#serbo croatian

[phoenixyfriend]

curious abt the paprika thing you mentioned in the tags of the tea post. would you be willing to expand on that? :)

The word Paprika came to English through Hungarian in the 19th century, but it came to Hungarian from Serbo-Croatian,* which I speak.

See, the thing is. In Serbian. The original language. This is not paprika:

This is paprika:

A Paprika in Serbo-Croatian, the language of origin, is A Pepper, generally a bell pepper (others get a qualifier, like 'ljuta paprika' meaning 'spicy pepper').

The spice that the Anglophone world is familiar with is aleva paprika, though ngl most packaging also uses 'dimljena paprika' (smoked pepper) or a qualifier like 'slatka mlevena' (sweet ground, as in sweet and processed by grinding).

It's sort of the inverse of the naan bread and chai tea and gobi desert type discourse. Rather than using an existing word as a qualifier for a new product, a qualifier was stripped from the primary noun to use it as a new word.

The doubling might be annoying, but I cannot emphasize how incredibly confusing it was in elementary and middle school to get into arguments with classmates about paprika because as far as I was concerned, paprika was always an entire fresh pepper.

EDIT: Y'all, please stop making this about Dracula. Not only is Romania a separate area with its own etymologies and definitions, but paprika hendl (chicken paprikash) has both the vegetable and the spice, so it's a moot point.

* (What qualifies as Serbian vs Croatian vs Bosnian vs Serbo-Croatian is 90% politics and regionalisms. Serbian and Croatian have more in common than England English and American English. It's the same language with a few different terms here and there. In this case, we're using Serbo-Croatian because it was all still lumped in under the same umbrella until... well, the actual start of the excision of Ethnically Serbian words started in 1941 for Reasons, but quite frankly this is not a post for a topic that dark. Short version: still one language when the Hungarians got the word, I'm guessing through Croatian since it was in union with the Kingdom of Hungary for centuries, in part as a bid to protect from the Ottoman Empire that had taken other parts of the Balkans.)

[cinesludge]

Movie #61 of 2024: Hitman

I have a feeling this was the movie that prompted Olga Kurylenko to fight like hell to prevent her Bond girl character in Quantum of Solace from becoming a sex object.

[daydreamodyssey]

Servo-Crowatian

[mist-the-wannabe-linguist]

Us, arriving to Austria to a tiny family hotel owned by an elderly lady

Us: speak only limited German

Lady: barely speaks English

Us:

Lady:

Lady: Czech? Slovak?

Us: Czech

Lady, to herself: Czech, that's a Slavic language right

Lady: understand Yugoslavian?

Us:

Us: yeah that works

[ishparpuaqib]

i happen to be generally quite fond of exonyms and calques, but imho translating proper names (and toponyms and so on) should only be mandatory if they come from languages closely related to the language one is translating into—say, no more than one order of magnitude removed from their earliest demonstrated common ancestor (limiting mandatory translations in english to other germanic languages). insisting on calling belgrade 'whiteyard' or whatever would be rather silly, but i quite like the idea of referring to brussels (from middle dutch 'broekzele') as 'brooksale' ('sale' in the sense of 'hall') or to frankfurt as 'frankfort'. double points if the close relation between the languages allows for the calqued name to be formed in the exact same manner as the original—it is, for instance, perfectly possible to translate the name of oslo using the native (and cognate) english suffix -ley, 'osley'

(moreover, i think the number of calques should ideally be maximised by taking advantage of existing calques in languages closely related to one's own—the english should, for instance, make use of icelandic 'kænugarður' and solve the kiev/kyiv dispute by referring to the city simply as 'canyard')

[sneg-v-avgustu]

😇 @bojan_cvjeticanin

[da-riya]

Admittedly I had awkward situations where I knew a language that I thought the other person also knew, but I didn't know how to "break the ice" so to say

[uraandri]

ok now i need to figure out why were two serbo-croatian speaking women conversing exclusevily in english in this caffee. the convo wasn't being recorder for a podcast cause none of them had any technology on the table

[kutyozh]

actually slavs know the most important thing: that tummy is life

[pvtchurch]

feeling normal emotions about "dušo" being a term of endearment that literally means "soul"

[fifi-goes-to-hollywood]

https://open.spotify.com/track/248Jb9J8zsegFBaROd66ie?si=fC5lTsQnRhK3QeF2bYHSQA%0A

May I suggest it as a jance song

Immediately added to the playlist, she slaps hard

✨From Kranj to Vrhnika playlist✨

[anarchotolkienist]

Wrt differences in national language internal to groupings that exist on a dialect continuum, I might go as far as to accept that they are actually different languages today - Swedish Norwegian and Danish, Gaelic, Irish and Manx, to pick the examples I'm most familiar with, might all be different languages today. But in these cases the national differentiation, i.e. the political decision that these languages are different along these particular national lines, precedes any actual discernable difference specific to those national lines. The nationalisation of languge is fundamentally political and artificial, and is profoundly not rooted in the supposedly ancient and authentic voice of the volksgeist to which they appealed.

[yugocar]

konfiskacija pamcejna (the confiscation of memory) (1996), dubravka ugresic

[rmmgy-blog]

I really hope Duolingo releases a course on that language spoken in Croatia, Serbia, Montenegro and Bosnia and Herzegovina that is mutually intelligable between all of those regions. It'd be funny to see them squirm trying to figure out how to represent it.

My two cents would be to call it Serbo-Croatian, give it a new flag that mixes those two countries' national flags Austria-Hungary style or use the flag of Yugoslavia to depict it and do it in the more common latin script, or perhaps make it the first bi-script course.

Interested to hear the thoughts or feelings of others though. Beyond the meme of "funny Balkan infighting" I do think it would be really nice to see the language reach a wider audience and I personally would love to learn it if they made a course.

[heyyellee]

It's cute to learn about your partners heritage and I like learning new languages. But I don't know how to explain to my father in law that all my Serbo-croatian comes from eurovision.

[ishparpuaqib]

unfortunately intraslavic calques seldom produce interesting results, because all slavs are the same. you know what the proper serbo-croatian translation of polish 'kraków' is? 'krakov'. the proper translation of russian 'moskva' is—'moskva'. (both are already in use as exonyms; big surprise!) might as well combine us all into one country and call it a day. the biggest challenge would probably be figuring out how to distinguish the dozens upon dozens of different 'belgrades'