Serbian_language - Celebrity Encyclopedia

Serbian orthography is very consistent: approximation of the principle "one letter per sound". This principle is represented by Adelung's saying, "Write as you speak and read as it is written", the principle used by Vuk Karad„i“ when reforming the Cyrillic orthography of Serbian in the 19th century.

Writing systems

Serbian can be written in two different alphabets: Serbian Cyrillic script (--) and the Serbian Latin (latinica). Both were promoted in Yugoslavia. The Cyrillic script is Serbia's official under the 2006 Constitution of Serbia, but the Latin alphabet is equally used with the Cyrillic alphabet in Serbian language, according to the Serbian orthography. The Latin alphabet was first officially used in the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (later Kingdom of Yugoslavia)^[7]. Also, among others, a famous Serbian literary historian and critic Jovan Skerli- proposed abandoning the Cyrillic script and accepting Latin as the only alphabet^[8].

Table

Alphabetic order

Equivalence of scripts

The Cyrillic letters <->, <-> and <-> are represented by digraphs in the Latin alphabet. In digraphs, letters are always written together - even in top-down text - and are also sorted as one letter (e.g. ljubav, 'love', comes after lopta, 'ball'). The present Cyrillic script, having been devised for the language itself, is precise because there is no ambiguity involved in reading Lj, Nj and D-: for example, both Cyrillic „-“ (mathematical injection or medical injection) and „“ ('his') are written with <nj> in Latin form. Thus, automatic transliteration of Cyrillic text to Latin is straightforward, but automatic transliteration of Latin text to Cyrillic requires additional heuristic rules.

Phonology

Vowels

The Serbian vowel system is simple, with only five vowels. All vowels are monophthongs. The vowels are as follows:^[9]

Consonants

The consonant system is more complicated, and its characteristic features are series of affricate and palatal consonants. Voicing is phonemic, but aspiration is not. The consonant phoneme table for Serbian is as follows (corresponding Latin letters are below the IPA symbols)

^{^} V is often also described as a (lowered) fricative ([v-]),^[9]^[10] which is phonetically closer. However, on phonological level, it doesn't interact with unvoiced consonants as a fricative normally would, but as an approximant.

/r/ can be syllabic, playing the role of a vowel in certain words (it can even have a long accent). For example, the tongue-twister na vrh brda vrba involves four words with syllabic /r-/. A similar feature exists in Czech, Slovak, Macedonian and many other languages. In some vernaculars /l/ can be syllabic as well. However, in the standard language, it appears only in loanwords as in the name for the Czech river Vltava for instance, or debakl (), monokl () and bicikl ().

In Serbian, the phonemes /t-/, /cç/, /d-/, and /-j/ (in contrast to Croatian and Bosnian vernaculars) have an independent phonetic realization in most vernaculars.^[11]

Phonetic interactions

While the basic sound system is fairly simple, Serbian phonology is very complicated: there are numerous interactions (sandhi rules) between voices at morpheme boundaries which cause sound changes, with numerous exceptions. The changes include:

Voicing and devoicing

In consonant clusters all consonants are either voiced or voiceless. All the consonants are voiced (if the last consonant is normally voiced) or voiceless (if the last consonant is normally voiceless). This rule does not apply to approximants - a consonant cluster may contain voiced approximants and voiceless consonants; as well as to foreign words ("Washington" would be transcribed as Va-inGton/), personal names and when consonants are not inside of one syllable.

Prosody

Accents

Serbian has an extended system of accentuation. From the phonological point of view it has four accents which are divided into two groups according to their quality:

However, their realization varies according to vernacular. That is why Dani-i“, Budmani, Mate„i“ and other scholars have given different descriptions of the four Serbian accents. The old accents are rather close to Italian and English accent types, and the new ones to German (this can be easily seen through loanwords).

The "finest" realization-the differences between the accents are relatively small, words are pronounced without any special effort-can be found in the most respectable vernaculars of Piva and Drobnjak and in Belgrade and partly in familiar vernaculars in Kolubara district and southwestern Banat. These two groups of vernaculars gave the base for Belgrade old speaker school. Already in surrounding Nik-i“ (Montenegro), Dubrovnik (Croatia), U“ice (Serbia) area stress is more intensive. Modern surveys have shown for instance, that there is a minimal difference in Piva and Drobnjak (where the family of Vuk Stefanovi- Karad„i“ had come from) between the syllables that carry short-stressed accent with fall intonation and the short-stressed with rise intonation. In the first edition of Vuk's dictionary (1818), Vuk even marked these two accents as one and the same accent.^[12] The difference between the short-stressed accent with falling acentuation and the short-stressed with rise accent is almost lost in two-syllable words (cf. the surveys of Pavle Ivi- on Serbian prosody).^[13] The informal speech- slang in Belgrade has very special, neutralized accentuation (the oppositions falling/rising, short/long is only partly based on genuine word accents, far more on phonetic letter structure of the word).

Unstressed lengths

Not only the stressed syllables can be short or long. Other syllables have that feature as well. In neo-shtokavian vernaculars, the unstressed long syllable (unstressed length) can occur only after the accented syllable (these lengths are usually called postaccent lengths. Their symbol is macron (-): dèv-jka ('girl'), Jugòsl-vija ('Yugoslavia').

