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22 messages over 3 pages: 1 2 3 Next >>

Merv
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United States
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Speaks: English*, Serbo-Croatian*
Studies: Spanish, French

Message 9 of 22

24 September 2011 at 7:27pm | IP Logged

Марк wrote:

Do all Serbs distinguish between tones and vowel lenth?

All well educated people, yes. The pitch accent is weakest or nonexistent as you proceed towards the borders
with Hungary, Bulgaria, and Romania, so Serbs in Nis (the third largest city, in the south) will have poor pitch
accent and also poor case declensions (Bulgarian influence).

Pitch accent is strongest as you approach Bosnia and Montenegro. That's not so surprising since the literary
language was formalized based on dialects originating amongst the Serbs of eastern Herzegovina and the Drina
River valley.

Pitch accent is strongest in parts of Bosnia and Herzegovina (based on the region, not the ethnicity of the
speakers), where distinctions are also made in the length of the unaccented syllables (something nobody does in
Serbia).

I believe pitch accent is substantially weaker in Croatia. I think they mostly are aware of the length distinction but
not so much the direction of pitch change.
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Марк
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Russian Federation
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Speaks: Russian*

Message 10 of 22

24 September 2011 at 8:42pm | IP Logged

In Montenegro I noticed long vowels мало воде:. I didn't use any tonws but was
understood. So, for a foreigner do you advise to learn tones (it is difficult) or leave
it?
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Kartof
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Message 11 of 22

24 September 2011 at 10:12pm | IP Logged

How do Russian and Serbian cases compare? Do they cover similar morphological structures or are they used in a
drastically different manner? What about the verbal systems? I've heard that Russian only has three tenses but
what about Serbian? Are Serbian verbs more similar to Bulgarian verbs or to Russian verbs?
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Merv
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Message 12 of 22

24 September 2011 at 11:16pm | IP Logged

Kartof wrote:

How do Russian and Serbian cases compare? Do they cover similar morphological structures or
are they used in a
drastically different manner? What about the verbal systems? I've heard that Russian only has three tenses but
what about Serbian? Are Serbian verbs more similar to Bulgarian verbs or to Russian verbs?

I have no idea about Russian. You'd have to ask someone who knows both languages. Although Serbian has 7
cases and Russian has 6 I don't think the distinction is very important. Wikipedia has some overviews:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_grammar

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serbo-Croatian_grammar

Not sure how useful they are. It appears that similar things are at play: gender, number, animacy, etc. and there
are three declension paradigms in both.

Again, can't speak for Russian verbs.

In day to day use, Serbian uses a compound past tense, a present tense, a conditional (some don't consider this a
tense) and two future tenses. The future tenses are not interchangable. The pluperfect, imperfect and aorist exist
in archaic language (like the Bible), but you would rarely hear them today.

That said, the older archaic tenses will be more used in rural areas, especially as you go towards Bosnia or
Bulgaria, so there you would hear the aorist and imperfect.
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egill
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Message 13 of 22

25 September 2011 at 12:38am | IP Logged

When some pitch distinction is merged/confused, which ones tend to be combined? I ask
this because I remember reading somewhere that in large parts of Serbia two of the
pitches (short falling and short rising maybe?) were in free variation. Is this true?

To cast the question in another light: what are the most important pitch distinctions to
make? Of course ideally one would learn all of them, but if one were to combine a pair,
which ones would sound the least natural and which ones would be similar to how (some)
Serbs speak?
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Merv
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United States
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Speaks: English*, Serbo-Croatian*
Studies: Spanish, French

Message 14 of 22

25 September 2011 at 1:00am | IP Logged

egill wrote:

Messing up the length is a bigger issue than the pitch. If you say the word "pet" (five) as the English word pet,
you will sound very foreign. It needs to be a long e. However when you want to say something like "petoro dece"
(five children), then the e in petoro becomes a short e.

If you get the length down, then focus on the pitch for the long vowels. Short vowels are almost indistinguishable
in rapid speech (as to whether they're rising or falling) and you only realize which pitch accent you're using when
you pronounce the word really slowly. A rule of thumb for most short monosyllabic words is that they tend to
have a falling accent.

Edited by Merv on 25 September 2011 at 1:03am
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Merv
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Senior Member
United States
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Speaks: English*, Serbo-Croatian*
Studies: Spanish, French

Message 15 of 22

25 September 2011 at 1:08am | IP Logged

Марк wrote:

In Montenegro I noticed long vowels мало воде:. I didn't use any tonws but was
understood. So, for a foreigner do you advise to learn tones (it is difficult) or leave
it?

To be honest, I'm impressed and gratified that you take the time to learn a language of relatively little global
importance. It can't hurt to learn pitches but learning lengths is more key. It's weird: I never think of what pitch to
use, it's very natural. So for most words I can't tell you straight away what the pitch is (length is easy), I need a little
bit of going over the word in slow motion to figure out the pitch.

