Language learning

This is the final part of the series.

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).

This is central Sarajevo, and here’s the ćevabdžinica I mentioned in the previous post in this series. The mici-like pieces of barbecued meat, called ćevapi or ćevapčići, are everywhere in Serbia and Bosnia. They normally come with pita bread (as you can see in the picture), smântână, and kajmak (a kind of cream). As I said in the previous post, in the word ćevabdžinica the unvoiced p has changed to a voiced b, matching the voiced dž. Further above, you can see Izdaje se (For rent). This comes from the verb izdavati, and is an example of a reflexive verb. The se indicates that the property is “making itself available”. Reflexive verbs seem to be common in Serbian, just like in Romanian. To ask in Serbian what someone’s name is, you say Kako se zoveš?, literally “How do you call yourself?” You reply with Zovem se Robert, or whatever your name happens to be.

This is a fairly rare example of Cyrillic from Sarajevo. It’s a plaque on the Serbian Orthodox Church; Cyrillic is often used in Serbian. Without Google Translate I was pretty clueless. In Latin, the text reads:
U slavu božiju
Ovu kapiju podigoše i podariše sabornoj crkvi i gradu Sarajevu, Olivera i Milinko Mlađen. Za blagoslov i napredak svoje porodice, a na ponos naroda srpskog.
Slava bogu za sve!

Google Translate gives me:
In the glory of God
This gate was erected and donated by the Cathedral Church and the city of Sarajevo, Oliver and Milinko Mlađen. For the blessing and progress of his family, and for the pride of the Serbian people.
Thank God for all!

There are some things I can pick up. Slava means glory: this word also exists in Romanian. Napredak comes from napred meaning “forward”, which appeared in my first post in the series. The surname Mlađen means “Young”. Porodice is the genitive of porodica, “family”. (Familija also exists.) Porodica comes from the verb poroditi, to give birth. This word has the po-prefix, which is very common. Po- signifies completion. The roditi part comes from rod, which means fruit, crop, family relation, or even gender. Rod, with a similar set of meanings (but mostly used for crops and fruit) also exists in Romanian.

There are two words for God used on the plaque, a formal, ceremonial božiji and a more general (bog-standard?) bog. Interestingly, the word bogat, which means “rich” in both Serbo-Croat and Romanian, comes from bog.

This says “Bosnia & Herzegovina public spending counter”, and is a good example of why Serbo-Croat is a notch up in difficulty from other, better-known European languages. You simply don’t get as many words for free. Counter is brojač; this comes from broj (“number”). Number is not numero or număr or nummer, it’s broj, something totally different. Javne is “public” in the feminine genitive. No, it isn’t anything nice like publico. Potrošnje is spending, again in the feminine genitive. And BiH is short for Bosna i Hercegovina. Without having some idea of Serbo-Croat, this sign could be telling you practically anything.

The sign on the shop above comes with a handy English translation, although the Serbo-Croat actually means “House of Healthy Food”. Both zdrave (healthy) and hrane (food) are in the feminine genitive. Variants of these two words also exist in Romanian: hrană means food, but I hear the word more for animal food than human food, and zdravăn describes somebody who is big and strong. The word zdravo, by the way, is used all the time in Serbo-Croat as a greeting, either “hi” or “bye”.

The name of the restaurant above, Dva Ribara, means “two fishermen”. Ribar is fisherman (this comes from riba, fish), and to talk about two fishermen you need the genitive singular, which gets an extra a in this case. It’s hard to see, but they serve Sarajevsko beer. There’s an -o ending because beer (pivo) is neuter; if it were masculine it be Sarajevski; feminine would be Sarajevska. It’s really common in this part of the world to simply name beers after the city they come from. In Montenegro I seemed to drink Nikšićko (named after Nikšić, the country’s second city, or town) most of the time. The local Timișoara beer is Timișoreana (beer is feminine in Romanian).

Now we’re in Mostar, in Bosnia and Herzegovina. I knew that Crvena Armija (which you can see in the shadow) meant Red Army, and I thought the mural had some sort of military significance, but it’s for the local football team, Velež Mostar, which was founded in 1922.

