Good one! The use of phonetically spelled "Poklico" is a good illustration of the difficulty many Serb and Croat speakers have pronouncing past and future forms of Slovene verbs — in this case, "(bom) poklical." The "l" is correctly pronounced a bit like the English "w", just shorter – not as an "o", which is how many Croats, Serbs, and Bosnians pronounce it, even when speaking Slovene. Of course, the Slovenian verb "klicati" (to call) doesn’t even exist in standard Serb or Croat, giving the sign an extra Fudjinian character.This, BTW, makes the pronounciation of the past and future forms a fairly accurate shibboleth.

     by AZ2SI on December 6, 2005 at 6:36 am

Old one..but good one.And I like very much the X-mas Carniola attire.

     by Vlasta on December 6, 2005 at 8:45 am

I can’t understand why they have such a problem learning slovenian. I speak fluent serbian and I was in Belgrade only 14 days.

     by Johnny7 on December 6, 2005 at 9:45 am

It’s further afield linguistically than you’re talking about, but my
Polish wife indeed can recognise much of Slovene through cognates, and
can get by quite well after just a little over a year here with zero
study. But the placement of stress continues to be a problem. She’ll
read film descriptions from "Vikend" at me and I’ve got no idea what
she’s talking about. "NeUstraseni uBIjalci vampirJEV"?

     by sgazzetti on December 6, 2005 at 10:15 am

I’m currently studying Croatian at university and learning Slovene through private tuition and I constantly fall into the trap of stressing words in the wrong places.  Things such as gOvorim (Croatian) to govorIm (Slovene).  I also confuse ja and da, and ja and jaz, and su and so.  Little things that I will overcome with time, and I really have myself to blame for trying to learn two languages so similar to eachother at the same time.  I’ve definitely bitten off more than I can chew.

     by Matt on December 6, 2005 at 10:53 am

Johnny7: I seriously doubt that you’re fluent in Serbian, if you really were in Belgrade for only a forthnight and didn’t have any previous contact with Serb culture (it appears so from your post). Slovene, Croatian and Serbian are three different languages of common descent, but the similarities stop there. Slovenes and Serbs do indeed understand each other when speaking in their respective language, but there are huge differences both in vocabulary and syntax of both languages. Besides, most of Slovene youth speaks what was once known as "Serbo-croatian", an artificial combination of both languages, which was created in Yugoslavia. Just take the word "thousand". In Croatian it’s "tisuću", but in Serbian it’s "hiljada". And the list goes on… 

     by pengovsky on December 6, 2005 at 11:12 am

It’s actually fun. Just spent a weekend working Croatia (don’t ask - system admin, working on weekends … yech). Returning back … and as a native Slovenian speaker - I’ve started confusing ja and da and mispronouncing Slovenian words. Can’t imagine how it must be for a foreigner altogether

     by Damir C. on December 6, 2005 at 11:50 am

As far as I see it is more that the "cefurji" don’t learn slovene, cause they hate it and see it as inferior language. Nobody can be that stupid not to be able to learn slovene after staying in ljubljana for years! They should be forced to learn slovene and use it, or otherwise sent back to their motherland!

     by mAT on December 6, 2005 at 12:34 pm

mAT: As Keanu Reeves famously said: "Woah." What about all the English speakers in Slovenia who don’t learn anything beyond "eno pivo, prosim?" (And there’s a ton of them.) If you started kicking out people who can’t, or don’t want to, learn Slovene, there’d be pretty much no foreigners left.

     by Michael M. on December 6, 2005 at 2:48 pm

Michael, I believe "pes" is "pas" in Croatian and "psa" in Serbian.  It’s one of those "test"
words I remember a cousin telling me about.  You know, just like
in the big WW II, a password would be the backup second baseman for the
Cleveland Indians.  This, of course, resulte din the death of a
lot of drafted American intellectuals who had been too busy studying
the Esoteric Poets instead of reading boxscores.So, when asked
this canine question, be sure to pick your answer in co-ordination with
whose ground you’re standing on at the time.

