Neoplanta log - German, French, Arabic, Urdu etc.

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Cavesa
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Re: Neoplanta log - Serbian, Hungarian, Mandarin, etc.

Postby Cavesa » Sat Sep 05, 2020 8:12 am

And what are the "lower genres" in Serbian like? I feel a big gap on my map of european fantasy, as few books get translated, but that doesn't mean there is nothing interesting. Have you found some good crime novels, scifi, etc?

Also, as the Serbian-Croatian distinction is rather small, do the people read in each other's languages (as many older Croats might still be familiar with the cyrillics, and many serbians are likely to be familiar with the latin script not only through Croatian, at least that's what I'd guess). Many Slovaks read in Czech. Czechs have much less need for that, but we are capable of it. Do the Serbs and Croats share their bookmarket, or is it strictly diivided?
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Re: Neoplanta log - Serbian, Hungarian, Mandarin, etc.

Postby overscore » Sat Sep 05, 2020 11:04 am

Hi Saim! Your log is super interesting; you're way ahead of me with all these languages (and some pretty though ones at that!) at a high level!

Cavesa wrote:Also, as the Serbian-Croatian distinction is rather small, do the people read in each other's languagesMany Slovaks read in Czech. Czechs have much less need for that, but we are capable of it. Do the Serbs and Croats share their bookmarket, or is it strictly diivided?

No, they do not. There is barely any contact between the Serbs and the Croats since the last 30 years. A lot of Croats don't know any Cyrillic.
Both nations are very hostile to each other. I can't speak much for Croatia because I don't know a lot about it.
I know there's quite a lot of Russophiles in Serbia, but mostly Serbs learn whatever language they need to go abroad make money, and then come back. The typical diaspora stuff.
Serbia at least has a very healthy literary tradition – lots of bookshops around, lots of books being written in all genres.

Many Slovaks read in Czech. Czechs have much less need for that, but we are capable of it.


Yeah the more appropriate comparison is Serbia and Montenegro. They are basically the same people, but the languages are a tiny bit different. And like Slovakia and CZ, they have 2 countries for reasons that are not very well established. Some sort of political opportunism at some point in both cases.
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Re: Neoplanta log - Serbian, Hungarian, Mandarin, etc.

Postby Saim » Sat Sep 05, 2020 4:37 pm

Cavesa wrote:And what are the "lower genres" in Serbian like? I feel a big gap on my map of european fantasy, as few books get translated, but that doesn't mean there is nothing interesting. Have you found some good crime novels, scifi, etc?


I haven't really come across much fantasy or sci-fi. I think there are a couple of relatively popular thriller authors that I might check out.

Also, as the Serbian-Croatian distinction is rather small, do the people read in each other's languages (as many older Croats might still be familiar with the cyrillics, and many serbians are likely to be familiar with the latin script not only through Croatian, at least that's what I'd guess).


Latin is de facto the dominant script in Serbia, and both Cyrillic and Latin are taught in Serbian-medium schools as essentially equivalent scripts. Cyrillic is officially the "preferential" script so it's the main language of official documents, but there are more books published in Latin than in Cyrillic (you can take a look at the "local" section of one of the two main publishers here).

I find it hard to say what people read because many people in my social circle are kind of allergic to local cultural production and mostly don't really read novels anyway. All I can say is that in the more mainstream bookstores there seem to be more translated works than local works, "local books" (domaći autori) is a section unto itself not divided into genres.

Vedrana Rudan (Uho, nož, grlo) is a Croatian author, but I think this book at least was published by the Serbian company Laguna, and she also seems to have carved out a niche in the Serbian media landscape by being very openly critical of Croatian nationalism in a fairly one-sided way. I don't know if she has much of a following in Croatia.

I just checked both Vulkan and Delfi's websites (these are the two major bookstore chains associated with the dominant publishers Vulkan and Laguna respectively), and found a number of Croatian authors there, but I can't tell how popular or commonly read they are in Serbia.

overscore wrote:There is barely any contact between the Serbs and the Croats since the last 30 years.


