Working in IT? ๐ฉ๐ปโ๐ป Would you call yourself an IT-ian, Hitechist or Startupist? These are literal translations of actual terms used to describe people working in IT. In Bosnian ๐ง๐ฆ, Croatian ๐ญ๐ท, Montenegrin ๐ฒ๐ช and Serbian ๐ท๐ธ, people working in IT are known as “IT-jevac” (m), “IT-jevka” (f) and “IT-jevci” (p). Of course “IT” is […]
Back from a week researching around Montenegro ๐ฒ๐ช, Bosnia and Herzegovina ๐ง๐ฆ and Croatia ๐ญ๐ท with a writer friend of mine. An amazing time! ๐ โ๏ธ For anyone working with languages, trips to “territory” (where those languages are spoken) are valuable for language maintenance and seeing and hearing what’s on trend linguistically, particularly slang. There’s […]
Watch out for the killer squirrels! ๐ฟ๏ธWe’re very much in “silly season” right now in the UK ๐คช Not long ago, a friend posted a link to a news item published the day before about an audacious missionary being killed by the uncontacted people of North Sentinel Islandhttps://www.mirror.co.uk/news/us-news/man-killed-uncontacted-tribe-after-30620890 My immediate thought was “no, not another […]
Two more language directions have been added to my Institute of Translation and Interpreting profile (check it out here https://www.iti.org.uk/directory/member/mr-nick-nasev.html):โญ Bosnian to Englishโญ Montenegrin to English That brings my total to six ๐. Some background… The breakup of Yugoslavia over 30 years ago transformed what was once one language, Serbo-Croatian, into four: Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin […]
Did you hear about the man who collects “old-timers”? ๐ด๐ฝOr that Frank Sinatra has many “evergreens”? ๐ฒOr the woman who was a rowing “recorder”? โถOr how the best player on the field was the “goal man”? ๐ฏAnd how one unfortunate person was a victim of “mobbing” in the workplace? ๐ฅ These are all actual examples […]
๐ฐ Words that look the same or similar in two languages but have two, at times radically, different meanings are called “false friends”. There are plenty of them in most languages, and particularly between Slovenian and the other Southern Slavic languages, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Croatian, Macedonian, Montenegrin and Serbian. ๐๐ป A particular false friend I love […]
How do you say in Bosnian, Croatian, Montenegrin or Serbian this: “Up there, the mountains burn worse”? ๐ Gore gore gore gore. I’m not making this up ๐! This is a genuine sentence made up of four separate homonyms. And don’t bother checking it up on any machine translation tool or AI๐ฑ as it won’t […]
I’m about to fly off to Australia transiting through Munich Airport ๐ฉ๐ช … so I’m preparing myself to be ready to speak in “naลก jezik” (“our language”). ๐ So what is this “naลก jezik” (“our language”)?๐ And why is it spoken at Munich Airport? “Naลก jezik” is the euphemism used by people from ex-Yugoslavia in […]
