a romanian adventure

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.

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”.