THOMAS F.
MAGNER, Introduction to the Serbo-Croatian Language. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota, 1956. XII + 205 pp. lithographed.
The manual
is an outstanding achievement and innovation in the Serbo-Croatian field. The
type is clear and easy to read. The size makes for easy handling with two
detached loose-leaf glossaries (one in Cyrillic, and another in Latin
characters) which reduce bulkiness and eliminate time-consuming thumbing of
pages. In this in-expensive format, the appeal is enhanced by clear
reproduction of drawings and photographs, mostly dealing with folkloric motives
of the Croatian and Serbian cultures.
As the
author himself says, this book consists of four parts: a section on
pronunciation, twenty seven lessons, a very short reader and a detached
vocabulary of all the words used in the sentences or conversations and reading
selections.
Following
the general practice in Europe and America, Mr. Magner refers to the language
he is concerned with as Serbo-Croatian. Yet, aware of the fact that Serbs speak
Serbian and Croatians, Croatian, he gave "careful attention to the
distinctive features of Croatian as against Serbian" (2)[1].
Every educated Croatian and Serb knows that there is a Croatian and a Serbian
standard language re-cognizable at the very first page of a book or at the very
first group of sentences uttered by a speaker of the language. At the same time
every Serb and Croatian knows that it is rather difficult to explain these
differences to non-initiated people. In spite of the fact that these
differences cannot be readily explained, they determine inevitably every book and
every speaker as Serbian or Croatian, or as a hybrid mixture of the two.
According to that linguistic reality, in his made-up conversations, Mr. Magner
has two S-Cr.2[2] equivalents
for each English sentence. Thus the Serb, in Cyrillic writing, says: "I speak
Serbian and came to America from Serbia." The Croatian, in Latin writing,
says: "I speak Croatian and came to America from Croatia." The
Slovene, in Latin writing, says: "I speak Slovene but understand
Croato-Serbian" and, in Cyrillic writing: "I speak Slovene but
understand Serbo-Croatian" (89). In the first five lessons the Latin
alphabet only is used, while the Cyrillic one is introduced in the sixth
lesson.
Mr. Magner made another courageous attempt in using the accent
markings. While the natives are usually unable to distinguish une accent from
the other, to the foreign student these markings are indispensable for correct
pronunciation. In this book, individual vocabularies within the book and the
two separate glossaries that go with the book have accent markings on each
word, whereas reading selections are as a rule without them, because neither
Serbs nor Croatians use accent markings in their writing.
The
content of this, book corresponds exactly to its title. This is not a complete
treatise of the S-Cr. grammar; it is an introduction to the language,
especially written for Americans of Croatian or Serbian descent desiring to
learn the language of their fathers. However, it can be profitably used by any
American or English speaking person wishing to be initiated into S-Cr.
In writing
his book Professor Magner encountered many difficulties. He had to deal with a
language which does not have a normative dictionary as yet. The existing
grammars of this language are usually based on a thesaurus taken from a very
rich folk literature and not on the vocabulary of the everyday language. The
Western influences (German and Italian) and one Eastern (Turkish) have affected
the area of the Serbo-Croatian to such an extent that each part of this area
has a different nomenclature, let us say, for kitchenware: teča in
Dalmatia (Italian influence), rajndla in Zagreb (German influence) and šerpenja
(Eastern influence) denote the same thing, a pan. Even in their respective
areas these three words are felt as local or provincial, so that the
"correct" form tava has a stilted connotation in the mouth of a
native. Thus the compiler of a book like this is left only the choice between a
local and a stilted term for an object as common as a pan. Or another example,
how many Croatians or Serbs will be able to give a living equivalent for the
word "bed-spread" (46)?
Really
there is not such a thing as a Serbo-Croatian language but two large areas
covering most of Yugoslavia, where Croatians speak Croatian and Serbs, Serbian,
both very proud of their different cultural heritages and specific linguistic
expressions.