The picture above was taken on Braće Fejića (Fejić Brothers) Street. The noun brat (brother) does not have a plural; instead you use the collective noun braća (think of the word “brethren” in English). There are dozens of collective nouns in Serbo-Croat. And guess what, the collective noun for brothers is feminine! Mad or what? Because it’s the street of the brothers, you need the genitive case, where the final a changes to e. The slogan on the mural means “Never forget, never forgive”, and it references the 1995 massacre of Srebrenica, where many thousands of Bosniaks were killed. Here we are on the east (Bosniak) side of Mostar. As the guide told us, the dividing line separating the Bosniaks and the Croats is the Boulevard that runs north–south, to the west of the river, not the river itself as some people mistakenly believe.

We’re hiring. But only females. Radnica is a female worker (a male worker is radnik). Potrebna is the feminine form of potreban (“necessary”). Once again, when you add the ending, you also remove the a before the final consonant. This gender-specific job advert is familiar from my time in Romania. Vânzătoare. Barmăniță.

This was my train from Mostar to Sarajevo. The text means “Railway Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina”. Now we see a difference between the Serbian variety of the language and the version spoken elsewhere. In Serbia, the j in željeznice wouldn’t be there. There are many, many words where an e in the Serbian dialect is replaced by je, or sometimes ije, in the variety used elsewhere. In Serbia and Bosnia, the same word is used for both “Sunday” and “week”; in Serbia this word is nedelja, but in Bosnia they say nedjelja with an extra j. “You are beautiful”, if talking to a woman, is Ti si lepa in Serbia, but Ti si lijepa (with ij added) in Bosnia.

Now I’m in Sarajevo. What’s a buregdžinica? It’s a place where you get burek, a kind of meat-filled pastry. The word burek comes from Turkish. This particular place had a huge variety of bureks, of which I ate several (and a yoghurt). I was amazed how cheap it all was, and I’m not someone to splash the cash. If the word for the pastry is burek, why is there a g in buregdžinica and not a k? This is due to something called “assimilation by voice”. Some consonant sounds (like g, b, d, v and z) are voiced – they employ your vocal cords – while others (like k, p, t, f and s) are unvoiced. If you say the g in “goat” with your finger on your Adam’s apple, you can feel the vibration, but if you say a k sound you can’t. In fact, g and k are a voiced–unvoiced pair; voice (or lack of it) is the only difference between the sounds. The same is true of b and p, d and t, and so on. The dž in buregdžinica is pronounced like the j in English “jump”, and is a voiced sound. It is much easier to pronounce two voiced consonants (or two unvoiced) side-by-side than a combination of both, and so the unvoiced k converts to voiced g, to match the “voicedness” of the following dž. There are lots of examples of these assimilations in Serbo-Croat. A ćevap is a piece of minced meat, much like mici in Romania, but a ćevap-seller is a ćevabdžinica, with the unvoiced p changed to voiced b.

And guess what – we do these assimilations in English too. The s in dogs is pronounced as a voiced z, to match the voiced g, but the s in ducks remains unvoiced, because the k is unvoiced. Of course, these sound changes aren’t reflected in the spelling, but that’s only because English isn’t a phonetic language, unlike Serbo-Croat. If it were completely phonetic, we would indeed write dogz. One example I can think of in English where the spelling does change is in the pair absorb–absorption. The -tion suffix begins with an unvoiced sh sound, so the voiced b changes to unvoiced p to match it.

Back to the picture above. On the window you can see the word mliječni, which means “dairy”. It’s an adjective that comes from mlijeko, “milk”. In Serbia, these words would be mlečni and mleko.

And finally, if you’re ever travelling to Sarajevo and want to visit Olimpik Buregdžinica, it’s in a square called Gajev Trg, off a main street named Ferhadija in the middle of town.

It’s a long time since I wrote about the Serbian language (summer of 2018, here and here), but I’ve had a bit of extra time on my hands, so here I’ve decided to post some signs from last summer’s trip to Serbia, Montenegro and Bosnia. (Montenegrin and Bosnian are basically the same as Serbian, as is Croatian.) Most of the signs presented some kind of puzzle, which I’ve attempted to solve, so here goes:

The main text on the plaque above would read SAVEZ ENERGETIČARA SRBIJE in Latin. This means Serbian Association of Energy Workers. The G is pronounced hard, as in goat. Serbia is Srbija in Serbian, but here it’s in the genitive case (“of Serbia”), where the a changes to e. At the bottom it says Beograd (Belgrade), Zetska 11, which is the address.

