by 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!