Instead of
choosing the language of the folk songs and folk tales, following the footsteps
of the greatest Serbian linguist Vuk Karadžić and the greatest Croatian grammarian
Toma Maretić, the author of this manual endeavored to bring forth the
everyday language. This is why we find in his book the so-called foreign
borrowings already naturalized in the language, like: ciment, oficir, kaos,
cigareta, repeticija, adresa, tref, pěk, partner, televizija, pidžama,
studirati, sendvič, etc. The official Croatian grammars usually shun
such words as if they should not enjoy the full-fledged citizenship of the
native words even when they are fully naturalized. Only a few words taken from
the folk literature crept into this book, like: neznan[3]
instead of nepoznat (4); ćelo instead of ćelavac
(5); ćorda instead of sablja (5); brodar instead of mornar
(21); bradva instead of sjekira (21). It seems to me that such
words, even when found in folk literature, should be given the standard
equivalent. To a learner of English we shall make clear that for
"calvities" everybody says "baldness." Here and there some
unnecessary dialectal words crept in, like špirit for alkohol (77), špag
for džep (77), škrabica for ladica (77), škver for brodogradilište
(77).
In
connection with this problem of vocabulary I like to mention another fact, the
author's happy rendering of deceptive cognates, like: tehnika for engineering
(69); pastor for minister (in religion) (61); instalater
for plumber (61). One feels that the author passes from one language to
the other with ease. In accordance with it he could have said
"college" or "school" for the S-Cr. fakultet but he
preferred to render it with "faculty" in quotation marks (72).
To my
knowledge, Mr. Magner's book is the first constantly applied attempt to show
what Serbian is and what Croatian is. Usually in other S.-Cr. grammars, one of
the two variants is given; thus Arturo Cronia in Italian gives the Croatian
variant mentioning only the main Serbian characteristics, and Milan Rešetar in
German gives in one edition the Serbian (Cyrillic) script, in another the
Croatian (Latin) script insisting on the complete oneness (vollständige
Einheitlichkeit) of the S-Cr. language. In his book Mr. Magner adopts the
Croatian variant and doubles it continuously with the Serbian variant.
Moreover, he does not say that the main difference between the two languages
consists only in two different scripts, but he stresses the differences in
vocabulary, and mentions some syntactic peculiarities. As a matter of fact, on
page 50 he summarizes these differences under "broad categories."
That way he pays the due respect to the linguistic and national realities of
Serbs and Croatians. As most writers do, he does not insist on what the S-Cr.
language should be, but on what Serbian and Croatian really are. Although Mr.
Magner draws a clear-cut demarcation line between the Serbian and Croatian
variant, one can find "Serbisms" in his Croatian. To mention a few: suv
instead of suh (25); kašika instead of žlica (24); tanjir
instead of tanjur (4); igra instead of pleše (8); sedeti
instead of sjediti (6); bakalin instead of trgovac mješovitom
robom (61); njen instead of njezin (passim); biće
instead of bit će (129); šerpa instead of zdjela or tava
(113); ćuretina instead of puretina (149); ćureći
instead of od pure (149).
If we read
carefully Mr. Magner's masterly grammatical and other explanations, we shall
observe that he insistently points out how the differences between Croatian and
Serbian are really slight, and one might say, negligible. Thus on p. 31 he
speaks of "these slightly differing varieties", and again on p. 49 he
says that Croatians and Serbs "have slightly different ways of expressing
it in writing." On the other hand, if we glance at any page of the book we
shall be overwhelmed with double forms and parentheses, i.e. Croatian forms
followed by their parallel Serbian forms in parentheses. Why list so many forms
if differences are so slight? Why so much ado about nothing? Changing somewhat
Mr. Magner's words to the American student on p. 31, we might say:
"Yugoslavs will understand you with ease, regardless of whether you speak
Serbian or Croatian, but they will be greatly annoyed if you mix together forms
from both varieties." The conclusion is obvious: behind the two variants
of the same language there are two different minds that want to be separated.
