by 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”.
