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We’re back in Belgrade for the sixth and penultimate part of this series, and suddenly there’s a whole load of Cyrillic again. The sign above the door of this sandwich bar reads:
Најбољи и најјефтинији сендвичи у граду. Са домаћом пршутом и комплет лепиња.
In Latin, this would be: Najbolji i najjeftiniji sendviči u gradu. Sa domaćom pršutom i komplet lepinja.
Translation: “The best and cheapest sandwiches in town. With homemade ham and a selection of buns.”
The words for “best” and “cheapest” use the naj- prefix for superlatives that I mentioned before. The word jeftin (“cheap”) is just like the Romanian word ieftin. (Incidentally, the same goes for “expensive”: skup in Serbian, scump in Romanian.) When you add the naj- prefix in front of jeftin, you get a slightly weird-looking double j. In fact the word najjeftiniji with all its i‘s and j‘s looks decidedly weird, full stop.
The adjective domaćom (domestic, homemade) and noun pršutom (ham, prosciutto) have the pleasant-sounding (to me) -om ending because they’re in the instrumental case, which is used to express with or by something, as well as a bunch of other things that I don’t know yet. Singular nouns usually get the -om ending in the instrumental, but in the case of masculine nouns that end in a so-called soft consonant like j or š, and neuter nouns that end in -e, you add -em instead. So čaj (tea) becomes čajem. Then plurals are different again. How am I ever supposed to remember this stuff?
Some graffiti. Smrt imperijalizmu, sloboda Balkanu! This means “Death to imperialism, freedom for the Balkans!” Even in just these four words, there’s some grammar. The word for imperalism is imperijalizam, but here the graffiti artist (that’s not the right word at all, I know) needed the dative case, which meant a u was added and the a before the m deleted. You see sloboda and its variants all the time. Slobodan means free, in the sense of “liberated” or “available”. It’s also a common male name, as in Slobodan Milošević, who was about as misnamed as you can get. We also have the noun slobod and verb a slobozi in Romanian, although they aren’t used nearly as much. To say “free” meaning “costing nothing”, you use the word besplatan, literally “without payment”. Bez means “without”, but the voiced z changes to unvoiced s before the unvoiced p. In Romanian we also have plată (payment) and a plăti (to pay). As for Balkanu, that’s also in the dative case. Because the last a of Balkan is stressed and longer, the rule about removing it before adding the u doesn’t apply here.
It’s almost impossible to see, but on the left-hand side of the big white C there’s some small stencilled graffiti that says 11.07.1995 #sedamhiljada. That’s a reference to the Srebrenica massacre in which many thousands of Bosniaks were killed. Sedam hiljada means 7000, although Wikipedia tells me that over 8000 people died there. The word hiljada (thousand) is borrowed from Greek; it’s cognate with kilo. Two thousand would be dve hiljade, with a final -e, but for 5000 and above, the -e returns to -a again. The name Srebrenica, by the way, comes from srebro, meaning silver. In Roman times it had a silver mine.
Firstly, the car. It’s a Zastava, probably from the late eighties or early nineties. I saw quite a lot of these still on the roads in Belgrade. The UE on the number plate stands for Užice, a region situated south-west of Belgrade. The name Zastava means “flag”. As for the Cyrllic sign outside a café, it says Цеђени сокови, or Ceđeni sokovi in Latin, which means “squeezed juices”. Sok is the word for juice in the singular. It’s masculine, like most nouns that end in a consonant. For the majority of masculine nouns, you simply add -i to make the plural, but some single-syllable nouns like sok add a longer -ovi ending instead. Another example is most (bridge), which becomes mostovi in the plural. A squeezed juice at this bar costs 169 dinars, about £1.40 or nearly NZ$3.