     by DarkoV on December 6, 2005 at 2:50 pm

Pengovsky: Yeah I had previous contact with Serbian culture and Croatian culture and I do sometimes mix words like pavlaka and vrhnje but in general I can distinguish serbian words from croatian. That is not really fluent I admit. Thousand could be also soma or miljara I think.

     by Johnny7 on December 6, 2005 at 3:38 pm

No offense Mike, but I am actually having a gf from US at the moment and she is keen on learning and sking tons of stuff the whole time, but from what she is telling me, the rest of the people she knows, that are here for years already speak no single word! No I guess these kind of pricks should be given an ultimatum! I have a proposal! You will be a testimonial for a new language course for americans only! Don’t tell me that you are the only "sort of american" that was able to speak good slovene! If it is the case, then…FUCK!!!  

     by mAT on December 6, 2005 at 4:30 pm

AAAGH! Serbian and Croatian (Bosnian, Montenegrin….) are NOT two different languages, not in ANY sence of what westerners refer to "different" languages. (If you want to play a political game in la-la land and call them different languages, go ahead, knock yourself out, that’s a different matter I COULD care less about!) And even as dialectical differences go it is pretty quaint in comparison with someone speaking a Texas drawl, vs. the Scots dialect. More like standard Brittish vs. standard American. Slovenian and Macedonian ARE quite different. And it is NOT "psa" in Serbian. It is nominative "pas" and accusative "psa". ( On je video psa=He saw the dog, Pas je video njega=The dog saw him) JUST LIKE IN "CROATIAN"!

     by XIOMANGER on December 6, 2005 at 5:54 pm

Michael M. and mAT: In the late 80s Mladina weekly ran a cartoon Diareja (it still does, but it’s not half as funny) and the character said in Serbian: "Glup neki narod ovi Slovenci… Koliko smo vec dugo u Ljubljani, a jos nisu naucili nas jezik" (Stupid Slovenians, we’ve lived in Ljubljana for god-knows how long and they still haven’t learned Serbian) As far as "language mentality" goes, Serbians tend to be similar to Italians: they only speak their native language, and if you don’t understand you, well, screw you… The same goes for the French, the British, the Russians, etc, etc. Mostly nations which at one point in history or another had a tendency to conquer much of the world (or at least Europe). Or - to put it politically correct - nations who high nation-awareness (it that even a word?). But I’m generalising. For centuries Serbs and Croats (as we are speaking of them) never had to learn another language, mostly due to cultural, historical and economic factors. And so the mentality remains. But I’m sure that the person who wrote the message in the picture realized that using Serbian will get him nowhere, so he wrote it in the best Slovenian he knew. I congratulate him. Altough it was a poor attempt, he still tried as do many (most) people from former Yugoslavia who now live in Slovenia. I’m sure that many of early Slovene ex-pats in USA spoke the same level of English (if any) And another thing. I belive that a by-product of the situation is what Michael M. called "fuđinian" language (or slang). Because there is a high level of cultural overlapping in Fužine (or in Štepanjsko naselje for that matter), a new kind of language has evolved, spoken by Slovenes and non-Slovenes alike (at least by those, who live in those neighbourhoods).

     by pengovsky on December 6, 2005 at 6:05 pm

Just saw the post by XIOMANGER: Well, I’m not sure if Croatians would agree that Croatian is the same as Serbian. And I’m sure you will agree that a nation can decide to call its language whatever it wants. Besides, there are quite a few differences in vocabulary between Serbian and Croatian. I already noted one, but here are a few more examples: Bread (CRO=kruh, SRB=hleb), Grill (žar, roštilj), Rope (špaga, uže) I’m sorry (oprostite, izvinite), Captian -army rank-  (satnik, kapetan)etc, etc… Not to mention the rather humorous Croatian attempt at "newspeak". The differences exist. The most notabe of all being that Croatians write in latin letters, whereas Serbs write in cirylic. 

