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Ljubljana, Slovenia.
Maribor, Slovenia.
Portoroz, Slovenia.
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The Slovenian language is notoriously difficult and brutal. One bonus is that it’s usually phonetic, like Serbian, so the words are read the way they are written.
I say "usually" because sometimes a slight difference in intonation creates a completely different word. And sometimes one word is clean, while the other word is not. And sometimes foreigners, such as myself, mix them up and embarass themselves. Here are the ones to watch out for — the five most dangerous Slovenian words:
ZAHOD : means "west" in Slovene
ZAHOD : means "toilet" in Serbian
ZADOVOLJEN : means "to be satisfied"
ZADOVOLJEN : means (almost always) "to be sexually satisfied." I still make this mistake on a regular basis.
POSESTNICA : means "a female landowner"
POCESTNICA : means "hooker."
ZAPRT : means "closed"
ZAPRT : also means "constipated," which I learned after trying to ask a waitress if her cafe was closed, but instead ended up asking her if she was constipated. (Ali si zaprta?)
KAKAV : means "hot chocolate"
KAKAL : means "to crap." In Slovene, endings in "v" or "l" are usually pronounced "ow." So, Jaz bom kakav and Jaz bom kakal sound dangerously similar, except that one means "I’ll have a cocoa" and the other means "I will take a dump." This can be made infinitely worse if adjectives like "large," "steaming-hot" or "creamy" are employed…
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That last one was probably the funniest thing I read this morning. You nearly had me spitting my coffee out all over the monitor because I just had to laugh. Creamy, indeed.
Another word that may cause embarrassment is
“trudna”.
In Slovene it means “tired”, in Serbian it means
“pregnant”.
Thx - I am going to print this and take it with me next weekend
Not embarrassing, but also different: kósiti and kosÃti
novala, I don’t know how you put those accents on the words, but I’m surprised they came out okay. I always avoid odd characters for fear that they will come out as gibberish.
kinuk and andreja: thanks for the comments!
Hi,
do you mean which keys I used on the keyboard? You might not have them because you probably use a Slavic keyboard.
Try it with HTML. For example:
unicode.e-workers.de/franzoesisch.php
unicode.e-workers.de/spanisch.php
Yes…I now realise where this word KAKA that many second and third generation Australians use quite often with there children and is carried on comes from…….anyway keep it up, I like the educational part of this site!!!
novala: Thanks for the links. Is it right that Slovenian characters in HTML are a no-go?
fabio: It’s great to hear that Kaka lives on through the ages. Thanks for the message!
*?* Why should they be a no-go? Never heard of that.
Sometimes the characters ž Ä? or Å¡ fail to render, even for me.
It sometimes depend on the database behind - whether it is able to interpret the signs. I have had this problem at work. It took us ages to find a database that works with the Eastern AND Western European letters.
Well, this is rather a late comment, but anyway. Your website appears to be using Unicode (UTF-8), so you should have no problems whatsoever using any characters, even such ‘exotic’ ones as Chinese or Korean.
You can always type in HTML entities, as suggested at the linked site: č is the character Ä? (c with a hacek), š is s with a hacek and ž is z with a hacek. (the codes get converted automatically; I used an equivalent code for the ampersand to keep it from doing so in this case)
I think your primary stress is wrong on the first ‘zadovoljen’; SSKJ (Slovene Standard Language Dictionary (?)) suggests that the stress is on the second o, not the first.
Also, perhaps of note is that ‘posetnica’ is a card with your company name and position.
Anyway, a rather interesting collection of words to be careful with.