On the silliness of language distinctions

We were in Croatia again, last week. Mostly we were trying to relax, but we spent a good deal of time sorting out our ruin of a house on Krk. Nice weather, good, if a little bit homogeneous food (I don't think I'll ever be able to eat lignje na žaru again), pleasant company. We actually brought the dog, which introduced an interesting complexity to my Canadian sensitivities regarding the whole Serb/Croat thing. Namely that one has to tell her sedi and not sijedi to sit down, and frankly, she doesn't always understand it if you say it the Croatian and not the Serbian way. Perhaps this will be food for thought for linguists struggling to distinguish the languages (if a dog can tell they are different languages, then surely....).

Anyway, I was going about saying quietly, or whispering sedi (puppies need to be told this very often of course), or just trying to use the Croatian sijedi a bit louder, with mixed results. I was probably more conscious, with my ever improving Serbian, that I tended to drop the ijs rather than use them, and it was obvious to anybody who thought about it that I had learned the language more in Serbia than Croatia. G makes few attempts to speak anything but her native Vojvodinian dialect, freely saying hleb, aerodrom, hiljada instead of the Croatian kruh, zračna luka or tisuća (for bread, airport, thousand). And indeed the way they speak in that part of Croatia is a bit of a deviation from what I think is standard Croatian anyway - they seem more inclined to ikavski (if that is what it is called): that is, Serbs say belo for white, typical Croats say bijelo and people on Krk and in Istria almost say bilo. G anyway says it is silly to worry about it, and being a Canadian, who has lived in the UK and now in Germany, and who stopped worrying about my English accent years ago (I think I now sound American), I did think it was a bit silly.

I cast my mind back to the first few words I learned in Serbian. I had bought my first book Teach yourself Serbo-Croat, and was learning Dobar dan and such like. G was on a visit to Novi Sad, and on the telephone had just excitedly told me Pada sneg! Pada sneg! to denote the fact that it was snowing there. I was, as it happened, presently on a skiing retreat with people from work, and when it snowed in the German alps I said to two Croatian colleagues Pada sneg. I was then curtly told that it was Pada snijeg in Croatian, and that I must remember that it was a different language. But my book, though it mentioned what it called Eastern and Western dialects, devoting about two pages to the differences, didn't make such a sharp distinction.

The above, I guess, is my way of introducing my general dilemma about the whole language issue in the former Yugoslavia.

As I improved in Serbian, I began to see that it was probably a bit of a stretch to call Croatian and Serbian different languages. As I've said before, I also speak German well, and also know Spanish, and as for English, these are languages with enormous variations in dialects. My once English wife found it impossible to understand people in truck-stops in my native Alberta, and though I'm fairly competent in high German, it is difficult for me to understand local-yokels speaking village Austrian, Schwaebian or even strong Heidelberg accents. I've never encountered any such difficulties in Serbian/Croatian, and indeed rather begin to think that the difference between them is more akin to American/British English than the seemingly greater distance between Austrian and German dialects. The Serbian/Croatian distinction would be similar in English dialects if one imagined that people in America, England & Scotland spelled words as they pronounced them (as is the case for Serbian & Croatian) - e.g. girl would then be gurl, gul and gerl respectively - it might be easier to say they were different languages, with all the practical problems that this would introduce.

Of course, people will take offense to this - I've certainly seen a lot of the vehement assertions in the discussions at Wikipedia on the subject of Serbian/Croatian or Serbocroatian. But I think the perspective of one who has come in as a naive outsider and (at least partially) learned the language(s) should not be cast aside without some thought. It is fairly easy to tell somebody ignorant about the language or the region that the languages are different - they will probably take it face value, and anyway they won't very much care. To them, all the languages sound like mumbo-jumbo and they wouldn't be able to distinguish Hungarian from Russian, and probably would label the whole lot as "Eastern Europe" and lump them all together anyway - geographically, culturally and linguistically. But when somebody has taken the time to learn the language, they immediately see how silly, and indeed impractical, it is to distinguish them. Why do I have to worry about how I address my dog? And take it from me, having learned a good deal of the language, I can't suddenly see (as perhaps my Croatian friends, who told me the sneg/snijeg distinction as evidence of divergence, expected) that they are so different, unless I start saying that I speak Canadian as a native and not English. It doesn't take a genius, at any rate, to see that the distinction is political more than it is linguistic. Very silly.

