1 items found for "Serbian"
Did you know this about... Serbian?
01Serbian is one of the few European standard languages with complete synchronic digraphia, using both Cyrillic and Latin alphabets; speakers read the two scripts equally well.
The Serbian Cyrillic alphabet was devised in 1814 by Serbian linguist Vuk Karadžić, who created the alphabet on phonemic principles. The Latin alphabet was designed by Croatian linguist Ljudevit Gaj in 1830.
02One of the main Serbian orthographic rules is “Write as you speak and read as it is written”. This means that even proper names coming into Serbian from another language are transcribed according to their pronunciation - for instance, New York is Njujork, and Gérard Depardieu is Žerar Depardje.
03Just like some other South Slavic languages, Serbian also has a rich vocabulary denoting intricate family relations such as blood kinship, kinship by law (in-laws), spiritual kinship (such as godparents), and legal kinship through adoption and remarriage, all of which can reach as far as the sixteenth generation.
04In standard Serbian the future tense is built by merging the infinitive base with suffixes "ću", "ćeš", "će"... so it is spelled "radiću" (I will work), "radićeš" (You shall work).
05The Board for Standardization of the Serbian Language (Одбор за стандардизацију српског језика) was founded in 1997 as a collaborative effort between institutions in Serbia, Montenegro, and the Republika Srpska. Composed of representatives from relevant countries the Board handles issues relating to standardisation of the language and develops ways of increasing the use of Serbian language and the Cyrillic alphabet.
www.rastko.org.rs/filologija/odbor/index_c.html
What does Serbian sound like? Listen to a Serbian radio station here