The phonetic realization of postaccent lengths is different. In vernaculars of Piva and Drobnjak they are rather very short, without any stress components. In some other East Herzegovinian vernaculars, they are almost stressed (of course, less intense than the really stressed syllable). In many vernaculars-for instance in Belgrade, and in many places in Vojvodina-postaccents lengths are almost lost. That's why foreign students are not expected to pay much attention to them.

History

Before 1400, most Serbian vernaculars had two accents, both with fall intonation-the short one and the long one. That is why they are called "old accents". By 1500, the old accents moved by one syllable towards the beginning of the word, changing their quality to rising accents. For instance junâk (hero) became jùn-k. The old accents, logically remained only when they were on first syllable. Not all dialects had that evolution; those who had it are called neo-shtokavian. The irradiation point was in east Herzegovina, between Prokletije mountains and town of Trebinje. Since the 1500s people had been emigrating from this area. The biggest migrations were to the north, then toward Military Krajina and to the seaside (Dalmatia, Istria, Dubrovnik area, including islands of Mljet and “ipan). In 1920s and 1930s royal government tried to settle people from this poor mountainous area to Kosovo basin. Vojvodina was settled with inhabitants from this area after WWII.

When all old accents had moved to the beginning of the word for one syllable, this was the result:

Grammar

Conjugation

Serbian verbs are conjugated in 4 past forms - perfect, aorist, imperfect, and pluperfect - of which the last two have a very limited use (imperfect is still used in some dialects, but majority of native Serbian speakers consider it archaic); 1 future tense (aka 1st future tense - as opposed to the 2nd future tense or the future exact, which is considered a tense of the conditional mood by some contemporary linguists), and 1 present tense. These are the tenses of the indicative mood. Apart from the indicative mood, there is also the imperative mood. The conditional mood has two more tenses, the 1st conditional (commonly used in conditional clauses, both for possible and impossible conditional clauses), and the 2nd conditional (without use in spoken language - it should be used for impossible conditional clauses). Serbian has active and passive voice.

Vocabulary

Serbian literature

Serbian literature emerged in the Middle Ages, and included such works as Miroslavljevo jevan-elje (Miroslav's Gospel) in 1192 and Du-anov zakonik (Du-an's Code) in 1349. Little secular medieval literature has been preserved, but what there is shows that it was in accord with its time; for example, Serbian Alexandride, a book about Alexander the Great, and a translation of Tristan and Iseult into Serbian. Although not belonging to the literature proper, the corpus of Serbian literacy in the 1300s and 1400s contains numerous legal, commercial and administrative texts with marked presence of Serbian vernacular juxtaposed on the matrix of Serbian Church Slavonic.

In the mid-15th century, Serbia was conquered by the Ottoman Empire and, for the next 400 years there was no opportunity for the creation of secular written literature. However, some of the greatest literary works in Serbian come from this time, in the form of oral literature, the most notable form being Serbian epic poetry. The epic poems were mainly written down in the 19th century, and preserved in oral tradition up to 1950s, that is few centuries or even a millennium longer then by most other "epic folks". Goethe and Jacob Grimm learned Serbian in order to read Serbian epic poetry in original. By the end of the 18th century, the written literature had become estranged from the spoken language. In the second half of the 18th century, the new language appeared, called Slavonic-Serbian. This artificial idiom superseded works of poets and historians like Gavrilo Stefanovi- Venclovi-, who wrote in essentially modern Serbian in 1720s- just, these vernacular compositions have remained cloistered from the general public and received due attention only with the advent of modern literary historians and writers like Milorad Pavi-. In the early 19th century, Vuk Stefanovi- Karad„i“, promoted the spoken language of the people as a literary norm.

Dictionaries

Serious Serbian and Croatian dictionaries regularly include Croatian only, and Serbian only words. Three Serbian words that are used in many of the world's languages are vampire, paprika (borrowed via Hungarian), and slivovitz. The English word nightmare is also most probably of Serbian origin. It originated from the name of a demon in Serbian folklore - Mora, which denotes a female demon that comes at night and sits upon its sleeping victims, giving them bad dreams.

Standard dictionaries

Bilingual dictionaries

Historical dictionaries

The Rje-nik hrvatskoga ili srpskoga jezika (I-XXIII), published by Yugoslav academy of sciencies and arts (JAZU) from 1880 to 1976 is the only general historical dictionary of Serbo-Croatian language. His first editor was “uro Dani„i“, followed by Pero Budmani and famous Vukovian Tomislav Mareti-. The sources of this are, especially in first volumes, mainly -tokavian.

Etymological dictionaries

The standard and the only completed etymological dictionary of Serbian is the "Skok", written by the Croatian linguist Petar Skok: Etimologijski rje-nik hrvatskoga ili srpskoga jezika ("Etymological Dictionary of Croatian or Serbian"). I-IV. Zagreb 1971-1974.

There is also a new monumental Etimolo-ki re-nik srpskog jezika (Etymological Dictionary of Serbian). So far, two volumes have been published: I (with words on A-), and II (Ba-Bd).

There are specialized etymological dictionaries for German, Italian, Dalmatian, Turkish, Greek, Hungarian, Russian, English and other loanwords (cf. chapter word origin).

Dialect dictionaries

Geographic distribution

Differences among similar languages

Contents