I think that's a bit of an exaggeration. It's certainly nothing like the contact there was between 1945 and 1989, but HRT is available for anyone who has cable television, the CNN affiliate N1 has offices in both Zagreb and Belgrade, and Croatian bands fairly regularly play in Serbia. Perhaps the literary scene is a bit more divided but I don't think you can say there's "barely any contact".

Here it seems that Laguna participated in a major Croatian book festival in 2019: https://www.laguna.rs/laguna-bukmarker- ... 13519.html .

Yeah the more appropriate comparison is Serbia and Montenegro. They are basically the same people, but the languages are a tiny bit different. And like Slovakia and CZ, they have 2 countries for reasons that are not very well established. Some sort of political opportunism at some point in both cases.


In terms of population and the weight of the local publishing and entertainment industries, I don't think the relationship between Montenegro and Serbia is that similar to the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Here Croatia and Serbia are more comparable.

As for linguistic distance, even Moravian is more distant from (Bohemian) Czech than "Serbian", "Croatian", "Bosnian" and "Montenegrin" are from each other. I don't know if anyone could find any differences between Standard Montenegrin as it actually exists and the sort of Standard Serbian used in Bosnia, and of the two dialect blocs that exist in Montenegro one of them (Eastern Herzegovinian) is found in both Bosnia and Serbia and the other one (Zeta-Raška) is also found in Serbia.

When it comes to political issues... I guess I shouldn't get into it too much, all I'm going to say is that Montenegrin nationalism exists and is supported by a non-negligible portion of the population of Montenegro, so I'm not sure what makes it so different from Croatia or Bosnia.
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Cavesa
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Re: Neoplanta log - Serbian, Hungarian, Mandarin, etc.

Postby Cavesa » Sun Sep 06, 2020 9:50 am

overscore wrote:Hi Saim! Your log is super interesting; you're way ahead of me with all these languages (and some pretty though ones at that!) at a high level!

Cavesa wrote:Also, as the Serbian-Croatian distinction is rather small, do the people read in each other's languagesMany Slovaks read in Czech. Czechs have much less need for that, but we are capable of it. Do the Serbs and Croats share their bookmarket, or is it strictly diivided?

No, they do not. There is barely any contact between the Serbs and the Croats since the last 30 years. A lot of Croats don't know any Cyrillic.
Both nations are very hostile to each other. I can't speak much for Croatia because I don't know a lot about it.
I know there's quite a lot of Russophiles in Serbia, but mostly Serbs learn whatever language they need to go abroad make money, and then come back. The typical diaspora stuff.
Serbia at least has a very healthy literary tradition – lots of bookshops around, lots of books being written in all genres.

Many Slovaks read in Czech. Czechs have much less need for that, but we are capable of it.


Yeah the more appropriate comparison is Serbia and Montenegro. They are basically the same people, but the languages are a tiny bit different. And like Slovakia and CZ, they have 2 countries for reasons that are not very well established. Some sort of political opportunism at some point in both cases.


Thanks for the explanation! I was really curious. So, The Croats and Serbs are building two entirely different book markets and traditions.

Well, the reasons for the Czech and Slovak separation are absolutely clear. The two countries actually don't have that much in common, except for the language, and the shared history was rather short. The values and traditions are actually much more different, than it would seem at first sight (or if you were judging the differences based only on all the Slovaks working in the Czech Republic, who are bound to be a specific subcategory). The Croatian-Serbian situation seems much more complicated and the linguistic differences much smaller, if it wasn't for the script. But that's only in the eyes of an outsider, I'll be glad to be corrected. The Czech and Slovak languages are actually not that close, if you take the most extreme differences (=the Prague regional version of Czech, and the eastern Slovak). It's suddenly more like Italian and Spanish. They are almost the same only if you take the closer variants, or if you prove the idea on people with tons of exposure to the other language, not on the uninitiated.

Saim wrote:
Cavesa wrote:And what are the "lower genres" in Serbian like? I feel a big gap on my map of european fantasy, as few books get translated, but that doesn't mean there is nothing interesting. Have you found some good crime novels, scifi, etc?


I haven't really come across much fantasy or sci-fi. I think there are a couple of relatively popular thriller authors that I might check out.

