Beware of False Cognates!

False cognates, or "false friends", are those cunning little traps that allow natives to guffaw at ignorant foreigners struggling to communicate in another tongue. Essentially, false cognates are words in one language that resemble words from another language, but differ in meaning, sometimes significantly. These faux dopplegangers, if you will, can lead to potential miscommunication, and in retrospect, provide hilarious entertainment.

Some 35 years ago, as a foreign exchange student in Paraguay without any prior knowledge of Spanish, I was trying to explain my embarrassment over something, and of course, if you just tack a vowel onto the end of a an English word, it must be the Spanish equivalent...I mean, come on, embarazada surely sounds like it would have the same meaning! Little did I know that I was claiming to revolutionize medicine by declaring to be the first pregnant human male. Nothing like exponentially increasing one's embarrassment.

So the other day I was browsing through the Bosnian-English dictionary that I just received in the mail, and lo and behold, my eyes were quick to spot the Bosnian word "svastika".  I immediately had visions of throngs of men wearing military uniforms and jackboots, sporting goofy abbreviated mustaches with their right arms raised, singing the Horst Wessel song (a catchy little uber-fascist number popular with the SS).

But no! Svastika is not exactly what comes to the mind of an English speaker when referring to a sister-in-law. Unless of course...oops, we'd better not go there.

So today's lesson is: always look up new words that you encounter, even if they look very similar to English words, just to make sure of their meaning, and to avoid confusing and awkward moments in foreign lands.

Basic Bosnian/Bosniak language resources

Not knowing the language when hitting the ground will be difficult, but here is a free multimedia web resource for learning basic phrases in Bosniak:
http://www.101languages.net/bosnian/

The fact that the language has been politicized as a result of the Yugoslav civil war makes it difficult for a non-native speaker to understand what all the fuss is about. Without knowing anything about the language yet, I wonder what differences there are between Bosniak, Croatian and Serbian. Obviously, Serbian uses Cyrillic writing, but are the other differences between the languages anything more than what we might call an accent, or a preponderance of different word choices (similar to spanner: wrench, elevator: lift) or idioms and slang?

Here's a brief explication summarizing some of the variations between the three:

http://www.omniglot.com/language/articles/serbocroatian.htm

That being said, here's an "old school" Serbo-Croatian resource, the US Foreign Service Language Course, complete with two PDF manuals and downloadable audio:

https://www.livelingua.com/project/fsi/Serbo-Croatian/

Another manual on the live lingua project website comes from the Defense Language Institute, a place I once called home (a lifetime time ago, when I was in the US Army studying Russian in Monterey, California.) This one's apparently just Serbian, so unless you're planning to spend a great deal of time in Republika Srbska, and need practice with Cyrillic, I'd stick with the first two links.

https://www.livelingua.com/project/dli/Serbian/

Reading List for the Balkans

I've decided to add a permanent page for a bibliography for this project. I'm sure it will grow monstrous in size quite quickly...and there are so many books out there that I haven't had time for.

One of the difficult tasks is deciding which books I really to purchase redundantly in electronic form, since I already own most of books listed, but haven't found a gullible sponsor to ante up enough money to ship a loaded pack mule across the Atlantic.

Deciding on a starting point--Sarajevo

I had to put my upcoming sabbatical out of my mind for the month of July as I was punching above my weight in an National Endowment for the Humanities summer seminar, studying Existentialism at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts. It was an enriching, yet quite humbling, experience. Lots of really smart, articulate people; lots of deep and voluminous readings...As much as I enjoyed it, I came to the realization that I'll never be more than a dilettante in most things; especially philosophy!

Over the last few days I've been refreshing my memory on the various historic sites and other things I want to see and do. Since the focal point of my sabbatical is to try to gain an understanding of the diverse viewpoints of the various participants' involved in the Yugoslav wars, I will focus on Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), where the conflict was prolonged and involved shifting alliances.

I've been of two minds, whether to hit the ground running, using my initial burst of enthusiasm to explore the many outlying areas of BiH that experienced significant upheaval and suffering during the conflict, or to start in Sarajevo, soak up as much as I can there, while networking for potential contacts with firsthand knowledge and friends they may have in the periphery.

 After hours of trying to plan several itineraries using different geographic parameters, I finally came to a decision to trust my intuition and make Sarajevo a starting point, at the risk of  permanently narrowing my scope to the many stories of Sarajevo (which I'm sure, in the end, would be just as revealing).

Several other advantages come to mind by taking this approach:

• Learning rudimentary Bosniak phrases and customs before traipsing around in the countryside will make life easier, as the percentage of the population that may speak English usually drops precipitously.
• Trying to live frugally,finding a central location to rent an Airbnb place by the week or month cuts your rate by 20 to 50%.
• No matter how much knowledge you gain from books and the internet, locals are the experts. Hopefully a few are willing to take me under the wing and enlighten me over a few rounds of rakija.