Silly also does mean impractical. I read in the Economist last year that many western publishers were just not bothering with translations in the former Yugoslavia since the nationalist fervor that boldly states the languages are different makes translation and publication a headache. Namely that the attitudes effectively partitioned what was originally a market of 22 million people into smaller pockets of people sensitive to missing or present ijs and minor differences in vocabulary. They mostly just washed there hands of it, until some plucky Bosnian publishing house saw an opportunity and began translating mostly English books into something neutral - more Croatian than anything else, since they are probably the most sensitive - but importantly without any l specific label of what the language actually was. All countries, whether they spoke Croatian, Serbian, Montenegrin, Bosnian, Istrian or God-knows what else, started eating them up, hungry for translations of books that otherwise might never be available to small markets. The article ended with a somewhat ironic quip that the Croatian government, eager to make Serbian entry into the EU easier (the much believed notion that it will be easier to go in together; or perhaps they just wanted to demonstrate good will to the EU onlookers), helped the Serbs with the thousands of pages of translation into the local languages needed for EU membership. This, of course, they did by sending several hundred word documents that, with a few find-and-replace operations, and perhaps a trivial change to cyrillic, would do well enough to satisfy the EU officials that the job was done.

Back to me. I guess what I now find myself doing is not worrying too much about it unless I'm in some place where I suspect that people are more nationalistic, or among people who have made some indications already that they feel strongly about it. I hold my tongue and try to add or take-away ijs as necessary. But frankly, I still think this is a bit silly.


I'll end this with something that I found very touching from another book I have called Colloquial Croatian and Serbian: A Complete Course for Beginners. This was written in 1998 by Celia Hawkesworth, an academic in London, who specialises in these languages and clearly speaks them having spent a lot of time in the former Yugoslavia, and shows a great devotion to these countries. Indeed, she has written the very best translations that I have seen of Ivo Andrić, the Nobel Prize winner for literature from the former Yugoslavia (ok, ok, he was a Bosnian Croat, who wrote in Belgrade mostly and died in Yugoslavia - better?). In the preface to the book, she makes an apology to those of her friends in the former Yugoslavia (Bosnia if I remember clearly) who had taken issue with her views on their language (the peoples of these lands speak the same language, the book opens with). At the end of the acknowledgments, she writes:

I am well aware that my attitude to their language is unacceptable to some of my friends in Croatia and Bosnia at this time, but I hope at least that those who use this book will learn to understand more than just the language.

This is certainly how I feel. When it comes to losing friends over those lost ijs and hleb/kruh distinctions, this is very silly indeed.

And incidentally, I notice that Dr Hawkesworth now publishes separate Serbian and Croatian language books. One wonders if this rescued the friendships.

The adages of old Serbian wives

An Old Wives' tale, at least in English, refers to one of the vast number of home truths that people tend to believe regardless of any hard evidence. Anyone who spends any time with their grandparents invariably gets a few of these thrown at them. Wikipedia names several classics: staying out in the cold causes pneumonia, chocolate causes acne, masturbation causes blindness, etc. In Serbia there are a good number of these, and for the benefit of Westerners new to the country, here are some of them, mostly suggested by a recent visit from a Serbian of advancing years:

1. Anything that is produced by hand by somebody you know is always necessarily better than anything that is bought in a shop.

