feeding the five thousand » polysemic

Skopje is more crowded! With people and statues!

Goce Delčev! is on a horse!

New buildings! Mostly banks but who cares they’re shiny!

Macedonian is such a beautiful language! I love getting back into it!

Ajvar is still delicious!

VIP has completely taken over the country!

VMRO shut down the entire city center for a party party OMG what!

I am caffeinated!

More soon!

The politely intoxicated Serbain metalheads from last night were friendly in the morning and didn’t take issue with my clumsy, sleepless wandering in and out of the hostel room. Getting back to the airport was relatively simple and my bag arrived as planned.

Things got a little crazy after that though.

I’d planned to take a regularly scheduled busline from Sofia to Skopje as soon as I had my bag. This adds five hours to my journey over flying directly to Skopje, but saves me hundreds of dollars in airfare. The one international airport in Skopje has some of the highest fees in Europe and airlines charge hair-rising tariffs to take you there. Once you arrive, you find there’s no public transportation from the airport to the city: only usuriously priced taxis (and that’s if you speak Macedonian—if you speak no Macedonian you might as well just write ‘Bankomat’ on a piece of paper and hang it around your neck so they can withdraw all the money you have).

This annoys me enough that I go the indirect route through Bulgaria. I’ve recommended it to other travellers to Macedonia as well. Now though, I’ll add the caveat that there’s the outside chance you’ll have to do some real legwork to make the circuitous route.

When I got to the central bus station, I found they’d moved the office of the company I was looking for. There are more than a hundred companies, so it took awhile to find mine again. I stumbled on their new office only to see traffic jam of harried-looking people forming out the door. Not a ‘line,’ mind you. Balkan people don’t do ‘lines.’ I’ve dealt with this before, so I knew the drill. I wormed and carefully elbowed and inched my way forward through the shuffle while the sole, stressed out counter lady called out destinations she wanted to see first.

By the time I made it to the front of the crowd, I’d figured out that my bus was cancelled for the day. A minor catastrophe, since somebody was planning to wait for me to pick me up at the Skopje bus station, but two lucky breaks prevented it from turning into a major one. First, there was another (apparently hastily arranged) bus leaving a little later. Second, my American phone and calling plan work in Europe this time around, so even though I haven’t gotten myself a temporary Macedonian SIM card yet, I could still contact my host and let him know I was going to be late. Add in the fortunate coincidence that, while standard Bulgarian is hard for me to understand, Sofia street dialect is much closer to standard Macedonian and people switch to it readily here, and I was able to negotiate my way out of the fix.

Now as long as there isn’t some major international incident at the border or the mountain road doesn’t suddenly disintegrate due to contractor corruption piled on Communist-quality public works, I should make it to Skopje tonight.

(as it turned out, there was in fact one more kink to work through: the bus company had sold four more tickets than there were seats on the bus. Departure was delayed fourty-five minutes while the unlucky leftovers fought it out with the bus driver and saleswoman from the office)

All ended well, however, as a friend of a friend met me at the train station and with startling generosity got me situated with a place to stay in Macedonia. Now for a desperately needed shower.

It has been nearly a year, but I’m back in the Balkans.

The last post I made to this blog spurred the greatest number of comments from readers I didn’t know personally of anything I wrote all year. I was angry at the treatment of my thesis adviser and it came through in my writing. Even though I’d already arrived back in the United States, I was still invested in one of the dozens of national conflicts that still rage across this region.

I was so invested, in fact, that it felt as though I was bringing the Balkans with me back to the US. The very first day I got back, my parents came to meet me in Chicago and within minutes of us sitting down at a restaurant, I realized our server was Albanian, started a conversation with him in Albanian, had another Albanian coworker of his come over, and promptly got into a heated argument with them about language issues in the Balkans. My parents had to intervene and beg the men to drop the issue so they could talk with their son for the first time in a year.

I remember my Dad asked me, “Is this what it was like in Macedonia all year? Is this normal?”

And my response was… well, no! But… well… yes. Sort of. Passions run high. People of all types, educated and not, love to hash these issues over. Hard-headed certainty with no room for shades of grey shows up at every level of conversation. I am not of this constellation of cultures and I cannot participate at the level of a native, but I had adapted closer to the Balkan norm over the year. That this marked such a change in me for my parents was startling. It got me to thinking I might need to distance myself a little.

So I have not posted in a year. I spent the year moving to a new city, starting graduate school, picking up a new sport, making friends, making enemies, and discovering new sides to my virtues and faults. It has been a good year, a mostly Balkan-free year except for purely academic work. I kept loose contact with my friends and colleagues, but not as well as I should have. I got the distance I thought I needed. I got too far away.

