A man's best friend for learning Serbian

She has Hungarian nationality, but her parents were Serbian. She was raised by a Hungarian/Slovak couple and their children, and, since she moved in with us, she is the best thing to happen to my spoken Serbian for a long time, giving me hours of helpful practice. Though some would call her a bitch, she is a joy to behold, great fun to be with, eager to learn and try and taste everything, and she is, of course, our new puppy.


Monica (or Monitsa or just Moni) really does understand Serbian. And I don't mean Serbocroatian or Serbian/Croatian or Serbian/ Croatian/ Bosnian/ Montenegrin or Naški or anything else neutral, I mean proper Serbian dialect. A recent Croatian visitor - indeed a linguist - who visited us recently here in Germany was shocked, and even mildly impressed, to hear my correct and distinctly Serbian (even Novi Sad) vowels when I would say sedi (and not sijedi or sidi or some such) - for sit down, lezi - for lie down, dodji (come here), dole/gore (down/up) and ne about eight hundred times per day. I have also learned several kiddie, giggle-inducing verbs that one never learns in books, such as kakiti (kakati in Croatian I discovered) and piškiti for the things that Moni likes to do mostly outside, but occassionally on G's precious Turkish carpets or in my shoes. Gristi describes what she does with her teeth to my feet when I'm taking my shoes off causing me to yelp, and when she's misbehaves, we call her glupi psu - crazy dog.

What is most convenient, however, is that G. speaks Serbian to the dog as well, which makes a nice change. I'm been trying for years to get her to speak Serbian to me, but it takes a certain patience to speak Serbian to a learner, especially one pushing 40, so after a few frustrating sentences she usually gives up and switches to English. However, even the most impatient people have more time when speaking to somebody who is furry and 12 weeks old. And it seems that most everybody wants to speak their native language with small animals. So Moni and I, we learn Dog Serbian together.

The fact that other people (i.e. in Germany) don't understand isn't a problem. Indeed, I'm glad to have somebody else who speaks this handy-dandy language that G and I sometimes use to speak to each other when we want to discuss somebody's weight, smell, clothes etc. And if Moni understands sedi when I say kaki most people will be impressed that such a young dog does what she's told.

I wonder: does her little puppy brain deal with case? Is it Monitsa or Monitse? Or does it matter, since when do you ever use anything but the vocative with a dog? And while we are on the subject of Serbian confusion, we bought her a house yesterday, i.e. a kuća, and she is a puppy (or cub), so kuče, making her house - that is the puppy's house is kučetova kuća. The houses house? The houses dog? And yes, I know, I'm a dunce for making a song and dance about it, but my "ch" sounds are primitive, so my ability to hear the difference between č and ć is about as easy as differentiating the English names Dan and Den for a Serbian native speaker, meaning that I don't know whether it is the dogs house or the houses dog. Probably doesn't matter to her.

Which reminds me of a Serbian book, that I tried to read: Kuća Mrtvih Mirisa. So lots of genders, lots of cases in there, I can see that, I'm not that stupid: all those endings and what not - I read about all that malarky somewhere. But the problem is I don't know if it means the dead smelly house, the smell of dead houses, or the house of dead smells, or even the house that smells dead. Blimey, I think Moni and I will need to attend an intensive course, or perhaps I should just stick to Dog speak. Braaaavo, Dooooobra.

Croatia with the Serbs

I first visited Croatia in the summer of 2004. Not such an odd thing for a Canadian living the Europe: like most people, I had heard about it as a place to visit, and it was supposed to be great, relatively cheap, sunny with nice food and people, so why not? What was a little odd was who I was traveling with: three mostly Serbian people from Novi Sad, my girlfriend and her parents. Now, there is quite a lot of traffic in to and out of Croatia, so I can't really be 100% sure, but I was pretty damn sure that we were the only people who were in that part of Croatia in a car from Novi Sad, complete with Serbian passports, the little Serbian flag on the license plate and everything. Indeed, I saw only one other car from Serbia the whole month that we were there, a Belgrade license plate on a car tucked away in a parking lot in Pula.

