to have a higher bar, even if they’re unjabbed. It’s a far cry from the panic you saw in the early days, when people were elbowing revolving doors and disinfecting surfaces, even though we faced a less contagious variant back then. Of course, 18 months ago we thought that surfaces (or fomites, as they explained in the film) were a major mode of transmission.
In the absence of tennis I thought I’d talk about Domnul Sfâra, the 86-year-old who plays. He’s tiny – he can’t be more than five foot three. In a game I hit the ball directly to him, preferably to his forehand, and plop my serve over. He used to be a teacher, at a university I think, and spent some years in Moscow. He has a number of catchphrases. After sufficient warming up, he says M-am încâlziiit, meaning “I’m warmed up”. (Încâlzit only has one i. I spelt it with three to show that he draws out that final vowel.) If somebody misses an easy shot, he says siguranță prea mare, which seems to mean that they played it too safe, although in reality it’s usually the opposite. At a score of 15-15, he usually says “fifty-fifty”, in English, presumably thinking that’s actually how we say that score. The -teen and -ty numbers cause Romanians no end of confusion (and me too; I often simply can’t tell whether someone’s saying 13 or 30, say, so I repeat it back to them in Romanian). He usually says 0 as nulă, which I’m guessing is an older term for zero, as is commonly used in Romania today. (Nula is the usual term for zero in Serbian, and it seems that Slavic terms have sometimes been replaced by more Latinate words in recent decades. Prispă, meaning porch, has largely been supplanted by the much more boring terasă, for instance.) He also says the number three as tri, as I sometimes hear from old men on the market, instead of the standard trei.) As for “out”, which Romanians have stolen from us, he pronounces that with two syllables, a short ah before launching into a prolonged ooot.
From next week I’ll be having two lessons a week with the twelve-year-old girl instead of just one. She and her mum think I’m doing a good job. It’s nice to get that kind of feedback. She has come on in leaps and bounds since we started 15 months ago.
I’ll probably play some poker tonight. It’s been a mixed bag of late, although I seem to be improving in Omaha hi-lo, which has been something of a nemesis for me. My bankroll is $997.
Today is a public holiday in Romania. It’s Rusalii, or Pentecost.
Pe. Two little letters. A mountain of complications. Outside any consideration of pronouns, pe is a preposition, which is usually equivalent to on (pe masă = on the table; although there are exceptions, such as pe cer = in the sky). Pe mâine means until tomorrow or see you tomorrow.
Pe is also used with direct object (accusative) pronouns, for emphasis. To give extra weight, you use both the unstressed accusative pronoun and the emphatic pronoun. In my previous post in the series, I said that te iubesc meant I love you. If you extend this to te iubesc pe tine, it means I love you, only you, and nobody else but you.
Here are the full set of emphatic accusative pronouns, with examples:
(Tu) m-ai sunat pe mine?: Did you call me? (Eu) te-am chemat pe tine: I called you (Eu) l-am întrebat pe el: I asked him (El) a văzut-o pe ea: He saw her (Voi) ne vedeți pe noi?: Can you see us? (Noi) nu vă vedem pe voi: We can’t see you (Eu) îi urăsc pe ei: I hate them (males or a mixture) (Ea) le-a cerut pe ele: She asked them (to do something; a request) (females only)
This is actually fairly straightforward; the emphatic pronouns are the same as the stressed accusative pronouns, but with the addition of pe. You just have to be careful to never use them with the dative pronouns which I’ll talk about in my next post.
We’ve so far dealt with the case where pe is optional, but often it’s mandatory. When you talk about specific people, you must use the same constructions as in the list above, with the unstressed accusative pronoun and an emphatic-style pronoun with pe, except that instead of pe el or pe ea, you say pe Dan or pe Maria or whatever the case may be. It’s not just named people that you have to do this with. Mum and the policeman and the kids and nobody all trigger pe. Animals and plants and inanimate objects don’t, however. Here are some examples:
Ai văzut-o pe Simona?: Have you seen Simona? Nu îi am pe copiii mei: I haven’t got my children L-am cerut pe medic: I asked the doctor Le-ai sunat pe fete?: Did you call the girls? Încerc să-i învăț pe băieți: I’m trying to teach the boys
The last example uses the verb a învăța, which can mean both to learn and to teach. Similarly, a împrumuta means both to borrow and to lend. The fact that each of these Romanian verbs maps to two English verbs, one for each direction, causes a headache for my students.
