Talking the Talk
A mass of cold air continues to sit on top of the Balkans. On Tuesday of this week the high temperature in London was 11 C (about 52 F) while in Istanbul it was negative 4 C. That's just wrong. But the thaw continues here, albeit slowly. Our weather has reached the high 30s F for the highs, and it is consistently sunny. Thanks to the use of earth moving equipment, there are now long stretches of road with visible asphalt. Even so, the thawed snow freezes at night, making walking a continuing adventure. And every day there I see at least one car stuck in the snow.
The big adventure here, though, is the encounter between two cultures. When I had my first class on Monday (two classes, actually, with a total of 70 or 80 students) I wanted them to give me impressions they had of the climate and terrain in the U.S. from movies or TV. Instead they started offering views about American culture. "All we see is violence. I don't believe it." "They have really good cars." Clearly, a teachable moment. Next week I will see what they make of Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.
But I also have to keep putting myself into this culture, and the most valuable tool for that is a language I don't speak. If you are keeping up with the Chronicles, you already know the matter of the heater purchase. Exchanges like that become possible whenever I leave the apartment. I get lots of looks that say, "There are sounds coming out of his mouth, but no words." In return, I reply with a look that says, "I'm just a nitwit who didn't take the trouble to learn your language" and then I usually say something wholly unintelligible (i.e., in English) and resort to some lame gestures: "I...want...buy...this/one."
Little by little, I'm acquiring some usable vocabulary. Serbian is a formidable language. It has a shortage of vowels but eight declensions for its nouns. So, my progress could generously be described as deliberate. Usually a word only becomes really fixed in my mind when I misuse it. So, after my first meal in a restaurant I asked in Serbian for "the vill, please." Look of confusion from the waitress, then she said in Serbian, "Oh, the bill." Shopping the other day I asked for cheese using the word kir, except that the word for cheese is sir. Fortunately, kir has no meaning that I know of in Serbian.
But I am always aware of danger of misplaced phonemes. A phoneme is a sound unit that carries some meaning with it. So, change a phoneme and you get a new word, as in the change from hit to sit to bit. In the cases above, one sound made bill and cheese into something that made no sense. One slip of the phoneme, and you could be talking about something you don't want to bring up. In Serbian, one sound separates the word for signing your name to the one for emptying your bladder. One or two sounds take the word for person or customer and makes it the word for shit.
Still, I can only improve. Right? The other day I was hailed by an older gentleman as I was leaving my apartment bloc. Maybe he was drunk, but he wanted to talk and it turned out he is my neighbor. After a short time a woman walked by and soon became part of our chat. They wanted to know where I was from, what I was doing in Montenegro. The exchange of all of this took far more work and patience than appears on paper, but somehow they made themselves understood and I did too. The woman wanted to know how much I paid for my apartment. I told her 300 euros (it's really 350) and she gave a look of shocked disbelief. She didn't say if she thought that was a bargain. We just didn't have enough language in common.