My other half had been back to Croatia a couple of times. Like many of the former Yugoslavian diaspora, she had a lot of friends from different former provinces, and had been the past two summers on sailing trips with various Croatian friends, but she hadn't dared to be as conspicuous as all of this - flying in with just one passport check, but no other obvious symbols to give her away. Coming from Novi Sad, and being something of a true polyglot herself (six languages and one of them is Hungarian) she blends very quickly. Add the odd "j" to your words, and remember to say Kruh instead of Hleb nothing can really go too wrong.

Anyway, back to our 2004 trip. I must admit I was a bit nervous, given that I had also heard all kinds of opinions, mostly from people in Serbia, which I had visited several times already, about why it wasn't a good idea to drive to Croatia: they would vandalize your car, beat you up, etc. Actually, nothing of the sort happened and indeed, it was rather the opposite.

Virtually everybody we met in hotels and restaurants was very glad to see us, or rather them, as normal tourists like myself were obviously part of the summer furniture. People of her parents generation generally moaned (as +50-somethings often do) that things weren't as good as they used to be, and that the new customers (Germans, Italians) weren't of the same ilk as the old Yugoslavs. At one point over ribice in a restaurant in Punat, on the Island of Krk, her father explained to me, in his charming, if a little broken English, that "We are having a very nice time". I think the pleasant surprise, combined with nostalgia must have been almost overwhelming.

A little later, we went to Brijuni, which was Tito's summer residence - an Island off the Istrian peninsula. There, we saw a play about the former Yugoslavia, set inside the prison island of Goli Otok. The play seemed good: we moved around from scene to scene inside the ruin of a fortress that served as the prison, and apparently all the actors were dead famous, but, of course, I had never heard of any of them, and understood almost nothing. Blah blah blah mi blah blah blah mislim blah blah blah dobar blah blah jeste blah blah nije. But quite an experience. After the performance there was a little party, I was asked to escort G.'s mother (who was feeling a bit timid) over to a group of people singing old songs, and eventually the singers worked out that she wasn't precisely one of them, and once again there was the usual charm and exchange of jokes about the mad old Communist days.

Other odd things happened on that trip. For instance, one day we were driving along a narrow road on Krk, and, as is very normal, a big German registered Mercedes was coming towards us, not giving way. I began my usual curses about the discourteous German drivers, when the window of the Mercedes rolled down, and a head popped out that was decidedly not German. A dark-complexioned man in sunglasses, with a rough beard looked out and said "Eh, Novi Sad" and then did something with his hand. Three fingers - thumb, index, and middle finger - points towards us. G.'s mother did the sign of the cross, her father laughed heartily, and when I asked what it was, G. said "he was just doing something stupid". Obviously, he was giving us the three fingered Serbian salute. I realised that we weren't, in fact, the only Serbs there, but that plenty of Gastarbeiters from Germany had probably been sneaking into the country for years. It reminded me of what an American once joked to me about Canadians in the US: "they can walk among us, almost undetected".

I've been back to Croatia now about a dozen times, and we've bought a house there that we are slowly beginning to renovate. I love the place, and love the people. It isn't all good, of course. In certain parts of the country one encounters people who really really don't want to hear that one is from Serbia, such as the Taxi driver who had "Croatia forever" tattooed on his neck. And in a later trip, another person from Novi Sad had his car vandalised - if it could be called that: somebody stole his license plate, probably wanting a souvenir. But such things could easily have happened in London, and indeed a lot more besides.