When you want to say somebody, anybody, everybody or nobody, you no longer use the unstressed accusative pronoun, but you still need pe.
Cunoașteți pe cineva care poate să …?: Do you know somebody who can …? Poți să chemi pe oricine: You can call anybody Nu poți mulțumi pe toată lumea: You can’t please everybody Nu am pe nimeni: I don’t have anybody (In Romanian, you say I don’t have nobody)
With non-people, it’s much easier: no pronouns, no pe:
Am văzut câinele: I’ve seen the dog Citești cartea asta?: Are you reading this book?
Now we come to another important use of pe. To say the book you read or the boy you hit, you need pe care, which is a bit like of which in English, along with the unstressed accusative pronoun. (This is counterintuitive to me; with pe care, it feels like you shouldn’t need that pronoun as well, but you do.) What’s more, pe is used here whether you’re talking about people or not. Some examples:
Cartea pe care ai citit-o: The book (that) you read Băiatul pe care l-am învățat: The boy (who) I taught Mășinile pe care le vindem: The cars (that) we sell Banii pe care îi câștigi: The money (that) you earn (Money is plural in Romanian)
This is all vital stuff for me. So often I find myself drowning. Next time I’ll try and deal with the dative (indirect object) pronouns, which are another ball game entirely.
Before I even came to Romania, I had a chat with a friend about the language. What’s it similar to? Is it hard? What makes it hard? I immediately answered that what makes Romanian hard are the pronouns. A pronoun-free sentence like “The church was destroyed in the war” shouldn’t present me too many problems, I thought, whereas “She told me to give this to you” would leave me in a right muddle. Almost five years on, I can get by OK in Romanian, but those damn pronouns are still a jumble in my mind.
Why are they so hard, at least for me? Lots of reasons.
1. They’re mostly short, shapeless words. For the same reason that I struggled to remember the three-letter Scrabble words, much more so than the longer words, these short pronouns are an indistinct blur.
2. Romanian has cases. These are a hold-over from Latin that other Romance languages have ditched but Romanian hasn’t. This means that the words for him in “I called him on the phone” and “I gave him some chocolates” aren’t the same. In “I called him”, calling is what you’re directly doing to him, and this requires the accusative case, while in “I gave him”, you’re not giving him, you’re giving something to him, and that requires the dative case. Although I conceptually get this, it’s hard to get right because of what we do (or don’t do) in English. (If you substitute “the boy” for “him” in the examples above, you again need two different words, but I find those longer nouns, rather than pronouns, a lot easier.)
3. Some verbs that work indirectly in English are direct in Romanian. For instance, you just listen the radio in Romanian, without the equivalent of to. You say “don’t lie me”, again without to.
4. Romanian uses an absolute ton of reflexive, which is like myself or herself in English. Some of my students tell me that they need to “prepare themselves” for job interviews, or that they like to “relax themselves” at weekends, because that’s what you say in Romanian. Reflexives are used in a lot of situations where a possessive is used in English instead. “I broke my leg” and “he needs to improve his English” are expressed with a reflexive pronoun in Romanian, not a possessive. It’s hard to know whether to use a possessive or a reflexive, and to make matters worse, there are both accusative reflexive and dative reflexive pronouns.
5. When you want to express how you or someone else feels — “I’m hungry”, “you’re hot”, “she’s fed up” — you have to resort to dative pronouns instead of the nice simple adjectives we have in English.
6. Romanian pronouns can change their forms when they interact with other words in a sentence.
7. You use lots of pronouns when you have interdependent relationships with lots of people. I don’t, at least not with people I speak Romanian with, so I don’t. If you’re always talking about other people, perhaps this all becomes second nature.
