We Do Adventure

The main reason our blog had been sitting unattended was work winning the battle for attention. Part of what we do here is work with the Evangelical Church of Bosnia and Herzegovina on youth work projects. This includes summer camps and conferences. Anyone who has ever been to a Christian camp will probably have experienced singing of some sort or another: maybe camp-fire songs, maybe things that sound like they come from the Bible, maybe tunes that sound like they came off the radio. The English speaking world has hundreds of artists producing all this and more. The Bosnian, Croatian or Serbian speaking world doesn't. All of that to say the work in question - producing new music recordings – is something that needs to happen more here. Music is such an important form of expression; we don't want young people to miss out on the chance to sing things they mean in their own language. People can, and do, translate English language songs and sing them. Sometimes they work, but of...

Doctor Dolittle – and I’m speaking about he of the Hugh Lofting books, not the unwatchable Eddie Murphy – spoke to the animals. He understood their language. Today I gained a greater understanding of how Bosnian animal differ from their English-speaking counterparts when it comes to their most famous phrases. English cats ‘meow’. Cats in Mostar, of which there are many, can be heard to ‘mijau’. Like several Bosnian words we’ve found this is basically a phonetic transliteration. ‘Džem’ is a favourite example. ‘Šorc’ is another. Yes, ‘jam’ and ‘shorts’ respectively. Back to the animals, it seems that baring the transliteration cats and horses, and ducks and cows speak the same language – and rabbits don’t speak at all! But the surprising difference is dogs. My English-speaking audience will know that when a dog barks they say ‘woof woof’. Perhaps it’s the lack of a ‘w’ in the Bosnian alphabet; perhaps it’s their Balkan temperament, but when a dog here bares his teeth to make some noise t...

I’d hate to bore you by getting stuck on a theme but I learnt a new word today and it made me smile. So I’m going to write about it. I’m also going to make a few statement s about language founded on nothing stronger than my own observations and analysis. (Feel free to correct me if you know better – just do it gently!) My word of the day is ‘radoholičar’ which I am told is the local equivalent of ‘workaholic’. (That, of course, is the link to yesterday’s post!) My thoughts on language are about the way new or foreign words are assumed into language. The English make much of the fact the French have a bureau, or some kind of official body, to protect the purity of their language. English just begs, borrows and steals - adding whatever seems to fit regardless of rules. So long as it can be spelled with its twenty-six letter alphabet it’s even happy to allow an accent or two. Here we’re learning a language that’s spelled phonetically. This is a genius invention for beginners as there are...