The buskers above have a sign that says NISMO NA BUDžETU, meaning We’re not on a budget. “We are not” is a single word, nismo. They’ve taken budžet directly from English (dž counts as a single letter in Serbian and is pronounced just like the j in just—sometimes the ž part remains in lower case even if the rest of the text is in caps, as in here). The word budžet gets an extra u because it’s in the locative case. Cases tell you what the word is doing in the sentence—they’re an essential part of Serbian, which has seven of them.

The billboard above is printed in italic Cyrillic, and that opens up a whole nother can of worms. Some of the letters look quite different from upright Cyrillic. What looks like a g is in fact a д, equivalent to latin d. The barred u is actually a п, equivalent to p. The barred upside-down m is a т.

In non-italic Cyrillic, the slogan above would read “Ко сме, тај може. Ко не зна за страх, тај иде напред.” In Latin, that would be: “Ko sme, taj može. Ko ne zna za strah, taj ide napred.” This means “Who dares can. Who knows no fear goes forward,” and is a quote from Vojvoda Živojin Mišić (1855-1921), a commander in Serbia’s wars. You can partly see his name at the bottom.

Still in Belgrade, the billboard above has the word “shake” printed in Serbian phonetics. The milkshake has been reduced to 100 dinars, or about 75 pence.

We’re still in Belgrade, where these handwritten Cyrillic bar signs weren’t easily decipherable. Handwritten Cyrillic is very similar to italic Cyrillic, only harder to read. The large sign in the frame reads:
Марина Милорадовић П.Р.
Услуге припремања и послуживања пића
Лутић
Београд – Стари Град

In Latin, that would be:
Marina Miloradović P.R.
Usluge pripremanja i posluživanja pića
Lutić
Beograd – Stari Grad

The top line is the name of the woman who owns the place, I guess. I don’t know what P.R. means. The second line means “preparing and serving drinks”. The word for drink is piće which is a neuter noun. The e changes to a in the plural. I think we need the accusative case here, but pića is the same in both nominative (vanilla, if you like) and accusative. I think it’s only masculine nouns whose plurals change between nominative and accusative, but don’t quote me on that (!).

They’ve switched to Latin for small signs on the right; the top one simply says otvoreno with “open” in English, while the bottom right sign says radno vreme (opening hours), which are 4pm till midnight, except Fridays and Saturdays (a subotom i petkom), when the place is open from 5pm till 1am. The words for Friday and Saturday are subota and petak in the nominative, but this sign is using the instrumental case, just in case you haven’t had enough cases yet. Nouns which end with the letter a followed by a consonant (like petak) lose that a when a case ending (the -om here) is added. Note that Serbian has two “and” words: i (a general “in addition” type of “and”) and a (a “but” or “whereas” kind of “and”).

Now it’s my first morning in Bar (Montenegro) after my long train journey. Although the language is substantially the same, there’s virtually no Cyrillic in sight now.

The sign on the right above is a road safety message. It says Ne brže od života: “Not faster than life”.

Brz (one of those no-vowel words) means “fast”, but it has comparative forms (“faster”) which are brži (masculine), brža (feminine) and brže (neuter). The z changes to ž, which is equivalent to the sound at the end of “massage”. I guess you use the neuter version in this general situation. Od can mean “from”, “since”, “of”, or (here) “than”. Od is followed by a noun in the genitive case, which is why the word for life (život, masculine) is written with an a on the end.

This beachside restaurant is built around trees, and that’s why I was confused when I saw the sign. I knew drvo meant tree, so I thought Pizza na drva probably meant “pizza in the trees” or something. It actually means “pizza on wood”, i.e. “wood-fired pizza”. I don’t know what case drva is in – Wiktionary isn’t helping me. Roštilj na ugalj (it should have an accent on the s, making the “sh” sound) means “barbecue on coal”.