There is no use in passing the usual moral judgement stating that it would be
better and wiser to make a compromise, since each side distrusts the other and
does not have any desire to compromise. Mr. Magner aptly concludes on p. 50:
"Though the differences are neither very great nor very many, they have
for many speakers of Serbian and Croatian an importance not to be measured on a
linguistic check-list, since they are associated with the political and
religious rivalries fomented during the turbulent history of the South
Slavs."
The four
headings under which the author summarizes the main differences are:
Pronunciation, Vocabulary, Use of the Infinitive, Alphabet. Under the chapter
of Pronunciation he says that the (i) jekavski aspect of the language is
Croatian and ekavski, Serbian. One might add also that in many words the
accent is different. The very name of the capital of Serbia is Beógrad in
Serbian and Béograd in Croatian. As for the alphabet it is true that both
alphabets have been taught in schools throughout Yugoslavia, yet many Yugoslavs
have difficulties in passing from one alphabet to the other. It seems to me
that the third heading should read "Syntax" and not only "Use of
the Infinitive," because the student will come across several syntactic
differences. For instance a few pages later, the vocative case is studied and
it is stated that Gospodine Popoviću and Gospodin Popoviću (54) are
interchangeable. The second variant can be heard only among Serbs. In this very
book there is a sentence on p. 60 where a Croatian uses the active voice and a
Serb the passive one. Croatian: Ali treba vrlo
dobro znati matematiku. Serbian: Ali treba da se vrlo dobro zna
matematika. To mention one more. It is not difficult to find tvoj
and moj instead of svoj even in the writings of Aleksandar
Belić, the greatest living Serbian grammarian. On page 95 of this book
Branislav Nušić, a Serbian playright, starts his selection: Sećam
se mojih muka ... instead of svojih muka and he ends the same
selection by using mojih osobina instead of svojih osobina.
In those cases a Croatian would insist on svoj. There are other
syntactic differences listed in P. Guberina and K. Krstić: Raziike
izmedju hrvatskoga i srpskoga književnog jezika. (Zagreb: Matica Hrvatska,
1940), pp. 37 to 44.
In his
selection of reading, the author has followed a very sound principle: variatio
delectat. Every lesson has a Croatian and the corresponding Serbian
conversation made up of common and frequent topics, like "Days of the
Week," "Introduction to an Unknown Person," "Some
Occupations and Professions," "The Room," etc. After a
grammatical discussion, a little story often brings a touch of warm life, or a
folk saying summarizes Serbian or Croatian wisdom. Thus a lesson is usually
composed of a conversation, a folk saying, a story, the grammatical
explanation, sometimes the short biography of a noted Croatian or Serb, and an
appropriate picture or drawing.
I imagine
that the making up of these "conversations" must have been one of the
most difficult tasks the author had to meet. Since he did not want to give a
series of disconnected sentences and, on the other hand, he could not find
literary selections suitable for grammatical purposes, he had to figure them
out himself. I have the impression that the author tried to transpose the
American way of thinking into Croatian and Serbian garments. Then the American
student will retain his frame of mind even in speaking the language of Miroslav
Krleža and will hardly enter the arcana of a different culture. One receives
that impression from both the English and the S-Cr. part, because the former
sounds more idiomatic than the latter. Now, if the Serbian and Croatian way of
thinking is the objective of the course, it seems to me, the opposite procedure
would have been more appropriate. As a matter of fact, the author had that
intention, but things worked out differently.