I’m going to write a series of posts on Romanian pronouns, so I can refer to them later for easy reference, and hopefully I can kill this beast once and for all. At the moment they’re really holding me back.
Most languages have words that seem too long for what they represent. English, for instance, has understand and disappointment. Today, pedestrian came up in a lesson, and I’ve never liked that word – it’s too long, too cumbersome, and I suppose too pedestrian. French has maintenant, which is far too long for something that means “now”. By the time you’ve said or written the word, now has passed. Romanian also has its fair share. The numbers from 11 to 19 are all stupidly long – 17 is șaptesprezece – and most people shorten them in everyday speech. But the biggest culprit, literally, in almost any language, has to be dumneavoastră, which is the Romanian formal version of “you”, just like vous in French, only (unlike in French) it doesn’t also serve as the general plural “you”. It’s also used for the formal “your”. When I first tried learning the language, I was immediately intimidated by this 13-letter monstrosity, which literally means “your lordship”. Surely they don’t actually use this in conversation? But they sure do, in all its glory. Fortunately, Romanian is a “pro-drop” language, which means you can get away with just using the verb form without the subject, so you can often dispense with dumneavoastră. But you can’t always, and when it serves as the formal “your” (rather than “you”), you’re forced to use it. Yesterday I played tennis, partnering a bloke of a similar age to me. Hmmm, can I use the informal tu with you (I hardly know you), or should I play safe and use the formal version? In doubles, it’s fairly common to shout something to indicate that either you or your partner should take the next shot, but you can hardly say dumneavoastră, can you? That’s practically a whole sentence. By about the third syllable the ball will have whizzed by. So what can I say? Yesterday I decided on the English “go!”. I mean, go is universal, right? I’m pretty sure you pass go in even the Romanian version of Monopoly. My partner unfortunately interpreted my “go!” as eu, which means “me”, and our communication breakdown cost us the point.
Last night I realised how much work I still need to do if I’m ever really going to get good at Romanian. Someone from the police called me, and I was lost. In our five-minute conversation, or should I say monologue, he must have said over a thousand words. Just too damn fast, and of course it was on the phone and that makes it even harder. Plus it’s the sodding police – what have I done? It seemed that I hadn’t done anything, and one of his colleagues wanted me to translate something into English later this week. He gave me the phone number, I called this other policeman (I assume that’s what he is) and that was indeed the case.
It tipped it down yesterday morning. Good weather for poker. I got up early and FaceTimed my parents before the tournaments kicked off just after eight (while I was still eating my porridge). I made a decent start to the PLO8, then while that was going on I fired up a single draw in which I broke the best hand to bust out after 40 minutes. Never mind. I was now in the process of amassing a giant stack in the Omaha hi-lo, which was helped immensely by making quad threes to inflict a very unfortunate bad beat on my opponent. I easily made the seven-man final table, and from there anything could have happened. There was a Romanian who hurled insults at me in his native language for some bizarre reason (he could see I was playing from the same country) and I just blocked his chat, before knocking him out in fourth place. The final three were all pretty evenly stacked, but I had basically zero experience at the game short-handed. After a decent number of hands I was out in third place for a $22 profit after just over five hours. By that point I’d also made the final table of the knockout pot-limit badugi (two final tables simultaneously is a rarity for me) and came back well from being relatively short to make the final three. Then, crucially, I was dealt two pat nines that helped me chip up and eventually knock out a good player and grab his healthy bounty. I had a big chip lead as I got heads-up with an inexplicably passive opponent, and soon I’d won a bounty tournament for the first time, making $62. A lucky day. I made $81 overall, and my bankroll is now $705.
I had no side effects at all from my much-maligned (totally unfairly) Covid jab. A slightly sore arm for a day, and that was it. I know others haven’t been quite so lucky, but c’mon people, get the damn vaccine. It’s our only chance of getting out of this.