But on the whole, things have been event free as far as Serb/Croat relations are concerned. Indeed, I think I overheard some of the first ice-breaking conversations between Serbs & Croats regarding the wars. Last time we were there (September) we were sitting on the terrace at night sharing a glass of wine with our hosts. G's father was telling the story about the bomb-shelters in Novi Sad. The synopsis was the the mechanism for opening/closing the blast doors on the shelters had stopped working, and they thus needed to use a Tractor to close them. They had to draw straws for the hero who would have to sacrifice himself for the sake of the others, and he bravely agreed he would go outside, close the door, and then die (a hero) in the bombing. It was only then that the others wondered how they would ever get out of the shelter. The Croats related the story about how the New Croatian Army toured the island to familiarize the people with the implements of war. They threw a single grenade into a field, and when they turned around, the entire village had disappeared, having fled in terror. Neither of these stories was uproariously funny (though perhaps in another blog I should try to explain my understanding of Balkan humor), but I could see how both people were carefully observing the other to see whether the subject matter was acceptable, and it was clear that the slightly over-enthusiastic guffaws were as much about relief as humor.

On mixed-up language centres

Like many people, I once tried to learn Spanish. Not such an odd thing to do, since nearly half a billion people speak it, with speakers on every continent, and most importantly perhaps, tens of millions of speakers in the US, which I visit regularly. And being honest, I once had a Spanish flame. Whether I was/am fluent is probably a thing of perspective. In the sense that Canadians from Alberta say they speak French because they studied it for four years in high-school (but couldn't order a coffee in Paris) I am utterly fluent. But in the typical European polyglot sense of "I speak a little English, would you like to debate the finer points of philology?" I am hopeless. Nevertheless, there are actually people in this world that I only speak Spanish with, or at least I did until they picked up English out of their own work-related necessity, so I guess I am functional, but not great at it.

My Spanish began to go wrong when I began to attempt the mega-impossible: namely speak the not-so-common-to-learn Serbian language. And it went wrong in a big way. The problem was that every time I tried to speak Spanish after beginning to learn Serbian, I ended up throwing Serbian words into Spanish sentences. Tengo malo hambre. Quiero cafe samo. That sort of thing.

Now, even the most ignorant person linguistically probably knows that these languages are not related. Yeah, yeah, sure, I know they are Indoeuropean tongues, but then so are English, Sanskrit and Albanian, and only an Academic, in a sweater with holes in it, would think that knowing one would help understand another.

People who have tried to pick-up more than one new language will understand, and probably won't see what the fuss is about - this is normal, and something you get over as you get better at the languages. But there are other languages in my brain that don't suffer from any interference problems: I do speak German pretty well, and I guess my French is about the same as Spanish, and I'm not just being a silly English-speaking Canadian: I have used it and it does work, sort of. It seems that whatever space Spanish occupies in my brain (and not the space for German or French), is now being over-written by Serbian, and it doesn't seem to get better as I improve my Serbian. Rather my Spanish, albeit already atrophying from lack of use, is degrading all the more rapidly.

My reasoning for this is simply that Serbian just sounds so much like Spanish. And there are also a vast number of words in one language that are words in the other, but that mean something else. Consider:

Serbian = Spanish (English)
Isto = Mismo (The Same)
Mi smo = Nosotros somos (We are)
Čiste = Limpio (Clean)
Wiz = Chiste (Joke)
Malo = Pequeño (Small)
Loš = Mal (Bad)

And on and on and on. Is it bad, small or sick? Is it clean or a joke? Is it the same or are we something? Argh.

What's more, many Serbian words simply sound like they easily could be Spanish: Samo, Isto, Dobro (Alone, The Same, Good), which is a far cry from the equivalents in (say) Germany: Allein, Gleich, Gute. No chance of interference there, or so it would seem.

And to augment my frustration, I must suffer the indignation that Serbian native speakers also don't see what the fuss is about, even when they speak Spanish. How could you ever mix up Mi smo and Mismo? You dunce.

A few years ago, some perhaps over-proud Serbs in Cambridge were saying that Serbian/Croatian speakers were the only people who can truly pick up Spanish and speak it like a native. I don't know where on Earth such a fact would come from (did somebody study this?), and frankly, if you can't say "th" I don't see how it would be possible to speak Castillian Spanish perfectly, but I could nevertheless see their point. It must just be a slight shift in the brain, the sounds (anyway) come flawlessly. Ovo es malo interesantno, no?

