engrbian

(Translation, Yugoslavia)

A mix of english and serbian. There bits of it ever since the sixties, but it came to rule at some point in the mid naughts; by 2010, when we returned from the US, it was just about everywhere. There are shops where anything with a font larger than 10cm is in english, there are public texts without a single diacritical, i.e. written in serbian but with english alphabet, there are sentences with english construction, phrases taken from english and grafted upon a serbian sentence, perfectly good words replaced with their english counterparts (which have six meanings each) etc etc.

Its best feature is the writing of foreign words, where there's a strict rule to write them half-half, pretty much like the Amers pronounce german names, half of it in the original, half their own way. So here, the list of phenomena, in no particular order.

You can write comerc, commerc; komerc and commerce are not allowed at all.

You can write expres, ekspress, forbidden are ekspres and express - one being too serbian, the other too english.

The words ending in -ija now have to end in -ia, even folia, even though it's foil in english.

The foreign words are to be written as they are in english, fuck the original, except sometimes (half-half, remember). So „tortilja chips sa ukusom pizza“ and not ever „tortilla čips sa ukusom pice“. Because nobody imagines that čips is actually plural, so it should be čip, čipovi - because that's a different word, that's electronics. A chips is edible. And this is not english, it's engrbian. Also, the author probably said, in his mind, „sa ukusom pice“, but didn't dare write „pice“, because pica is a diminutive of pička, cunt, so he oscillated between pizze and pizzae, found both wrong, and stayed in the nominative case, just in case.

The adjectives are exterminated, now one lines two nouns, of which the first one is exempt of declension. Instead of paper on squares, we now have cube paper.

Any diacriticals in a logotype must be thinned, miniaturized beyond recognition, never leave enough space above the line for them. Includes car tags.

Serbia is nowadays a four bananas republic (so they'd fit on its coat of arms, which requires a cross surrounded with four fire strikers facing outwards).


Mentions: Notes on grammar, spelling and other witchcraft, 26-XI-1977., 06-VI-1983., 24-I-1994., 11-I-1996., 21-VIII-2001., 18-IX-2003., Isabel hurricane, 13-VIII-2004., 03-VI-2007., 05-IV-2010., 13-X-2010., 22-XII-2010., 07-IV-2011., 17-IV-2013., 04-VII-2015., 24-XII-2015., 15-I-2016., 21-II-2016., 24-IX-2016., 22-IX-2018., 24-I-2019., I sing, 23-XI-2019., 01-V-2021., 12-VII-2021., 18-VIII-2021., 31-I-2022., 13-IV-2022., 24-IX-2022., 25-IX-2022., 16-X-2023., kokta, ms Rašetić, pečenjara, Radoslava Međei, in serbian