On the
very first page Mr. Magner says: "It is not enough to learn rules and then
try to apply them in speech; a far better way is to imitate the way in which
the speaker says certain things ... and then to consider the rule in helping to
classify and extend what you have already learned by imitation" (1). In
spite of the excellency of that statement the very example given to illustrate
it betrays English and not Serbian or Croatian spirit. An American will say: "Do
you see my room? Do you see my picture?" A Croatian or Serbian will say: "Vidite
li moju sobu? Vidite li moju sliku"? And not: "Vidite li vi
moju sobu? Vidite li vi moju sliku"? S-Cr., a language with flexion,
usually does not express the subject pronoun of a verb (Cf. Latin laudo
and English "I praise."). The same observation could be made about
the examples on page 16: "Što radite? Koga vidite? Vidim šešir. Vidim grad. Vidim tramvaj. Vidim
pod." In other words the author does not follow the rule he gives
on p. 19. This redundant personal pronoun constantly appears throughout the
book and gives the impression of being commonly used in S.-Cr. as it is in
English. On the other hand, to a native it sounds heavy and artificial, like in
this sentence: "Čim vi pišete?" instead of "Čime
pišete?"
Judging
from the following examples: "On je moj prvi sin. Ona je moja prva kćerka. Ono je moje prvo
pero." (10) and "To je moj
šešir. To je moja knjiga. To je moje selo. On je moj brat. Ona je moja sestra." (15), the student does not know when the pronoun subject agrees with the
predicate noun, and when it does not. In all those cases the neuter pronoun is
used as a rule, like in French or in German: C'est ma mčre. Das ist meine
Mutter. The agreement between the subject pronoun and the predicate noun occurs
only when the stress is on the pronoun and not on the predicate noun. However,
stress is regularly on the predicate noun.
To present
the different variations of S-Cr. verbal forms the author successfully
systematizes these forms into very easily Understandable patterns. It is
worthwhile mentioning his clear presentation of the four present-tense
terminations (19), his presentation of the S.-Cr. dialects (30) with a very
appropriate selection "Hey! Any hay?" built on the
"quiproquo" sino (hay) and sin (son). Čime što radimo? Oćima gledamo, ušima slušamo, nosom
mirišemo," etc, it is a series of very well chosen examples for the so
called instrumental of means; its English translation is very natural.[4]
The selection "Učeni sin" (51) is characteristic from the sociological
point of view; it brings forth an important aspect of the' social conflict
called grad i selo (city and country), common to all Yugoslav nationalities.
The idea of 'proposing the pronunciation of consonant clusters is excellent
because there are "mańy combinations of consonants which normally do not
occur in English" (77). In every language there are sound combinations
within individual words or groups of words pronounced as one unit, which occur
frequently and are "natural" to that language. The learner of a
foreign language should get acquainted with these phonetic units because in his
own language they are usually strange. Imagine a Croatian studying English,
where a "th" can precede an "s", and pronouncing
"months" and "loathsome," if for him the "th"
sound is practically "a kind of s". The pronunciation practice
contrasting the long and short accent with rising tone in accented syllables: vŕljati
(to be valid), váljati (to roll) etc. or the vowel length in unaccented
syllables: nőgu (leg, acc. sing.) nőgū (of the
legs, gen. pl.); ůčitelja (of the teacher, gen. sing.) ůčitēljă
(of the teachers, gen. pl.) conveys the importance of differences produced by
the musical variation of syllables under the same accent as well as the differences
in vocal quantity. The enclitic forms (109) are very well explained. They are
appropriately compared with English and then gradually used in Croatian. Every
student of S.-Cr. knows how the use of these enclitics is bewildering in the
mind and the mouth of a foreign learner. At the bottom of the same page Mr.
Magner adds the sentence: "On je se vratio" giving it as an
alternative for: "On se je vratio." Although the former word order
might exist in some dialect, it sounds strange to a contemporary Croatian.
The author
rightly thinks that the difference between the short rising and short falling
accent should not be insisted upon, since the natives themselves are not aware
of it (8). Should he not give the same warning for sounds č and ć, dž
and d (dj), since most natives have no way of distinguishing one sound from the
other? S.-Cr. has a triple form for the demonstrative, while English has only a
double form. (French has only one form!). Mr. Magner was very skillful in
finding the third English equivalent: ovo "this", to
"that", ono "that over there."
On p. 12
we find an enigmatic little paragraph called "Zdravo". It
reads: "A word which was formerly used very frequently in greetings is zdravo.