My conversations with Mum and Dad revolve around when, where and how we can meet again. It’s already been ages, to the point where I’m struggling to piece together the timeline of what has happened since. I do know the dates, but my whole concept of time has been warped. Dad’s cancer, my trip to Bosnia, a few months which passed for normal, then Covid, the new normal. A little over two calendar years, but what’s that in lockdown years?
Today I felt quite angry. We could have eradicated this virus by now, but modern society – greed, entitlement, selfishness – hasn’t allowed us to. All over the world, apart from New Zealand, Vietnam, South Korea and one or two others, the wrong kinds of politicians have made the wrong kinds of decisions, and they still are.
Last week was my biggest for work in a while, with 36 hours of lessons, plus all the putting together of worksheets and what have you. When I’m locked down, I’m happy to take all the work I can get. Yesterday I had that 90-minute session with the young couple who are learning English from scratch, and it’s quite tiring having to speak a weird mixture of Romanian and English. One of the very nice kids I teach said he’ll be off to Egypt in a few weeks with his parents. Seriously, right now you can shove your pyramids up your arse. The bloke in the UK gave me a one-hour Youtube video of Romanian stand-up comedy to watch. That’s got to be one of the hardest things to understand in a foreign language. Shushushu zhuzhuzhu dududu. Ha ha ha ha ha! Um, I don’t get it, Toma.
Poker. I haven’t had much joy since I last reported. On Thursday I paid the price for my terrible passivity in a pot-limit badugi tournament. I was really kicking myself for failing to shovel chips into the pot. Today I had a similar spot and played much more aggressively. I got knocked out, but did the right thing I’m sure. My biggest problem continues to be how little I can play. My bankroll is $464.
Someone’s just called me asking for a lesson on behalf of her husband. I managed to find a space in my diary on Thursday evening, and I was all set to pencil it in, but then she asked for my address. Er, Skype? Zoom? No, your actual physical address. We want face-to-face here. Fa-fa-face-to-face? No! No no no no no. Not until at least mid-April, three weeks after my first jab. I’m guessing these people might not be all that into jabs and stuff.
I’m starting to beef up my work volume again. Last week I got 30½ hours, and this week should easily surpass that (but you never know; sometimes it just rains cancellations). Some of my lessons are dead easy and don’t remotely feel like work, but others are a test of mettle. I recently started with a married couple who have a nine-letter, seven-vowel surname, and they want to learn from scratch. Hello, how are you, my name is, would you like a vowel? I have to speak a lot of Romanian in these lessons, and although I get by, I still make mistakes and get tongue-tied. For instance, last weekend I couldn’t say “he likes to run” correctly in Romanian. Sounds a simple sentence, doesn’t it? The verb to run is a alerga in Romanian (well, there’s also a fugi, but that’s more like “to run away”). Here’s how you conjugate a alerga in the present:
eu alerg – I run tu alergi – you run el/ea aleargă – he/she/it runs (notice the extra a before the r) noi alergăm – we run voi alergați – you run (more than one person) ei/ele aleargă – they run
That’s great, but with sentences such as “he likes to run” we need to use the subjunctive, and for the third person (he/she/it or they) this is different from the normal form of the verb. The form I needed was alerge, not aleargă. The full correct sentence is Îi place să alerge. (The first word of that sentence, if you’re wondering, is an i with a hat followed by an i without a hat.)
By contrast, the very common verb a merge means to go, and it’s conjugated like this in the present:
eu merg – I go tu mergi – you go el/ea merge – he/she/it goes noi mergem – we go voi mergeți – you go (more than one person) ei/ele merg – they go
If I wanted to say “he likes to go”, I’d once again need the subjunctive, and this time it would be Îi place să meargă. So the subjunctive ending of “to go” is just like the normal ending of “to run”, and vice-versa. I understand this, but I still get tripped up from time to time.
Another problem I have is stress. Not that kind of stress, but the way words are accented. Just like in English, it isn’t always obvious which part of a word gets the emphasis. I managed to confuse a kid this morning when I said “martor” (meaning “witness”) with the stress at the end, when it should be at the beginning. Unless it’s a word I use a lot, I often find myself guessing.
