Celia Hawkesworth - Colloquial Serbian: The Complete Course for Beginners

Colloquial

THE COLLOQUIAL SERIES

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Colloquial

The Complete Course for Beginners

Celia Hawkesworth with Jelena ali

First published 2006

by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN

Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada

by Routledge

711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

2006 Celia Hawkesworth

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Hawkesworth, Celia, 1942

Colloquial Serbian: the complete course for beginners/Celia Hawkesworth; in association with Jelena ali.

1st edn.

p. cm (The colloquial series)

Includes index.

1. Serbian language Textbooks for foreign speakers English. 2. Serbian language Spoken Serbian.

I. ali, Jelena. II. Title. III. Series

PG1239.5E5H298 2005

ISBN13: 978-1-138-94979-9 (pbk)

Typeset in Times by
Florence Production Ltd, Stoodleigh, Devon

I would like to thank the friends and colleagues who have helped with the various stages of the evolution of this book, which has grown out of the earlier volume Colloquial Croatian and Serbian. Nada oljan, Damir Kalogjera, Ljiljana Gjurgjan, Vinja Josipovi and Vesna Domany-Hardy all generously advised on its various different drafts. The present work is the result of a most enjoyable collaboration with Jelena ali. Her advice and help on many aspects of life in Serbia and Montenegro, in addition to her skills as a teacher of the Serbian language, as seen in the exercises she has devised, have been invaluable. She has also provided the numerous illustrative photographs which enhance the text. I shall always be grateful to her for her hard work, patience and cheerfulness throughout the production of the book.

Serbian, and its close relations, Bosnian and Croatian, belongs to the South Slavonic group of languages, along with Bulgarian, Macedonian and Slovene. Of all the Slavonic languages, the Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian linguistic complex is the easiest for English speakers to master, and it is considered one of the easiest of all the European languages for English speakers to pronounce. There is just one small hazard for those who have difficulty in producing a rolled r. In some words r has the value of a vowel and carries the stress. Innocent students should be prepared to be exposed to a series of tongue-twisters, such as Navrh brda vrba mrda On top of the hill a willow sways, or words such as Grk Greek, or the onomatopoeic cvrci cicadas (pronounced tsvrchtsi with the stress on the r).

The alphabet consists of thirty phonemes: one letter for each sound. The pronunciation of these letters is constant, not varying with its position in a word. Each letter is pronounced, e.g.pauk spider consists of two separate syllables. Notice the spelling of Srbija: without the j there would have to be a break between the two final vowels i-a. Also, the spelling is phonetic. That is to say, words are written just as they are spoken. In other words, the learner could gain full marks in dictation from the very beginning.

Serbian has two main dialects, defined by the pronunciation of the letter e in certain situations. As each written letter is pronounced, this difference in sound is reproduced also in writing. Thus, for example, the word for milk is pronounced and written mleko in Ekavian and mlijeko in Ijekavian. The Ekavian dialect is used in the greater part of Serbia, while Ijekavian is used in some parts of Serbia, in Montenegro and by Serbs living in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia. This book uses Ekavian throughout, but the two Bosnian characters who appear in the Dialogue Ekipa speak Ijekavian.

The historical division of the South Slav lands between the Orthodox and Catholic spheres of influence has meant that the Serbian language may be written in either the Cyrillic or the Latin script. Both have been modified for the languages phonetic system, and transliteration letter for letter is possible from one to the other.

There is no absolute rule for the position of the stressed syllable in a word, except that it is never the final syllable. In a polysyllabic word it is generally the pre-penultimate syllable which in practice generally means the first syllable. This is a fairly safe principle for you to adopt. Listen carefully for words in which there is a long syllable in addition to the stressed syllable: it can sometimes sound as though there are in fact two stresses on a word, see the section on tone below. In certain words, the stress may shift from singular to plural or from one case to another, e.g.