Also, as the Serbian-Croatian distinction is rather small, do the people read in each other's languages (as many older Croats might still be familiar with the cyrillics, and many serbians are likely to be familiar with the latin script not only through Croatian, at least that's what I'd guess).


Latin is de facto the dominant script in Serbia, and both Cyrillic and Latin are taught in Serbian-medium schools as essentially equivalent scripts. Cyrillic is officially the "preferential" script so it's the main language of official documents, but there are more books published in Latin than in Cyrillic (you can take a look at the "local" section of one of the two main publishers here).

I find it hard to say what people read because many people in my social circle are kind of allergic to local cultural production and mostly don't really read novels anyway. All I can say is that in the more mainstream bookstores there seem to be more translated works than local works, "local books" (domaći autori) is a section unto itself not divided into genres.

Vedrana Rudan (Uho, nož, grlo) is a Croatian author, but I think this book at least was published by the Serbian company Laguna, and she also seems to have carved out a niche in the Serbian media landscape by being very openly critical of Croatian nationalism in a fairly one-sided way. I don't know if she has much of a following in Croatia.

I just checked both Vulkan and Delfi's websites (these are the two major bookstore chains associated with the dominant publishers Vulkan and Laguna respectively), and found a number of Croatian authors there, but I can't tell how popular or commonly read they are in Serbia.

overscore wrote:There is barely any contact between the Serbs and the Croats since the last 30 years.


I think that's a bit of an exaggeration. It's certainly nothing like the contact there was between 1945 and 1989, but HRT is available for anyone who has cable television, the CNN affiliate N1 has offices in both Zagreb and Belgrade, and Croatian bands fairly regularly play in Serbia. Perhaps the literary scene is a bit more divided but I don't think you can say there's "barely any contact".

Here it seems that Laguna participated in a major Croatian book festival in 2019: https://www.laguna.rs/laguna-bukmarker- ... 13519.html .

Yeah the more appropriate comparison is Serbia and Montenegro. They are basically the same people, but the languages are a tiny bit different. And like Slovakia and CZ, they have 2 countries for reasons that are not very well established. Some sort of political opportunism at some point in both cases.


In terms of population and the weight of the local publishing and entertainment industries, I don't think the relationship between Montenegro and Serbia is that similar to the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Here Croatia and Serbia are more comparable.

As for linguistic distance, even Moravian is more distant from (Bohemian) Czech than "Serbian", "Croatian", "Bosnian" and "Montenegrin" are from each other. I don't know if anyone could find any differences between Standard Montenegrin as it actually exists and the sort of Standard Serbian used in Bosnia, and of the two dialect blocs that exist in Montenegro one of them (Eastern Herzegovinian) is found in both Bosnia and Serbia and the other one (Zeta-Raška) is also found in Serbia.

When it comes to political issues... I guess I shouldn't get into it too much, all I'm going to say is that Montenegrin nationalism exists and is supported by a non-negligible portion of the population of Montenegro, so I'm not sure what makes it so different from Croatia or Bosnia.


Thanks for explaining! Too bad these genres are not that popular in Serbia. They are a great opportunity for the smaller contries and traditions to shine.

When a Croatian author is published in Serbia, are they translated, or in original? It's a rather disgusting thing, that the Slovak authors read in the Czech Republic get translated. And often even wrongly sorted in the local authors section. I find this to be a rather parasitic behaviour, on the part of the "translators". (It reminds me of a Czech movie fairy tale, which ends by two neighbouring kingdoms finally being at peace, and the war hungry generals looking for an alternative job, settling on becoming translators: "But our countries speak the same language!" "Shhh, they haven't found out yet." :-) )

Your note about your social circle not appreciating the local writers is interesting. Is it because of them being very educated and simply seeing the worse quality of the authors? Or is it a sort of a "snobbism" (no offence meant)? Or is there an objective lack of local production in the genres and styles popular in your social circles?
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Re: Neoplanta log - Serbian, Hungarian, Mandarin, etc.