Poker. My biggest problem is how little I’m able to play. I haven’t run very hot since I last posted. In one tournament my laptop crashed five times – hopefully I’ve solved that problem. My bankroll is $470.
It’s 7pm but it’s still stinking hot, and look at the weather for the coming days. The whole trip was hot. When I arrived in Belgrade on 12th August it was 37 degrees, and Mostar was the same. (I was lucky. Mostar had reached 42 a week earlier.) At least there’s not too much vlažnost (humidity). This word comes from vlažan (humid). The -ost ending corresponds to English -ness or -ity; in eighties Russia there was glasnost, “openness”. Note that vlažnost features yet another of those famous disappearing a‘s. We’ve got pretty high pritisak (pressure) and not much vetar (wind).
But what fascinated me about this electronic sign was the compass. I mean, compass directions in any language seem to be NSEW or a close variation. French is NSEO. Romanian is NSEV. But SJIZ, with S being north?! The Serbian compass points are sever (north), jug (south), istok (east) and zapad (west). Two of these happen to be English words. Istok at least sounds a little like “east”. As for zapad, that’s remarkably close to zăpadă, the Romanian word for snow. Hmmm, what’s going on there? It turns out that both zapad and zăpadă come from the same Slavic root word, meaning “fall”. Snow falls, and the sun falls (i.e. sets) in the west. Etymology can be amazing at times.
Now we come to the first of two signs that look like hieroglyphics. I bloody love the font because it looks so wonderfully primitive with all the letters made out of basic shapes, but because it’s already in a script I don’t know too well, and in a language I hardly know at all, it’s extremely hard to read. Is that a Г or a Ћ? An М or an Н? Honestly even the numbers are hard to decipher.
I got this: По овој кући су кораци Милорада Петровића, глумца Народног Позоришта, одјекивали 1865–1928. Кућа це ова Браниславу Нушићу 1864–1938 радована и Добрицом Милутиновићем 1881–1956 славним српским глумцем поносила.
The Latin equivalent: Po ovoj kući su koraci Milorada Petrovića, glumca Narodnog Pozorišta, odjekivali 1865–1928. Kuća ce ova Branislavu Nušiću 1864–1938 radovana i Dobricom Milutinovićem 1881–1956 slavnim srpskim glumcem ponosila.
The English translation is something like this: The footsteps of Milorad Petrović (1865–1928), an actor in the National Theatre, echoed around this house. This house was also proud to accommodate both Branislav Nušić (1864–1938) and Dobrica Milutinović (1881–1956), famous Serbian actors.
I was confused with the word radovana, because Radovan is also a common male name. The word glumac (actor) is cognate with the Romanian word glumă, meaning “joke”. Korak means “step”, and the plural is koraci. As far as I know, the letter k changes to c when an i is added.
I didn’t think this sign could be any harder to decipher than the previous one, but it sure as hell is. Decoding these signs is a three-stage process. First, you have to figure out what Cyrillic letters are represented by these weird letter-forms. Some of them (like C, К or M) have their standard shapes on the sign, but others don’t, and some letters (like Д and Е) don’t even have a consistent shape throughout the sign. Second, you need to transpose the Cyrillic to Latin (although with a bit of experience you could skip this step). And third, you have to figure out all the words actually mean. After much head-scratching, this is what I got:
Живота горког кад год грч ме гвозденом канџом зграби; стисне; рађено срце на дну крчме ко дивља звер затули; врисне. И нагнем пехар на грло суво сав ми се свет пред очима врти или ми циган свира на уво о слаткој страсти и о смрти. Густав Крклец, Бумс.
The Latin equivalent: Života gorkog kad god grč me gvozdenom kandžom zgrabi, stisne, rađeno srce na dnu krčme ko divlja zver zatuli, vrisne. I nagnem pehar na grlo suvo sav mi se svet pred očima vrti ili mi cigan svira na uvo o slatkoj strasti i o smrti. Gustav Krklec, Bums.