     by pengovsky on December 6, 2005 at 6:15 pm

pengovsky: I must agree with XIOMANGER, they are the same language, in
fact in the linguistic community it is more and more often referred to
as Serbo-Croatian-Bosnian. You are right that neither Serbians nor
Croatians will always admit that they are the same language. However
the lexical differences that you have pointed out are the same as those
in British vs. North American English. As in lorry vs. truck, trousers
vs. pants. The fact that there are lexical differences between the languages does not mean that it’s a different language. Also as far as using Cyrillic or Latin, Serbian can be be written in either, it does not matter. 

     by Tijana on December 6, 2005 at 8:07 pm

"And even as dialectical differences go it is pretty quaint in
comparison with someone speaking a Texas drawl, vs. the Scots dialect.
More like standard Brittish vs. standard American."Just
a personal opinion: I’m Croatian, and I have to watch newer Serbian
movies, where they use a lot of slang, with subtitles. I guess 10 years
of isolation from Serbian culture and being force-fed with "newspeak"
can do that.

     by v on December 6, 2005 at 9:46 pm

v: i’ve noticed in my visits to croatia that people don’t use the “formal” names for months, but instead call them by numbers: the first month, the tenth month and so on. i presumed these “new” names were dug out of a box in the attic of the croatian language, dusted off, and introduced “back” into the language, where they just refused to take root. is this true? what’s your take on this phenomenon?

     by Cornelius on December 6, 2005 at 10:56 pm

Regarding the debate whether Serbian and Croatian are seperate languages or simply two dialects: I’m not sure that there is a firm, agreed-upon distinction between a language and a dialect. It is often said that "a language is a dialect with an army." Even though Croatian and Serbian, in their standard forms, are incredibly similar, they are now slowly going their separate ways, and most of their speakers consider them to be distinct languages, so why go against the flow.If anyone wants an illustration of how arbitrary the difference between a language and a dialect can be, listen to a clip of Resian Slovene on this thread I recently started, and see how much (or, more accurately, how little) of this Slovenian dialect you understand.

     by AZ2SI on December 6, 2005 at 11:12 pm

Cornelius: Croatian doesn’t use Latin-based names of months at all, but instead uses its version of the old Slavic months (srpan, listopad, etc.), which, in a different form, also exist in Slovene, but are rarely used nowadays (which is too bad, and a terrible injustice to unique Slovenian words such as "vinotok," but that’s another story). As to why Croatians say "tenth month" and so on, I don’t know; I used to think that they did that with non-native speakers only, but apparently they also use this form among themselves. Maybe our Croatian vistors will clarify this for us.

     by AZ2SI on December 6, 2005 at 11:23 pm

Pengovsky: "Besides, most of Slovene youth speaks what was once known as "Serbo-croatian", an artificial combination of both languages, which was created in Yugoslavia."I’m not sure that today’s Slovenian youth — i.e. the generation that grew up after 1991 — does speak Serbian/Croatian beyond a few basic phrases.

     by AZ2SI on December 6, 2005 at 11:51 pm

AZ2SI: i re-read my post and realized i might have been a wee bit unclear, but that’s exactly what i had in mind. i noticed the names i heard used on croatian television or in other croatian media, didn’t seem to be widely used in informal speech, and being a linguist, this caught my attention. my assumption was that the olden names of months were artificialy reintroduced into the language, but that they never realy caught on. but this is only my assumption, and i hope our croatian friend can confirm or reject this.

     by Anonymous on December 6, 2005 at 11:55 pm

oops, forgot to sign the post above.

     by Cornelius on December 6, 2005 at 11:57 pm

You are right that neither Serbians nor Croatians will always admit that they are the same language. - Tijana No, Croatians won’t admit that its the same language. Serbs just insist that the language should be known as Serbian everywhere.  : ) 

     by marko on December 7, 2005 at 12:44 am

Slovenian, Croatian, and Serbian are not 3 languages. They are two: Slovenian and two dialects of Serbo-croatian.If Croatian and Serbian are two languages, then so too are Canadian and American. E.g. Washroom (Canada), restroom (American)Differences (not always quite accurate though) between British-, American-, and Canadian-English:    