And while we are on the subject, does anybody else get confused by cyrillic/latin ambiguities? Mecapa or Mesara? Hypo or Nuro? Novi Sad or Hobi Cat? Argh....

Krompir or Kumpir?

What does a Turkish Kebab shop have to do with the former Yugoslavia? Well something anyway. Yesterday we walked across the river to what we consider to be the one decent place to buy food in our typical German suburb - namely a little Turkish restaurant, complete with Turkish television and the usual friendly service. As I ate, I noticed that they had recently bought what appeared to be an oven for baked potatoes. The only original sign on the machine was in English, and frankly hard to understand for a native speaker: a half-washed out picture of what was probably a potato with cream cheese and chives, with the word "Baked". For clarity, the Turkish owners had added their own label - Kumpir - to clarify things for customers. Not exactly the same word, but recognisable enough: Krompir is the Serbian word for Potato. Which brings me to one of my favorite subjects regarding Serbia and generally all southern parts of the former Yugoslavia: Just how Turkish everything still is.

For those not well versed in Balkan history, some basics: most people know about the collapse of Constantinople in 1453, and how the Ottoman Turks kept on going, eventually reaching the gates of Vienna, and laying siege to it twice if memory serves. However, between Constantinople and Vienna lies virtually all of the Balkans, from Greece to Croatia, and the Turks stayed there, at least in Serbia, Bosnia & Macedonia - for half a millennium, and they left there mark on everything. Drive south of Belgrade and you immediately see a difference from (say) Vojvodina or Croatia, which the Turks only occupied briefly, or not at all. In South Serbia one finds Persian carpets & low-tables in the cafes, darker complexions, and frankly a more oriental feel.

One of the quaintest surviving marks is the fact that many of the words for things related to civilised comforts - pillows, carpets, good food, etc. - are still Turkish. Jastuk (pillow), Krompir (potato), Burek (pastry), and many more that I ought to compile. Makes you think that the Serbs didn't really have many creature comforts before the invasion. Which, of course, is probably at least partly true. The Turks were the great civilisers of their time, bringing exotic foods from the orient, the virtues of cleanliness, and education. Ok, ok, I know they were not always the kindest of overlords, but then times were rough back then. Anyway, given the relative quality of the Turkish lifestyle relative to some of the neighbors - imagine if the Serbs had instead picked up cuisine from the Germans - I think the remaining marks are fundamentally a good thing.

Inspriation to do what I set out to do with this Blog

Sometimes it takes an outsider to get you to do what you always intended. I had originally sought a blog so that I could vent my various feelings about the former Yugoslavia, but as one can see, I've done nothing of the sort.

In any case, looking on B92, the sound-as-a-pound news network in Serbia, I found a blog from Rosemary Bailey Brown (an American living in Sombor), and realised that somebody had beaten me to the blog. Actually, she is far more deserving of this, since she has taken the ultimate step of actually moving to Serbia with her Serbian husband. A few Emails later, and a prompting from her, and here I am.

So, erm... where to begin? I think there is a certain legacy at the begining of such a thing - old memories and stories, etc. - that must be dealt with first. So perhaps over the coming weeks, while I am at least a few weeks away from my next Serbian experience (a visit from the in-laws - don't get me started), I can try to do just this.

Probably I need to explain myself first. I'm from Canada, but I've lived in Europe since 1990, ten years in England, and the last seven in Germany. I'm a scientist - molecular biology actually if that means anything - and the reason I'm interested in the former Yugoslavia is deeply personal. The love of my life comes from Novi Sad, which is the capital of the former province of Vojvodina, in the northern part of what is now Serbia. Vojvodina is a bit like Kosovo in the sense that it lost its autonomy by becoming effectively part of Serbia, but in truth it is far more Serbian than Kosovo. Having said that Vojvodinians rather pride themselves on a certain ethnic diversity. Serbs are clearly the majority, but there are tens of thousands of Hungarians, Romanians, Slovakians, Roma/Sinti, and Ruthenians. Indeed, G. is part Hungarian herself (her father is half Hungarian from Bečej in the north of the province) and she spoke it until she was six at school. With all this diversity, Vojvodina isn't such a bad place to speak Serbian as a learner, since many people also speak it imperfectly and you are just as likely to be taken as some odd minority as an actual outsider. (And while we are on the subject, as a gigantic Canadian with blue eyes, Vojvodina is the only European place where nobody seems to be able to tell at a glance that I'm an outsider)

