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It's funny because in Croatia we don't do that, but it's an almost identical language. I still remember reading old ex-yu comic books with New York spelled as N
by dsego 3y ago
It's funny because in Croatia we don't do that, but it's an almost identical language. I still remember reading old ex-yu comic books with New York spelled as Njujork and so on. The problem is that you can't really capture the pronunciation since english has more sounds and serbian and croatian are phonetic limited to 30 letters, Stiv Voznijak doesn't capture it correctly, that's how you get the harsh slavic/russian accent. There is also a tricky situation with trying to keep the original like we do in Croatian, for example we can't read asian or arabic symbols, so it doesn't make sense to keep them, but we usually use the english transliteration which is to me also a bit silly.
- medo-bear 3y agoI find I need to say some names out loud to know what they mean when I read texts from Serbia. In Serbia they take the principle 'speak as you write, write as you speak' to the end. I also think that Croatian is a more pure Slavic language, and that Serbs are more liberal with adopting foreign terms. It is also interesting that all Croats can uderstand someone from Belgrade or Banja Luka without any issues (not including street slang), but some Croats have trouble understanding other Croatian dialects.
- orbital-decay 3y ago> The problem is that you can't really capture the pronunciation Can you do that in general if you don't know the actual language, though? Even native English speakers sometimes have issues with certain borrowed French words, despite those being in English.
- dsego 3y agoFair point, I think it just looks silly to me because I'm not used to it and in this modern age it seems a bit quaint. The other thing is that sometimes it might not be immediately obvious that Matthew Perry is the same person as Metju Peri. And since today everyone is exposed to english and other big languages, knowing the original spelling can be considered a part of basic literacy.
- SergeAx 3y agoI believe that this is because the primary alphabet in Serbia is Cyrillic, so they transcribe it first and only then transliterate it into "abeceda". Jumped couple of time seeing Cyrillic "Питхон", though)
- keiferski 3y agoIt is more of a both-are-used situation. Walking around Belgrade, you’ll see a mix of both. Younger people especially use the Latin alphabet much more.