     by |=|=| on December 7, 2005 at 5:22 am

This link wasn’t allowed to come through when pasted, for some reason (got prompted with a post denied due to "questionable content" message):http:// + canadianenglish1 + . + narod + . + ru 

     by |=|=| on December 7, 2005 at 5:26 am

pengovsky : comments on language learning in Serbia are totally off mark and factually untrue (and made of the exact sort of cultural schauvinism this blog criticizes on a regular basis when it’s coming from Western Europe). As if being straddled for the better part of the last millenium by conquerors who spoke Turkish, German, Hungarian AND Italian was not a reason to learn other languages. In Belgrade, at least, conversant knowledge of English is almost taken as a given even among Serbs, at least in the middle and upper class. Unlike in language bastions such as France, movies are not dubbed, but merely subtitled making a complete non-familiarity with English nearly impossible in today’s Serbia. Thanks to the influx of Spanish soap operas, learning and knowing Spanish is also becoming popular and fashionable. Strong affinities towards German and Russian also exist. Plus, unlike Croat or French, the Serb standard is not purist and freely borrows foreign words (I think this will eventually also happen in Croatia, despite resistance. The one thing about keeping a language pure is that one day you find that it is not the language anyone speaks anymore).Now that said, there is sort of an implicit assumption among Serbs that Serbo-Croat already is or ought to be the lingua franca of the west Balkans, so there IS an expectation that Slovenians, Macedonians and Albanians will at least be familiar with Serbo-Croat. But in any case, no foreigner has ever had to put up with a "you don’t understand you, well, screw you" attitude. Not even the most nationalist Serbs harbor any illusions that Serbian is particularly important on a global scale and that foreign visitors should bother learning it. The expression "speak Serbian so the world can understand you" is obviously an example of self-deprecating sarcastic humor.

     by XIOMANGER on December 7, 2005 at 10:11 am

"Now that said, there is sort of an implicit assumption among Serbs that Serbo-Croat already is or ought to be the lingua franca of the west Balkans, so there IS an expectation that Slovenians, Macedonians and Albanians will at least be familiar with Serbo-Croat."Coincidentally, this lack of linguistic equality, and the arrogant attitude you describe, were actually one of the main causes of Slovenian resentment in the late Yugoslav period. Even though Yugoslavia’s three major languages were equal on paper, some were a lot more equal than the others. Because Slovenes tend to be fiercely proud of our language — it’s seen as the cornerstone of our national identity — the idea of Slovene being subservient to Serbo-Croat in our own country was a far bigger deal than most Serbs probably realized.

     by AZ2SI on December 8, 2005 at 2:25 am

I don’t think that Croats recently introduced Slavic month names -
well at least not after WW2. But I was wondering as well, why they use
numbers for months. It is a bit funny, actually: when a Croat says,
let’s say, ‘prosinac’, I have no idea which month he means, and when he
says a number then I must convert it to a Slovene name first, like in
‘9th month? WTF ??? A, you mean september!"Also about Serbian
and Croatian vs. Serbo-Croatian. Seelrc (www.seelrc.org) calles this
language BCS - Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian (in alphabetical order).According to my knowledge about differences: - different influences for vocabulary (Slavic-Turkish-Greek). -
Croatian is must more keen to make compounds like ‘kišobran, ‘vodopad’,
etc (some exist in Slovene too, but are much more rare).-
Serbian belongs to Balkan linguistic group (with Macedonian, Bulgarian,
Albanian, Romanian and Greek), Croatian doesn’t. One characteristic of
these languages have, is that they don’t use infinitive, like in ‘Idem
raditi’ (Cro) vs. ‘Idem da radim’ (Ser). Plus some other differences in
the use of cases etc…

