Language learning

At the end of last month I wrote my first in a series of posts on the Serbian language, where I mostly talked about the Cyrillic and Latin alphabets. Here is part two.

English doesn’t have grammatical gender. Tables and eggs and combine harvesters aren’t male or female or somewhere in between. For anyone trying to learn it, that’s a real blessing. English pronouns are gendered, however. How many genders English pronouns have isn’t quite clear, especially as all sorts of weird and wonderful creations like xe and zir and emself have cropped up in recent years. (I never teach any of that stuff, but I bet some English teachers do. I do however touch on singular they occasionally.)

Serbian, on the other hand, has three genders, masculine, feminine and neuter, whether you’re dealing with nouns or pronouns. Romanian also features a neuter gender which acts as masculine in the singular and feminine in the plural, but Serbian isn’t like that: it has three distinct genders that act in three separate ways. A horse (konj, a three-letter word because nj counts as a single letter) is masculine, a cat (mačka) is feminine, and a tree (drvo) is neuter. A useful rule of thumb is that nouns ending in a consonant are masculine, those ending in -a are feminine, and those that end in -o ar -e are neuter. There are exceptions, though.

So how do you say “a cat” or “the cat”? “A horse” or “the horse”? The answer is, you don’t! Like most Slavic languages, there are no articles at all in Serbian. There’s no equivalent of a or an or the. Like the situation with genders I mentioned above, this is another example of having features in common with Romanian, but more “extreme” compared to what I’m used to in English. (Romanian has words for a and an but no word for the; to make a noun definite you instead have to alter or add letters to the end of the word.)

I’m quite happy with Serbian’s lack of articles. Definite articles in particular can be a minefield, as I’ve found out whilst learning Romanian and as an English teacher. It isn’t at all obvious to a non-native speaker that “Pacific Ocean” needs the in front of it, but “Central Park” doesn’t, and I commonly hear things like “after the lunch” or “both my parents are the teachers”. Even textbooks sometimes make mistakes here; one of my books tells you never to use the with islands. The author has obviously never been to New Zealand. As yet, I’m not sure what Serbians use to get round their lack of articles, but they seem to make extensive use of their words for “this” and “that”. I’ll talk about those in my next post in the series.

As for the gendered pronouns, these are on, ona and ono for he, she and it respectively. For “they”, you use oni for a group of men or a mixed-gender group containing at least one man; one for a group of women only; and ona for a group of things that are neuter. (Children happen to be neuter too, so you use ona when talking about kids, no matter whether they’re boys or girls or a mixture.) There’s a big added complication here, and that’s cases. The pronouns I’ve just mentioned only apply to the most simple nominative case, which we use when the pronoun is the object of the verb, as in a sentence like “He is happy” which would be On je srećan.

I’m trying to learn Serbian, which is a completely different animal from anything I’ve attempted before. It’s not at all like Romance languages such as Romanian and French. At least it is an animal, however. When I explained to my friend in the UK just how dissimilar Hungarian is to almost anything else, he said, so it’s like a fungus then. No, Serbian isn’t quite as off-the-wall as Hungarian.

I’m currently following a course of YouTube lessons. I like them because they explain the whats and hows and whys of Serbian, instead of just giving lists of vocabulary, which would be easily obtainable from a Google search.

First things first, the alphabets. Plural. Both Latin and Cyrillic alphabets are in common use in Serbian. That sets it apart from the otherwise almost identical Croatian and Bosnian, where Cyrillic has largely been abandoned. It seems that the choice of alphabet in Serbia is sometimes politically motivated and emotionally charged. In that region, that’s hardly surprising I guess.

There are 30 letters in the Serbian alphabet. Using the Latin version, these are (in order):
A B V G D Đ E Ž Z I J K L Lj M N Nj O P R S T Ć U F H C Č Dž Š
Crikey. Should I even bother buying a Serbian–English dictionary? I use physical paper dictionaries all the time, and I can look up a word in an average of around ten seconds, but alphabetical order (as I know it) is so hard-wired in my brain. There are, unsurprisingly, a few accented letters among that lot, but I’m used to seeing accented vowels. All the letters with accent marks in Serbian are consonants.

So how do you pronounce all those letters? Thankfully, Serbian is phonetic, unlike English which seems even more of a mess than it did before, now that I teach it. The Serbian letter C is pronounced “ts”, while Ć and Č are both similar to the English “ch” of chair, with Č being stronger. Ć and Č have their voiced counterparts Đ and Dž, which are both pronounced rather like “j” in “jump”, with Dž being stronger. Đ is sometimes written Dj, as in Djoković (or Đoković), which contains both the weak “j” and “ch” sounds. Then we have Š, which is like the “sh” sound in English, and Ž, which is like the “z” in “seizure”. Lj and Nj are pronounced similarly to the sounds in the middle of “million” and “onion” respectively. J on its own is pronounced just like the “y” in “yes”. Finally, there’s R, which is a really strong rolled sound. It is common for syllables in Serbian, and therefore whole words, to be completely devoid of vowels. An example is brz, which means fast, or srpski, meaning “Serbian”, which starts with five consonants in a row. But as far as I know, these vowel-free syllables all contain a syllabic rolled R.

An important thing to realise is that the digraphs Dž, Lj and Nj (and also Dj, if you write it like that) are each single letters. I noticed this in Serbia, when visiting a money changer, or menjačnica, like the one below. Notice that when the word menjačnica is written top to bottom, the NJ is written on one line, squashed together, like a simpler version of what happens with Chinese characters. You can also see a squashed NJ above the window, but that appears to be a stylistic choice. I’m guessing this is a fairly old photo and they just haven’t bothered with the decimal points; otherwise those exchange rates make no sense.

It isn’t that unusual for languages to have digraphs that are single letters; Hungarian even has a rare trigraph letter: Dzs. English could do something similar with, say, ch, sh, th and ng if it wanted. At least Serbian, to the best of my knowledge, isn’t like Welsh, where (for example) ng can be either one or two letters depending on the situation. That makes alphabetising a real pain.

For my own reference I’ll write out the Cyrillic version of the alphabet:
А Б В Г Д Ђ Е Ж З И Ј К Л Љ М Н Њ О П Р С Т Ћ У Ф Х Ц Ч Џ Ш

Finally, here’s a picture I took from a market in Belgrade, where you can buy fruit and vegetables, cups of coffee, pasta, household bits and pieces, and, um, coc. However those C’s in COC are actually the 21st letter of the Cyrillic alphabet, which corresponds to Latin S. The word seems to mean “sauce”. You can tell it’s Cyrillic because the next word is MAPКET. Note that the text above the kiosk windows is Cyrillic written in italics. A lot of the Cyrillic letter forms completely change when italics are used, or in handwriting. For instance, I think the letter that looks a bit like a w with a bar above it is actually a T. Madness!