This applies to wine, sausage, cheese, bread, chickens, fish, furniture, clothing, and frankly just about anything. The adage expresses itself by the need to bring said items, often illegally across borders, in order to save poor relatives stuck (say) in Germany where sausages are terrible (here is one of our sausages, made in the garage by our friend Milo) or to France where wine only ever comes from the shop and isn't provided in old, plastic water-bottles, as is the natural way for it to be served. How many times have I eyed with some longing the ubiquitous gift bottles of good wine from a shop (e.g. Vranac), only to then be offered home made wine of questionable vintage, colour and taste. I actually wonder if these bottles are ever opened, or if they are just past around in some tradition of re-gifting.

There is, at least in Novi Sad, also a tendency to travel great distances to buy individual items. For instance, a University Professor is a well known supplier of fresh fish, and he lives on the other side of town. When we protested that we could get great fish at the newly opened supermarket, the elders scoffed at us. It isn't fresh, so don't even think about it. The fact that the fish in the supermarket were actually alive in a tank didn't (if you'll excuse the pun) hold water.

2. Any meal that takes less than two grueling hours of toil in the kitchen is no good and not healthy.

We are a busy couple, and fond of quick meals in restaurants, or fast recipes at home for tasty meals. However, every time we try to impose such a recipe on visitors from Serbia, we are questioned about whether one can really eat (say) mushrooms if they haven't been boiled, sauteed, fried, soaked in fat, then baked.

This adage applies not just to meals, but to housework in general. I actually think that a lot of this is to do with a desire to be busy at home. My mother used to tell me that her mother, who was a housewife, would dutifully wash and polish the parquet flooring in a grueling four hour exercise each week, commenting that it was necessary to get rid of the germs. Heaven knows what she would think of our parquet, which I consider to be clean even if it only gets a fast clean once per week, and polishing, well, never. It's a wonder we are still alive.

3. Wet hair, even constituting a single drop of water on the head, will cause immediate life-threatening illness to a person if they set one foot outside, even in a sweltering summer.

I've been told this dozens of times, and the fact that I was a competitive swimmer in Canada for ten years, who twice a day would go out into weather that was as cold as -40 degrees with hair that was, for reasons of haste, almost never fully dry and managed to reach adulthood un-stunted (and in fact taller than almost everybody) is no argument.

I remember, in a mild winter in Novi Sad, after we had exited the swimming pool, something that habit means I can do in less than five minutes, I was sitting waiting for G. and noticed a number of swimmers who sat under the dryers for what I thought was a ridiculous length of time. Men with practically no hair dried their fuzz for upwards of ten minutes. I now understand that this was a habit enforced by constant warnings from aging relatives about the dire consequences of not doing so. There scalp must have been peeling off when they left, but Baka would be happy.

4. Not wearing slippers in the house, will lead to some kind of health catastrophe.

How many times I've been given slippers with a sense of urgency, and asked incredulously, in my own house, by visitors from Serbia (and Croatia to be fair) how I can possibly walk around without slippers on - just in socks or in bare feet! The look is one of horror, as if to say that I'm walking a thin line between life and death. A some time corollary of this is that wearing shoes inside will lead to death for all of those inside the house. You'd think I spent my days walking in nuclear waste.

5. Any minor sniffle must immediately be treated by antibiotics.

Now here is something that I definitely do know something about, as a PhD biologist. And curiously, this is, by definition, a new and not a medieval adage. Of course, most sniffles are caused by viruses, not bacteria, so I always protest, pointing out that not only will the antibiotics be ineffective, but taking them will harm your liver and ultimately increase resistance in your system so that they will fail to be effective against real bacterial infections in the future - the biological equivalent of the boy who cried wolf. But all of this is to no avail. Hands are held up, my tongue is requested to be held, and a general feeling that one shouldn't question the elders about things they know better about hangs in the air until the subject changes. Frankly, from a biological perspective, the sooner prescription drugs are more controlled in Serbia, the better.

And yes, I know this is a bit of a grumpy rant, but one must get the visitor frustrations out somehow, and if you can't rant to your blog, who can you rant to?