Personally, I hope there's some use to this other than as a linguistic curiosity. Perhaps in learning Chinese some
day? ;)
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Merv
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Speaks: English*, Serbo-Croatian*
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Message 16 of 22

25 September 2011 at 1:16am | IP Logged

Relevant info below:

Quote:

1.2 Accent and vowel length
A small number of words have no accented syllable of their own (certain
conjunctions, most prepositions and the word ne 'not' before a verb are proclitics
and hang on to the next word; certain pronoun and verb forms, and the question
marker li are enclitics, hanging on to the previous word, see section 3.1.5). Apart
from these, every word form has one accented syllable (some compound words
have one on each element). We say accent, not stress, because pitch and length
are involved rather than intensity. Accent can alternate in placement or contour
within the paradigm of a word. Accented syllables are termed either rising or
falling, and contain a long or a short vowel. Traditional notation in grammars and
dictionaries combines these two features, using four accent marks: short falling \\
as in ȁ, long falling ⌒ as in ȃ, short rising \ as in à, long rising ⁄ as in á. The falling
accents occur almost exclusively on first syllables of words, and can occur on
monosyllables: gȍvōr 'speech', lȍš 'bad'; prȃvdati 'to justify', grȃd 'city'. The rising
accents occur on any syllable but the last, hence not on monosyllables: dòlaziti
'to come', govòriti 'to speak', veličìna 'size'; glúmiti 'to act', garáža 'garage',
gravitírati 'to gravitate'.

1.2.1 Long and short vowels are distinguished under accent or in later syllables
in the word. Thus grȃd 'city', grȁd 'hail'; váljati 'to roll', vàljati 'to be good'. Postaccentual
length is notated with a macron: gȍdīnā 'years, genitive plural'; prȃvdā
'he/she justifies', prȃvda 'justice'; veličìnē 'size, genitive singular', veličìne 'sizes,
nominative/accusative plural'. Many post-accentual lengths are associated with
specific suffixes or grammatical forms (as genitive plural of nouns). One can
construct examples with multiple lengths like rázbōjnīštāvā, genitive plural of
rázbōjnīštvo 'banditry', but few people will pronounce all five vowels long;
practically every region shortens post-accentual lengths in some positions (P. Ivić
1958 finds a clear hierarchy of dialectal shortenings).

1.2.2 The names of the accents suggest a pitch change on a given syllable. Pitch
does ascend within long rising accented vowels, and drops during long fallings.
However short accented vowels have no such obvious pitch rise or fall.
Measurements (Lehiste and Ivić 1986) suggest that the only consistent difference
between short accents is the relationship with the following syllable: the syllable
after a short rising begins equal to or higher in pitch than the accented syllable
itself, then declines, whereas the syllable after a short falling begins distinctly
lower. The same relationship (equal to or higher versus lower) holds in the
syllables following long rising and long falling, and is hence the factor common to
all accentual distinctions, though regional variations in accent contour have led to
disagreements among scholars.

1.2.2.1 Falling accents can "jump" onto a preceding word: ne + znȃm = nè_znām
'I don't know', ne + bi = nè_bi 'would not'. In the modern language this happens
when ne is added to a verb form, and in a few preposition + object phrases:
sȁ_mnōm 'with me', sȁ_sobom 'with oneself'. Bosnian usage has a larger number
of prepositional phrases with 'jumping', as: ù_Bosni 'in Bosnia'.

1.2.3 How important are the accents and long vowels? A large proportion of
users of standard Croatian—especially those with Zagreb backgrounds—can tell
a long accented vowel from a short vowel, but don't reliably distinguish rising
from falling, and say their post-accentual vowels all short. They tend not to shift
the accent from one syllable to another when making different forms of a word:
govOriti 'to speak', present govOrim, where standard dictionaries would call for
govòriti, gòvorīm. Speakers of standard Serbian tend to distinguish long rising
from long falling, keep short rising and short falling apart but not in all words, and
have lost most of the older post-accentual lengths. In Bosnian usage all the old
distinctions survive well. Post-accentual long vowels are heard clearly, while
post-accentual short vowels (especially i and u) may drop out ("Zen'ca" for the
city of Zȅnica). But Bosnians are accustomed to dealing with speakers who make
fewer accent and length distinctions.

1.2.3.1 Given this situation, this text will omit almost all accents and length marks
from here on. It will mention certain noun, adjective, and verb endings that
contain a long vowel, because the length will be noticeable in one-syllable words
(zlī 'the evil...' and znām 'I know' have long i and a). Only the most important
instances where an accent shifts from syllable to syllable will be listed (šèšīr 'hat',
but with an ending šešíra, šešíru, etc.). For more extensive information see the
tables and discussion in Browne 1993. The best source for accents, long/short
vowels, and shifts is Benson's (1971 and later editions) dictionary; in his
dictionary, words without a mark (brat) are to be read with short falling \\ on the
first syllable. For standard Croatian see Anić (1991) and Šonje (2000). Many less
familiar Bosnian words are given with accents in Jahić (1999).

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