Anyway, I digress, but I tell you all of this for a reason. My perspective will necessarily by rather biased towards a more Serbian one, but not so baised as I think I would be if she had come from (say) some proud, pure Serbian village 100km south of Belgrade. I should also say that we have bought a house in Croatia, mostly as she spent so many happy childhood summers there, and because we both love the country. I have never been to Bosnia (though I want to go, and indeed love Kemal Monteno i Sarajevo Ljubavi Moooojaaaaaa), Montenegro, Kosovo or Macedonia, and have spent only brief stints in Slovenia on my way to Croatia or Serbia (but like what I've seen so far).

The overall thing about the former Yugoslavia is that any foreigner who really experiences it as I have simultaneously falls in love with it, and feels an enormous sense of sadness about what has happened there. So necessarily this blog will fill with stories of both kinds. Two things that my significant other said to me in the early days of our relationship - when visits to Serbia/Croatia would be in a kind of fog of half-caught snippits that is typical of anybody learning such a moon-man language - illustrate this point exactly.

Before my first ever visit to Novi Sad, when everything had been booked, including a complex series of flights from Edmonton (Canada) via Frankfurt to Belgrade, she started to question whether I should come at all, commenting that "It is very sad here". I couldn't really understand, since I was all ready for anything - I expected a town something like Torrelavega (a grubby industrial town in Northern Spain) or Runcorn (ditto in Northern England), but was very pleasantly surprised. But I know now that she was expressing a feeling that things were so much worse than they were. She had seen her town disintegrate from one of the loveliest places in southern Europe into a mess of broken buildings, bad roads, rubbish on the streets, homeless people, and nothing really to sing about.

A few months later during our first visit to Belgrade proper, we were in a book shop (looking for a copy of Ivo Andric's books in English) when we found an old promotional book for Yugoslavia, complete with pictures of Lake Ohrid and the Croatian coast, and she pointed without showing a lot of emotion at these panoramic pictures of breathtaking beauty and said "this is my country". Again, the quixotic nature of her comments are all to typical of the way people in the former Yugoslavia think. She was expressing the complex feeling that comes about when a country you once loved in its entirety had torn itself to pieces, leaving nothing but old books collecting dust in a Belgrade bookstore.

Equally, I am always taken aback by how friendly everybody is in these new countries. It baffles me that a few politicians managed to ruin everything, and that we in the west never did more to teach what is, after all, a group of pretty similar people in terms of behavior and appearance, to live peacefully together. But whatever, and what is done is done.

Anyway, I think I'll post a more sensible story next time. But perhaps I can leave this one with probably the most relevant quotation about the former Yugoslavia that I have ever come across.

"How is it possible.... for this country to become stable and orderly and adopt at least as great a degree of civilization as its closest neighbors, if its people are divided as nowhere else in Europe? Four faiths live in this... land. Each of them is exclusive and from the same soil, but the centre of the spiritual life of each of these four groups is far away, in a foreign land, in Rome, Moscow, Istanbul, Mecca, Jerusalem, and God alone knows where, but at any rate not here where the people are born and die. And each group considers that its well-being is conditioned by the disadvantage of each of the other three faiths, and that they can make progress only at their cost. Each of them has made intolerance the greatest virtue. And each one of them is expecting salvation from somewhere outside, each from the opposite direction."
-- Ivo Andric, The Days of the Consuls

Dovidjena for now.