by The pictures in this post are from Bar in Montenegro. I call the language Serbo-Croat for simplicity, even though we’re not in Serbia or Croatia.
I dalje si felje, with lj ligatures, written on the pavement. What does it mean? Google Translate says “You’re still a fella.” Dalje means “still”, and seems to be related to daleko, meaning “far”.
A bookshop. You can see here that all foreign names are transliterated into Serbo-Croat phonetics. Jamie has morphed into Džejmi. The same happens to foreign words. This would be like me writing that I’d eaten a crwasson or that I like paintings by Clawed Monay. Jamie Oliver’s book is called Meals in 15 Minutes in English, but the translated title just means All in 15 Minutes. The title of the book about mushrooms simply means What is this Mushroom? The word koja really means “what” instead of “which”, but “which” is used more generally than in English. It’s the same in Romanian: Care este numele tău? literally means “Which is your name?” It’s more complicated in Serbo-Croat though, because “which” has to agree with the noun. Here it’s koja because gljiva is feminine, but if it would be koji for a masculine noun and koje for a neuter noun. Gljiva is one of two words they use for mushroom; the other is pečurka, a cognate of Romanian ciupercă (meaning the same thing), but it’s a mystery how the consonants got swapped between the two languages.
The large brown book on the right is entitled Sto događaja iz istorije Crne Gore: One Hundred Events from the History of Montenegro. The local name for Montenegro is Crna Gora – Black Mountain. The English name (which obviously also means Black Mountain) comes from Venetian, and I wonder why we don’t now call it Black Mountain. Some grammar: because we’re saying “history of”, Crna Gora needs to go in the genitive, which means the final a‘s become e‘s. As for “event”, that’s događaj, but when you’re talking about 100 of them, you need that final a. If it were just “events”, without a number, you’d have a final i instead.
You don’t see much Cyrillic in Montenegro but you can see it on some books here. Поуке старца Тадеја (Pouke starca Tadeja) means “Lessons of the Old Man Tadej”. Star means old, starac means old man, and “of the old man” requires the genitive (add an a to the end but remove the a before the c). The old man is Tadej Štrbulović, a Serbian Orthodox elder who died in 2003. His name Tadej is equivalent to Thaddeus in English. I did once meet a Thaddeus in New Zealand, back in 1997 – he was a friend of a friend of my grandfather’s, and was known as Thady (rhyming with “lady”).
In the top right we have a book with a Cyrillic title in quite a traditional font, similar to one commonly used in Romania (but to write the Latin script). When reading something in an unfamiliar script, unusual fonts only complicate matters. The title is Тешко побеђенима, or (in Latin) Teško Pobeđenima, which either means “Hard to Beat” or “Badly Beaten” (two very different things, but I can’t tell which it is). Pobeđenima is some sort of passive version of the verb pobediti: to win or to conquer.