Postby overscore » Mon Sep 07, 2020 2:08 am

Cavesa wrote:The Croatian-Serbian situation seems much more complicated and the linguistic differences much smaller, if it wasn't for the script. But that's only in the eyes of an outsider, I'll be glad to be corrected. The Czech and Slovak languages are actually not that close, if you take the most extreme differences (=the Prague regional version of Czech, and the eastern Slovak). It's suddenly more like Italian and Spanish. They are almost the same only if you take the closer variants, or if you prove the idea on people with tons of exposure to the other language, not on the uninitiated.


It's also kind of like that with serbo-croatian if I understand correctly. In practice, the Croats speak their own language, called "kajkavian". At least this speaker of Serbian finds it pretty difficult to understand.

Cavesa wrote:When a Croatian author is published in Serbia, are they translated, or in original?

No. The latin and cyrillic scripts are both official, as are ijekavica (in Serbia, a rare written variant used in some villages) and ekavica.
This comes from an old agreement that existed for a long time; the Croats don't honor it anymore.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novi_Sad_agreement
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Re: Neoplanta log - Serbian, Hungarian, Mandarin, etc.

Postby Saim » Mon Sep 07, 2020 5:53 am

overscore wrote:It's also kind of like that with serbo-croatian if I understand correctly. In practice, the Croats speak their own language, called "kajkavian". At least this speaker of Serbian finds it pretty difficult to understand.


To be a bit more precise: that's the traditional language of northwestern Croatia, and at this point it's practically extinct in Zagreb at least.

There's also Chakavian, which is different to both Kajkavian and the dialects closer to Standard Serbo-Croatian. It's even more endangered than Kajkavian is.

Image

The green part is Shtokavian, which extends into Bosnia, Serbia and Montenegro, whereas Chakavian and Kajkavian are unique to Croatia.

In southeastern Serbia and northern Macedonia (in the area around Kumanovo) there is a dialect group that is as close to to Standard Macedonian or Standard Bulgarian as it is to Standard Serbian, Torlakian.

Image

overscore wrote:as are ijekavica (in Serbia, a rare written variant used in some villages)


Ijekavica is the traditional oral form in western Serbia, although it is mostly dying out among younger people. I think it might be a bit more present in Novi Pazar than in other cities in the region.

Ijekavica was also the original form of Standard Serbian, ekavica was adopted later due to the fact that it was the majority form in Serbia, even though it doesn't exist in the dialects that the standard was based on.

Cavesa wrote:Well, the reasons for the Czech and Slovak separation are absolutely clear. The two countries actually don't have that much in common, except for the language, and the shared history was rather short.


I'd say the same is true of Serbia and Croatia, really. To not go into too much detail, the short of it is that Croatia has much closer ties to Central Europe, whereas Serbia is more typically Balkan, and the common standard language was developed due to Serbophilia and pan-Slavism in a time when Croatia was under the Austro-Hungarian monarchy. (As well as the fact that Eastern Herzegovinian dialects, which Standard Serbo-Croatian is based on, are present in all four "Serbo-Croatian" republics, due to migrations induced by Ottoman incursions and conquests).

Cavesa wrote:When a Croatian author is published in Serbia, are they translated, or in original?


Since Standard Croatian and Standard Serbian (especially since Standard Serbian allows "western" forms used by Serbs in Montenegro and Bosnia that are almost always the same as those used in Croatia) are structurally identical and only really show small stylistic and lexical differences, "translations" are only provided when they serve an entirely symbolic function. In towns in Serbia where there is a Croatian population (so large parts of northern Vojvodina) signs and official documents are provided in a "Croatian" version. I think there have also been cases of people asking for "Serbian-Bosnian" and "Serbian-Croatian" interpreters to be able to follow judicial hearings, but I think that's just a case of people using a legal loophole to annoy the courts and drag out hearings.

Other than that I'm not aware of anything being translated.

Cavesa wrote:Your note about your social circle not appreciating the local writers is interesting. Is it because of them being very educated and simply seeing the worse quality of the authors? Or is it a sort of a "snobbism" (no offence meant)? Or is there an objective lack of local production in the genres and styles popular in your social circles?


It's a bit of both, and also the fact that I'm kind of exaggerating the situation. :) Most of my friends are people who are interested in languages (and are at least slight Anglophiles). Also almost no-one I know regularly reads fiction for fun, and most people are aware of Serbian literature through the classics they were made to read in school (which still includes some Bosniak and Croatian authors).
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Re: Neoplanta log - Serbian, Hungarian, Mandarin, etc.

