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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.