And in English, maybe, with the help of Google Translate: A bitter drop of life grabs me with an iron claw, it squeezes; a working heart at the bottom of the tavern like a wild beast roars, it screams. And I lean the goblet over my throat, the whole world is spinning before my eyes, or a gypsy is playing in my ear about sweet passion and death.
Gustav Krklec was a Croatian writer and translator. This is a poem; we’ve got stisne rhyming with vrisne. “Bums” appears to be title. The word zgrabi seems to be cognate with English “grab”, and possibly also the Romanian verb a se grăbi, which means “to hurry”. Cigan, “gypsy”, is basically identical to Romanian țigan, French tzigane (or tsigane), and Italian zingaro. The word krčme (tavern, inn, pub) is the genitive of krčma, which is equivalent to cârciumă in Romanian.
So that’s it, finally. Shop-front signs, handwritten notices, electronic signs, murals, graffiti, plaques, I seem to have covered just about everything. Maybe this will help me make some inroads into this rather difficult language. Let’s hope so.
We’re back in Belgrade for the sixth and penultimate part of this series, and suddenly there’s a whole load of Cyrillic again. The sign above the door of this sandwich bar reads: Најбољи и најјефтинији сендвичи у граду. Са домаћом пршутом и комплет лепиња. In Latin, this would be: Najbolji i najjeftiniji sendviči u gradu. Sa domaćom pršutom i komplet lepinja. Translation: “The best and cheapest sandwiches in town. With homemade ham and a selection of buns.”
The words for “best” and “cheapest” use the naj- prefix for superlatives that I mentioned before. The word jeftin (“cheap”) is just like the Romanian word ieftin. (Incidentally, the same goes for “expensive”: skup in Serbian, scump in Romanian.) When you add the naj- prefix in front of jeftin, you get a slightly weird-looking double j. In fact the word najjeftiniji with all its i‘s and j‘s looks decidedly weird, full stop.
The adjective domaćom (domestic, homemade) and noun pršutom (ham, prosciutto) have the pleasant-sounding (to me) -om ending because they’re in the instrumental case, which is used to express with or by something, as well as a bunch of other things that I don’t know yet. Singular nouns usually get the -om ending in the instrumental, but in the case of masculine nouns that end in a so-called soft consonant like j or š, and neuter nouns that end in -e, you add -em instead. So čaj (tea) becomes čajem. Then plurals are different again. How am I ever supposed to remember this stuff?
Some graffiti. Smrt imperijalizmu, sloboda Balkanu! This means “Death to imperialism, freedom for the Balkans!” Even in just these four words, there’s some grammar. The word for imperalism is imperijalizam, but here the graffiti artist (that’s not the right word at all, I know) needed the dative case, which meant a u was added and the a before the m deleted. You see sloboda and its variants all the time. Slobodan means free, in the sense of “liberated” or “available”. It’s also a common male name, as in Slobodan Milošević, who was about as misnamed as you can get. We also have the noun slobod and verb a slobozi in Romanian, although they aren’t used nearly as much. To say “free” meaning “costing nothing”, you use the word besplatan, literally “without payment”. Bez means “without”, but the voiced z changes to unvoiced s before the unvoiced p. In Romanian we also have plată (payment) and a plăti (to pay). As for Balkanu, that’s also in the dative case. Because the last a of Balkan is stressed and longer, the rule about removing it before adding the u doesn’t apply here.
It’s almost impossible to see, but on the left-hand side of the big white C there’s some small stencilled graffiti that says 11.07.1995 #sedamhiljada. That’s a reference to the Srebrenica massacre in which many thousands of Bosniaks were killed. Sedam hiljada means 7000, although Wikipedia tells me that over 8000 people died there. The word hiljada (thousand) is borrowed from Greek; it’s cognate with kilo. Two thousand would be dve hiljade, with a final -e, but for 5000 and above, the -e returns to -a again. The name Srebrenica, by the way, comes from srebro, meaning silver. In Roman times it had a silver mine.
