91–100 of 117 posts
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Please do share what's happening with minorities and people with the wrong accent daily in Serbia. I live there, perhaps I'm missing something. P.S. my accent is also wrong, should I be afraid?
Ask Serbs what they think about gypsies, gays, and jews.
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I have. And it's a preposterous statement. And the Serbs that I consider my friends would readily agree with that.
Can you elaborate? I live in Serbia for two years and don't feel much xenophobia towards me. I am aware of above-average homophobic sentiment here, and some hate towards ex-Yugoslav neighbors, but hey, they were at war and it is mutual.
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Being written in Latin script is not a guarantee on correct pronunciation; languages have wildly different ideas how to pronounce written text. Paradoxically, Serbian belongs in the group "write as you hear"; the mapping between writing and pronunciation is quite simple and uniform in slavic languages. It is English, that you have to learn twice -- first time to speak, second time to spell.
> Being written in Latin script is not a guarantee on correct pronunciation Yes, I understand this: being a Spanish native speaker, I had to learn the rules of pronunciation of the English language. Spanish is also pronounced as written, mostly. You can figure it out, so it's still better to spell English names in English, Serb names in Serb, and so on. The only concession I will make is leaving out extraneous accent…
It’s no big deal.
There was a Mexican dude whose parents named him Joe, but they pronounced it something close to /Dzoe’/, so neither /Dzou/ nor /Xoe/. I think he was better off going by Joe over here.
Why though? Did they just figure they’d grant one, and he just went ahead and accepted? Or is there a reason he needs one that wasn’t explained? I know that people sometimes shop around for a passport from whatever EU country for reasons, but Serbia isn’t one. (With all due respect to Serbia)
Election is in 10 days, so government is desperate to show how cool they are. He probably got paid few millions bucks, so they could parade him around and give him citizenship.
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It's one of few remaining militarily non-aligned countries. If Big War breaks out it is unlikely Serbia will be enacting conscription. It is also not a likely nuke target.
Serbia non-aligned militarily? I'm not sure that is accurate.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Military_alliances_...
Tangential question: Could a country force its citizenship to any person on the planet like that? ‘From now on, Mr X is now one of our citizen, with all the taxes/restrictions it entails’
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It's funny because in Croatia we don't do that, but it's an almost identical language. I still remember reading old ex-yu comic books with New York spelled as Njujork and so on. The problem is that you can't really capture the pronunciation since english has more sounds and serbian and croatian are phonetic limited to 30 letters, Stiv Voznijak doesn't capture it correctly, that's how you get the harsh slavic/russian…
I believe that this is because the primary alphabet in Serbia is Cyrillic, so they transcribe it first and only then transliterate it into "abeceda". Jumped couple of time seeing Cyrillic "Питхон", though)
Apparently some friend introduced made arrangements for him to get the citizenship
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This is neither here nor there, but Serbia is an EU Candidate, likely to get membership in the coming years.
Serbian accession is not at all likely in the coming years. They have had full candidate status since 2012. Last year the European Parliament passed a resolution saying it "strongly regrets Serbia’s non-alignment with EU sanctions against Russia, which damages its EU accession process." There's also the problem regarding their relationship with Kosovo. Also, only 34-43% of Serbians want to join according to polls. Co…
Serbia, on the other hand, does largely share "European Values", more and more so every year.
Its political alignments can change very quickly. But the cultural trajectory is clear.