| Speaking Serbian |
| Videogames - Geek Adventure | |||
| Written by Pixelsmith | |||
Wednesday April 30 2008Sorry, the layout's a bit dodgy on this entry because of all the pics. Brodos emerged, and before long the day's plans were underway, only slightly hampered by the fact that the day had started six hours late. We headed into Belgrade, and then to the Kalemegdan Fortress. Built on a hill and flanked by water - a strategic double-whammy in the world of olden-day fortifications - it has been demolished and rebuilt by pretty much every major group of people since the Romans. It's a huge historical mash-up, an architectural mongrel, and fortunately one with a cafe. Bog and Dudemeister arrived to join us for a drink. I had a terrible iced coffee made up of Nescafe granules and tepid milk, and a peacock came to watch us.  We caught a few more of the sights that day - old men playing chess in the park (their version of videogames), poles so covered in posters that they had grown fat, a glorious view over New Belgrade and a spot of pizza and pasta for tea.We headed back to Peyota's place and whiled away the night drinking beer and chatting about nonsense. Tronetti joined us too, as did Shone (pronounced Shon-ay) an exceptionally friendly chap who also, like almost everyone else in Serbia, was incredibly tall. He plays on the Ahn'Qiraj server too, but in a friendly guild of real-life Belgrade friends called Gnomes Undercover.  Shone filled me in on some of the basics of the Serbian language, of which I can remember the following: Serbian uses the Cyrillic alphabet, like Russia - which to an idiotic English person looks like our alphabet with some of the letters the wrong way round. That makes it easier to get to grips with than Japanese or Arabic, but it also wrongfoots you, as half the letters make a different noise to the one you'd expect. But it also seems to lack the terrible confusion of English. Mine is a language in which "ough" can sound like "uff", "off", "oo", "oh", "uh", "or" and "ow" depending on whether it appears in "tough", "trough", "through", "though", "thorough", "thought" or "plough". Serbian - as far as I know the same holds true of all the dialects of the former Yugoslavia - is pretty damn phonetic. If you can read it, you can say it. But the language loses its appeal a little when you get in to the "cases". These are contexts which change the structure, usually the ending, of words, and I was roughly familiar with the concept after learning German at school. German has four cases, which apply to verbs, and this means the student of German must learn four different possible endings for each verb on top of the various tenses. It's the main reason I quit it and took up French.Serbian, however, has seven cases, and they don't just apply to verbs. They apply to pretty much everything.  Shone explained the seven different ways in which you could express "brother". Some were the same as others, but I was already lost by version number three. Serbian may have amazing phonetic simplicity, but that's not much good when you need graph paper and a scientific calculator to work out how to use it. I listened, fascinated, enjoying what I learned all the more for the knowledge that by the following day, I would remember none of it.As the early hours took hold, everyone said their goodbyes and either headed home or, in the case of Peyota, Brodos and I, headed to sleep. Just before drifting off, I stumbled into a small bedside table with a phone and fax machine on it. It collapsed, and the heavy device tumbled onto the floor and ripped itself out of the wall, taking the socket with it. I decided to mention it tomorrow. Next week: Donkey's penis.Read from the start:
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Hoofy makes this comment
Sat 05 Sep 2009 03:15:03 CDT
Brodos makes this comment
Sat 26 Sep 2009 00:15:34 CDT