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We’re still in Sarajevo. The sign above the doorway says Српско Погребно Друштво, or Srpsko Pogrebno Društvo in latin. This means Serbian Funeral Society. Because Društvo ends in -o (it’s neuter), so do the two adjectives that precede it. Свети Марко or Sveti Marko means Saint Mark. There’s an i on the end of Sveti because it’s a definite saint (instead of any old saint), but I don’t know the ins and outs of that yet. In the third part of this series I said that Serbo-Croat words exhibit harmony between voiced and unvoiced sounds. Well, you see it again with Srpski and its variants. The voiced b of Srb has become an unvoiced p to match the unvoiced s that follows it.
Striparnica sounds like it could be something else, but it’s just a comic book shop.
More books. These ones are on music and films. I’ve read Born to Run, by … er … Brus Springstin, and it’s a damn good read. To the left of Springsteen’s autobiography is a book entitled (I think – you can’t quite see it) “The 100 Best Western Films”. However, the superlative adjective najboljih appears to be in the genitive plural, so it might be “100 of the Best…”. The word for “good”, which you hear all the time, is dobar, dobra or dobro, depending on gender. The comparative form (“better”) is bolji, bolja or bolje (it’s irregular, just like in English). The naj- prefix turns the comparative into a superlative (and that goes for all comparable adjectives, as far as I know).
In the centre right we’ve got a book by Toma Zdravković, who according to Wikipedia was a pop-folk singer-songwriter who died in 1991. A Mrs Zdravković was a teacher at my primary school in England, though she never taught me. The name must come from zdravo, meaning healthy and strong. The book is in Cyrillic, but Toma’s first name looks the same as it would in Latin. That’s because seven letters (JOKE MAT) look the same, and do the same job, in both Latin and Serbo-Croat Cyrillic. Well, the Cyrillic К looks slightly kinkier in the top right. On Bosnian number plates, the only letters you saw were the JOKE MAT letters. Other Cyrillic letters, like B, C and X, look just like Latin letters but correspond to different letters (B is equivalent to Latin V; C is like Latin S, and X is like Latin H).
The sign above had me baffled for a while, partly because of the font size difference between HIGIJENA and the following words. I knew pola was “half” and zdravlja was “health”, but what on earth does “half health” mean? It’s actually a full sentence: Higijena je pola zdravlja, which means “hygiene is half of health”, or something akin to “cleanliness is next to godliness”. Pranje od 30 do 95 means “washing from 30 to 95”, which I guess is the temperature. I don’t know what the H. means on the bottom line, but čišćenje (Google tells me the second c should have an acute accent, not a v-shaped one) means “cleaning”.
The two c-type letters in čišćenje are both pronounced similarly to ch in “chair”, but the first one (č) is a stronger sound, while the second one (ć) is softer, a bit like the start of “tune” in British English (in other words, how I say it). There’s a similar difference between dž (a single letter in Serbo-Croat), which is pronounced like the “j” in jump, and đ (sometimes also written dj, as in Djoković) which is pronounced like the beginning of British English “dune”. In both cases the differences are pretty small.
The letter š is pronounced sh, so in čišćenje you’ve got a sh sound and a ch-type sound back-to-back, just like in the word pushchair. I think this combination is relatively frequent; in Russian Cyrillic the shch combination even has its own letter (щ).