Firstly, the car. It’s a Zastava, probably from the late eighties or early nineties. I saw quite a lot of these still on the roads in Belgrade. The UE on the number plate stands for Užice, a region situated south-west of Belgrade. The name Zastava means “flag”. As for the Cyrllic sign outside a café, it says Цеђени сокови, or Ceđeni sokovi in Latin, which means “squeezed juices”. Sok is the word for juice in the singular. It’s masculine, like most nouns that end in a consonant. For the majority of masculine nouns, you simply add -i to make the plural, but some single-syllable nouns like sok add a longer -ovi ending instead. Another example is most (bridge), which becomes mostovi in the plural. A squeezed juice at this bar costs 169 dinars, about £1.40 or nearly NZ$3.
We’re still in Sarajevo. The sign above the doorway says Српско Погребно Друштво, or Srpsko Pogrebno Društvo in latin. This means Serbian Funeral Society. Because Društvo ends in -o (it’s neuter), so do the two adjectives that precede it. Свети Марко or Sveti Marko means Saint Mark. There’s an i on the end of Sveti because it’s a definite saint (instead of any old saint), but I don’t know the ins and outs of that yet. In the third part of this series I said that Serbo-Croat words exhibit harmony between voiced and unvoiced sounds. Well, you see it again with Srpski and its variants. The voiced b of Srb has become an unvoiced p to match the unvoiced s that follows it.
Striparnica sounds like it could be something else, but it’s just a comic book shop.
More books. These ones are on music and films. I’ve read Born to Run, by … er … Brus Springstin, and it’s a damn good read. To the left of Springsteen’s autobiography is a book entitled (I think – you can’t quite see it) “The 100 Best Western Films”. However, the superlative adjective najboljih appears to be in the genitive plural, so it might be “100 of the Best…”. The word for “good”, which you hear all the time, is dobar, dobra or dobro, depending on gender. The comparative form (“better”) is bolji, bolja or bolje (it’s irregular, just like in English). The naj- prefix turns the comparative into a superlative (and that goes for all comparable adjectives, as far as I know).
In the centre right we’ve got a book by Toma Zdravković, who according to Wikipedia was a pop-folk singer-songwriter who died in 1991. A Mrs Zdravković was a teacher at my primary school in England, though she never taught me. The name must come from zdravo, meaning healthy and strong. The book is in Cyrillic, but Toma’s first name looks the same as it would in Latin. That’s because seven letters (JOKE MAT) look the same, and do the same job, in both Latin and Serbo-Croat Cyrillic. Well, the Cyrillic К looks slightly kinkier in the top right. On Bosnian number plates, the only letters you saw were the JOKE MAT letters. Other Cyrillic letters, like B, C and X, look just like Latin letters but correspond to different letters (B is equivalent to Latin V; C is like Latin S, and X is like Latin H).
The sign above had me baffled for a while, partly because of the font size difference between HIGIJENA and the following words. I knew pola was “half” and zdravlja was “health”, but what on earth does “half health” mean? It’s actually a full sentence: Higijena je pola zdravlja, which means “hygiene is half of health”, or something akin to “cleanliness is next to godliness”. Pranje od 30 do 95 means “washing from 30 to 95”, which I guess is the temperature. I don’t know what the H. means on the bottom line, but čišćenje (Google tells me the second c should have an acute accent, not a v-shaped one) means “cleaning”.
The two c-type letters in čišćenje are both pronounced similarly to ch in “chair”, but the first one (č) is a stronger sound, while the second one (ć) is softer, a bit like the start of “tune” in British English (in other words, how I say it). There’s a similar difference between dž (a single letter in Serbo-Croat), which is pronounced like the “j” in jump, and đ (sometimes also written dj, as in Djoković) which is pronounced like the beginning of British English “dune”. In both cases the differences are pretty small.
The letter š is pronounced sh, so in čišćenje you’ve got a sh sound and a ch-type sound back-to-back, just like in the word pushchair. I think this combination is relatively frequent; in Russian Cyrillic the shch combination even has its own letter (щ).
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