Postby Daniel N. » Sat Sep 12, 2020 6:53 am

Cavesa wrote:When a Croatian author is published in Serbia, are they translated, or in original? It's a rather disgusting thing, that the Slovak authors read in the Czech Republic get translated.


Normally no. Books are normally just imported.

However, books for kids are always adapted. Many everyday words, house items (spoon, blanket, toilet seat...) tend to be quite different. And you'll find exactly these words often in books aimed at little children.

It's also interesting that some terms of endearment common in Serbia, such as kuca "doggie", deka "Granpa" etc are almost unknown in Croatia...

Also, about books - Croats seem to read much less than Serbs. And women read more than men in Croatia. And most read books are translations of self-help books from English and French (although we have self-help books from Croatian authors too).
Last edited by Daniel N. on Sat Sep 12, 2020 7:20 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Neoplanta log - Serbian, Hungarian, Mandarin, etc.

Postby Daniel N. » Sat Sep 12, 2020 7:06 am

Saim wrote:
overscore wrote:It's also kind of like that with serbo-croatian if I understand correctly. In practice, the Croats speak their own language, called "kajkavian". At least this speaker of Serbian finds it pretty difficult to understand.


To be a bit more precise: that's the traditional language of northwestern Croatia, and at this point it's practically extinct in Zagreb at least.

There's also Chakavian, which is different to both Kajkavian and the dialects closer to Standard Serbo-Croatian. It's even more endangered than Kajkavian is.

It's actually even more complicated. Kajkavian and Čakavian are merely traditional names for groups of dialects. Kajkavian dialects are very diverse and there are many dialects which show both Kajkavian and Čakavian characteristics.

Even worse, the border with Slovenia is mostly political, not dialectal. People from both sides of the border speak very similar dialects but ones on the Slovene side were told that the word "kaj" is "the right word" while ones on the Croatian side were told it was a "wrong word".

Northern Čakavian dialects also have a lot in common with the dialects across the border in Slovenia. Even better some villages in today Croatia were actually settled from today Slovenia and these people speak a significantly different "Kajkavian" than other "Kajkavian".

(A lesser known fact is there's a small Čakavian region in Slovenia, only a few villages, but there is Čakavian in Slovenia. Croats and Serbs are generally quite unaware of dialect diversity in Slovenia).

The proper description is: a dialect continuum with standard languages imposed on top of it, for mostly political reasons in the 19th century... and for many people, the imposed standard was quite unsuitable. The best match was for people in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

How unsuitable it is for many in Croatia is obvious from spelling issues most Croats have.
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Re: Neoplanta log - Serbian, Hungarian, Mandarin, etc.

Postby Saim » Sun Sep 13, 2020 10:30 am

Albanian

I need more audio resources. Thankfully Radio Free Europe's YouTube channel in Albanian has videos with accurate native subtitles:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6pW7HzLx9c

Kosovo 2.0 is good because of the translation but I feel like I need to listen a bit before learning words from writing gets easy.

There aren't many i+1 sentences here but for now I can just take i+2 or i+3 ones and add the other words in the sentence to a separate word card. The fact that I can add audio makes it easier to learn from harder sentences, too.
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Re: Neoplanta log - Serbian, Hungarian, Mandarin, etc.

Postby Saim » Tue Sep 15, 2020 1:24 pm

Hungarian

Some other podcasts, YouTube channels and radio programmes:

Harminc perc alatt a Föld körül:
https://mediaklikk.hu/musor/harminc-per ... old-korul/
Stories from around the world

117 perc:
https://anchor.fm/117-perc
Self-help + pro-opposition politics

Orient Expressz:
https://soundcloud.com/orientexpressz
Podcast about Asia

Demokrácia MOST!:
https://anchor.fm/peterfi-ferenc
Social-liberal, NGO/human rights stuff

ATV:
https://www.youtube.com/c/ATVzrt/videos
Generalistic news channel

Forr a világ:
https://www.mixcloud.com/voroscsilla/
Left-wing
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