Today I’ve translated part of The Magic Finger into Romanian as an exercise, I’ve practised some Serbian, I’ve worked on my book, I’ve written six short fill-in-the-gaps stories for my newest student, and I’ve been up and down the stairs eight times. I also had a quick walk this afternoon – noticeably more people were out than a month ago, but the quiet was still lovely, and I caught the first whiff of Timișoara’s distinctive late-spring and early-summer aroma. In some ways I’d prefer the lockdown to continue beyond this coming Friday.
In one of John Campbell’s latest videos, he talks about the higher mortality rate from coronavirus among people with darker skin, even when you remove the effects of underlying health conditions. The pattern is repeated all over the world, and the excess mortality rate increases progressively as one’s skin gets darker. He is convinced that this is because people with higher melanin levels (i.e. darker skin) produce immunity-boosting vitamin D more slowly, and is frustrated that this biological effect isn’t being talked about. It’s OK to talk about the socio-economic factors (which are massive too) but skin colour is somehow off-limits; you can’t go there, even if going there would save lives. Although I have white skin, I’m taking 2000 international units of vitamin D per day.
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).
I had a pretty shitty 48 hours from Tuesday afternoon to yesterday afternoon. Almost no energy. Fatigue. Extreme weakness. Clumsiness. Just how I often feel for a few hours after one of my sinus episodes (or maybe migraines), but worse and longer. I managed to work, but everything else was a write-off. Obviously my thoughts quickly turned to coronavirus, and Dad was scared witless when I told him my symptoms, but I could still smell and taste everything and had no sign of a fever. I’m still kind of mneh, but that’s a massive step up from yesterday.
This morning I went through Roald Dahl’s The Magic Finger with my latest (adult) student. I realised my Romanian is nowhere near good enough to instantly translate something like that into her native language, even if I know maybe 97% of the words. You can’t duck and dive like you sort of can with speaking, and my grammar and syntax just aren’t up to it.
In the UK they’re celebrating the 75th anniversary of VE Day, while many who remember that day are dying in nursing homes. In Romania we’re gearing up to come out of lockdown – this will be our last weekend. I’m a bit concerned – the cases and deaths haven’t skyrocketed as I feared, but this menace is hardly going away either.
Last night I lay awake thinking about when I’ll see (and hug) my mother again. I feel I have an almost complete relationship with my father just though voice calls and emails, but with Mum it isn’t the same.
This Friday will be the 75th anniversary of VE Day. I remember the 50th anniversary well. I was fifteen, it was a sunny Monday, and we had a barbecue and drinks in the garden. I took Seagers gin from the cabinet at regular intervals, added it to my orange juice, and nobody seemed to notice. I doubt I would have been in much trouble anyway – my parents weren’t big drinkers, but they had fairly relaxed attitudes to their kids getting hold of the stuff. Vera Lynn (still alive today at 103) was rolling out the barrel. It was a happy occasion, and of course so many World War Two veterans were still alive, including my grandparents. My grandfather, a squadron leader during and after the war, already had quite advanced Alzheimer’s by then.
It was a different world in 1995. The internet was this new thing, touted as the information superhighway, with all its cyber-slashes and dots and dashes that normal people still had no need for. Normal people made do with 1471, a handy number you dialled to tell you who called last. (And people still talked about dialling numbers then.)
When I think of ’95, I also think of sport. Costantino Rocca’s 50-foot putt at the Open, Blackburn’s Premier League title and various ups and downs through the divisions, and then Jonah Lomu’s destruction of England in the rugby World Cup. (I remember I switched over from that ridiculous match – it felt like a boxing match that I hoped could be stopped – and instead watched a very long third set at Queen’s Club which Pete Sampras barely survived.) I also think of an essay our English teacher asked us to write, called “The Class of ’95”. We had to imagine a school reunion taking place this year – in 2020. She told us that statistically, one or two of us (out of 25 or so) wouldn’t make it. I didn’t enjoy the essay – the idea of a reunion didn’t appeal at all – though I imagined I’d be living in New Zealand by then. I never would have guessed I’d have moved to NZ and then to Romania. Where even was Romania?
I wonder how Britain would have handled coronavirus in ’95. The government response would surely have been more sober, more dignified. Those were not partisan times. John Major would not have declared 20,000-plus deaths a success – that would have been too obscene. There would have been less information, but less misinformation too. Right now though, living thousands of miles from the rest of my family, I’d take having the superhighway during this pandemic over living in 1995 and not having it.
Yesterday was a crappy Friday. My sinus pain or migraine (I’m not sure which) started the night before, and I didn’t sleep a lot. I took plenty of paracetamol which helped, but I still felt washed out and sapped of energy. Four trips up and down the stairs were all I could manage. I had two lessons, and I had to apologise for yawning in my session with my UK-based student which started at 9pm. In the middle of the lesson we had a storm here. Today I’ve still felt lethargic and have done little other than read and talk to my parents (where they taunted me on FaceTime with lumps of Whittaker’s chocolate). I did my full eight laps of the stairs but was slower than usual. It’s bucketing down right now. We were in need of a good deluge.
It’s our penultimate weekend under full lockdown. I hope by the end of this month I’ll be able to read a book on a park bench while eating a punnet of strawberries. I have no desire to eat out or go shopping. I was surprised to see Piața 700 – an open air market I’ve mentioned several times on this blog – in full swing when I passed by on Tuesday. I kept well away from the produce and people. Another market, Piața Iosefin, has shut down after one of the stallholders tested positive.
Mum keeps me updated on cases and deaths from Covid-19 in New Zealand. Those who die in NZ are invariably old, often from care homes. In Romania that is not the case. The list is updated two or three times a day, and it’s full of not-that-old people. So far, 57% of deaths have been under-70s, including 27% under 60 and 10% under 50. Why? My first guess was that, even though I see old people all the time, Romania has a smaller proportion of elderly than a prosperous country like New Zealand. But no, Romania’s proportion of over-70s is in fast slightly larger than NZ’s (1 in 8 against 1 in 9, roughly). That’s not because Romanians live longer than Kiwis – they don’t! – but because so many young people have left the country, and women have just about stopped having babies, so the elderly make up a sizeable chunk of the population. In other words I’m puzzled by all the premature deaths here.
Here’s the first ten questions from Tuesday’s game of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? with the twelve-year-old. I made these up pretty much on the fly. After the Boris Johnson question, I was tempted to ask how many kids Boris had, and make all the possible answers correct.
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.
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