Some speakers of S-Cr. in Yugoslavia still use it extensively both with the
meaning "hello" and also with the meaning "farewell,
goodbye," while other speakers avoid its usage". It would be
interesting to know more about this greeting which was so common among Serbs
and Croatians. Who are those "other speakers" who "avoid its
usage?" It reminds me of the fascist era in Italy when Lei (the polite
"you") was condemned by the government and everybody was supposed to
use Voi instead. Does Communism have anything to do with this
"zdravo"?
In spite
of the fact that the German way of telling time (Viertel (auf) neun for
8:15) is widely spread in Zagreb and the environs, I would not have introduced
it in this book, except in a note. And that for three reasons: (1) It is not
admitted among all the Croatians, (2) it is against the spirit of the Croatian
language, (3) an American will be really confused when reading that "eight
and a quarter" and "a quarter of nine" is the same time. (55).
In
accordance with many other text books Mr. Magner tried to reduce grammatical
concepts to the minimum in order not to repulse the student who decided to
embark on the study of such an unusual language as S-Cr. Moreover, even some
basic grammatical concepts are explained in the course of the book to provide
the student with clearer ideas. The author follows, the principle of frequency
in his choice of words. As we have already mentioned, his
"conversations" are built on the everyday language. Only in
pronunciation exercises and among grammatical examples, a few unusual words are
found, like: hrakati (56), kitno (56), skvačen (56), rosopas
(62), ozim (63), mrknuti (63), tiganj (70), žiđi,
(92), lasteks (107), and čpag, crepar, čmavati,
čkalj, gnjat, gvod, žganica, all on p. 77.
Still speaking of frequency one could say that in many nouns conjugated like stvar
the instrumental singular simply is not used. No native speaker will ever use
or hear the forms examplified on pages 62 and 63: siluzju, varošju,
rosopasju, zelenju, kaplju, pliješnju, ozimlju, smržlju, bojažnju. Even stvarju,
obitelju, lažlju, solju sound unusual.
In a work
of this kind errata are inevitable. Yet if their number is reduced in a
subsequent edition, the student will feel more confident. We shall mention some
of the misprints that struck our eyes: (14) hrvatosrpski instead of hrvatsko-srpski;
(24) ćerka instead of kćerka; (25) fez instead
of fes; (27) dodem instead of dođem; (39) the capital
I instead of the capital J; (39) prestavim. (Cyrillic)
instead of pretstavim; (70) and (43) Braon instead of Braun;
(44)... "the longer accented forms are to be used." This statement
implies a shorter, unstressed form, which is really frequently used but it was
omitted here by inadvertence. On p. 46; prekrivač is given as
Croatian in the text (46) and as Serbian in the General Vocabulary (225-L). It
is a "blanket" in the Vocabulary and a "bed-spread" in the
text (47). On p. 26; prid rivu puštaje does not make sense; (38) pripisati
does not mean "to note" but "ascribe,"
"attribute"; (56) krakati instead of krakat; (61) nošac
instead of nosač; (72) oni instead of ona; (72) poznati
instead of poznata; (76) irskog-norveškog instead of irsko-norveškog;
(27) spag instead of špag; (87) and (93) lepši instead of ljepši;
(130) onabi instead of ona bi.
The author
of this book should be especially commended for three good reasons: (1) His
insistence on Serbian and Croatian variants shows that he faces a complicate
linguistic and national reality as it really is. Such an approach will give the
learner a genuine picture of the language and culture he desires to get
acquainted with. (2) As an experienced teacher, he handles the subject very
skillfully and presents it clearly. (3) He courageously pioneers in a field
where so many preliminary monographs are wanting.
[1] Numbers in parentheses refer to the pages of the book.
[2] Following Mr. Magner we shall use this abbreviation for the adj. Serbo-Croatian.
[3] As a matter of fact for "unknown words" on p. 53 the author says nepoznate because nobody would say neznane riječi.
[4] Note the facetious misprint "We walk with out legs."