Month: May 2020

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).