     by Nik on December 8, 2005 at 10:44 am

Linguisticly speaking, there is no doubt that Serb and Croatian are the same language. The Serbocroat language is divided in three main dialects: cakavski (spoken in the coastal strip of Dalmatia, parts of Lika and Kordun, in Kvarner and parts of Istria), kajkavski (spoken in west of Bijelovar, around Zagreb, Medjimurje and in the Croatian Zagorje and in Istria around Buzet) and stokavski, spoken in all of Serbia, Vojvodina, Bosnia, Hercegovina, Slavonia, Lika, most of Dalmatia (including Dubrovnik, Vis and Korcula) and Montenegro. In southern Serbia they speak "torlavski", which is sometimes listed as a separate dialect, but most linguists treat it as a sub-dialect of stokavski. The latter is further divided into several acustic variants: ekavski, ijekavski, ikavski etc. However, the thing gets even more complicated: for if there certenely IS a common serbo-croatian language, there isn’t (or should we say: there is- yet again- no more) a common standard language. There was an attemt to create one during Tito’s time, but it collapsed together with the concept of "bratstvo i jedinstvo" ("brotherhood and unity"). Nevertheless, it should be noted that all the three or four standard languages (Croatian, Serbian, Bosnian, Montenegrian) are based on the same dialect: stokavski. Furthermore: in the 18. Century Croatian writers chose to abbandon the old standard language based on kajkavski and to adopt a new one (closer to Serbian), based on the language of Dubrovnik (which had a long literary tradition). Later, in early 19. century Vuk Karadzic also chose to reform the Serbian written standard (which was until then an odd mix of Old Church Slavonic and Medieval Serbian, with a lot of words from contemporary Russian and German- a chaotic artificial language totally unintelligible to common people) and he, too, based it on the same dialect as the Croatian standard: that is, the stokavski speech of eastern Hercegovina (which is basically exactely the same speech of the Croatians in Dubrovnik). The case of Serbian and Croatian is not unique in Europe. There are other cases of one language with more names and more written standards: Dutch-Flemish, Catalan-Valencian, Rumanian-Moldavian. We have a very partticualar phenomenon of this kind in Norway, which has two official languages (which are in fact two different standard forms of the Norwegian language): bokmaal and nynorsk. Then there are cases of dialects that have evolved their own written standard: Galician (linguisticly speaking a dialect of Portuguese), Luxemburguese (a dialect of German), Corsican (a sub-dialect of Tuscan Italian) etc.: the Slovenian dialect from Resia/ Rezija, which was mentioned above, and has developed a written standard in the last 20 years, is just another example of this phenomenon. Then there are languages that have split away from each other relatevely recently, like Bulgarian and Macedonian, Dutch and Afrikaans; cases of dialects that could have easily developed their own written standard and turned into a separate language but haven’t (like Swiss German); cases of dialects that used to be recognised as separate languages but eventually merged into a bigger linguistic unit (as Asturian Spanish, Aragonese Spanish, Scottish-English, Low German); cases when there was a big chance of that happening but eventually hasn’t (like Slovak in relation to Czech, Belorussian to Russian, etc.). Then there are "dialects" which are, from a strictly linguistic point of view, undoubtedly separate languages (Sardinian, Friulan, Provensal-Occitan) but remain unrecognized due to exquisitly political reasons.The linguistic reality is a complex one, but we need to distinguish what is a linguistic question, what is a identitary one, and what is just political manipulation.

     by Luka on December 13, 2005 at 2:43 am

Wow, the linguistic debates here are always interesting. As the
original question about Croatian names for months was directed at me,
here I am to answer: as far as I know (that means about 25 years ;)),
Croatians have always preferred the "numerical" reference to months.
It’s quite rare to hear people use the standard names of the months (sije�?anj, velja�?a, …) in everyday conversation. But they are used, and much more than the januar, februar, … variant. I still have to think twice before saying junij (June) or julij
(July) in Slovenian, doing the mental math in the background ("the 6th?
no, the 7th! no, the other one!"). My parents also use Croatian names
for the months, so I presume there wasn’t any attempt to artificially
"plant" them into the standard language, at least not in the last 40-50
years. Of course, there was a period of intense differentiation from
Serbian during the 1990s (I call it the newspeak phase), so their usage
probably increased during those years.

     by Anonymous on December 25, 2005 at 8:38 am