So now I’m back, throwing myself back into the mindset, the languages, the sense of frenzied, purposeful disorder of this place that simultaneously frightens and charms me.

I had a cunning plan that involved me landing in Sofia, taking a bus the same day to Skopje to crash with a friend of a friend, trucking myself to Albania one day later to see a fellow Fulbright-alumna and rekindle the smoldering remains of my Albanian knowledge, and finally bus it back to Ohrid just in time for the summer seminar on Macedonian linguistics. The plan immediately, of course, went awry, when my trusty, beat-up hiking backpack didn’t arrive with me.

So now I am spending the night in Sofia, woken up by politely intoxicated Serbian metalheads coming back from a Metallica concert and kept awake by the human body’s poor evolutionary adaptation to transoceanic jet travel. The hostel worker, who kindly has kept me company the past hour or so, is finally turning in. The day was full of muddled negotiations in Bulgarian-accented Macedonian and supplementary sign language. I’m not at full game strength yet, but I managed to make up a new, crazy plan to fit the changing circumstances out of what was available here.

A conflict zone is hard on the psyche. But I think I came away from last year a better, more complex person. I’m hoping another go at the Balkans this summer will push me even further.

You might have noticed I’ve add a “Share/Save” link at the end of Polysemic’s posts. If you especially like any of the things I’ve written, I’d be really grateful if you could bookmark the post in case you use something like Del.icio.us or share the post in case you use something like Facebook.

That menu item should make it very easy, and it really helps me bring in new readers and hopefully introduce them to Macedonia and the Balkans (if they’re not familiar already!).

we overcome in sixty seconds
with the strength we have together

I’m in Greece at the moment, first in Thessaloniki and then in Athens staying at the parents’ place of my Rotary scholarship supervisor from the US.

He’s been giving me a walking and culinary tour of the country. I have to agree with him that the food is magnificent—it seems impossible to me the amount of deliciousness people wring out of eggplants here—but the walking tour inspires a lot of critical comments from him about Greece.

My own impression is that Greece is pretty much just like Macedonia, except denser and richer, so the things that would surprise most Americans don’t really surprise me after a year of exposure. Lack of pedestrian, much less wheelchair access, cars parked on sidewalks, dangerous nonchalance about traffic rules, loud conversations—they’re all so normal for me now that I keep finding myself somewhat puzzled that my host is pointing them out. I’ve even grown to like these usually negative qualities for adding “Balkan flavor.”

But I’m not stuck eating Balkan flavor every day, for years. It makes sense for it to seriously irritate my host. I can leave the Balkans at any time. He had to work extremely hard for the chance to resettle in the US. I take a certain pleasure in the grittiness and slipshod, somewhat dangerous freneticism of the Balkans because it is so different from my home and the novelty colors my whole experience. I can turn an inconvenience into an adventure.

Sometimes though, inconveniences are just inconveniences. I think I understand, or I at least have an inkling, why my host wanted to get away.

For me though, Greece hasn’t surprised me yet except in its size. From atop the Acropolis, I was not expecting Athens to extend in all directions to the horizon the way it does. Actually, the city reminds me a lot of Los Angeles in topography and size, sometimes even in architecture. Los Angeles streets are far wider and more orderly, though.

I think Athens is what LA would be if all of its traffic was routed into narrow, single-lane alleys that twisted and turned like a thousand worms’ boreholes through the core of the city. A lot more people walk, because like hell if you’ll be getting anywhere by car.

If you know me, you know a comparison to LA means that a city is not endearing itself to me under most circumstances. I think LA spoils the West Coast. But I kind of like Athens.

Maybe Balkan flavor for me is enough to disguise a rotting taste for others.

so testosterone boys and harlequin girls
will you dance to this beat and hold a lover close?

I’ve been on a book-buying spree as I’ve been getting ready to leave Macedonia. On one of my bookhunts I got handed a pamphlet in defense of Cyrillic. I thought I would translate it and analyze it in service of the broader point of Macedonian identity and the somewhat problematic ways it is defended in the public sphere.

The pamphlet goes as follows

Го чувам своето - додека пишувам на кирилица постојам!

I protect what is mine - as long as I write in Cyrillic, I exist!

Македонски се пишува со кирилица

Macedonian is written with Cyrillic

Јзикот го зачувавме. Да ја зачуваме и кирилицата. Зашто, јазик без писмо нема. А писмото најдобро со употреба се чува. Иако е создадена пред повеќе од 10 века, токму тука на нашиве простори, во земјата на древни цивилизации, со прегорната работа на светите Кирил и Методиј и со посветеноста на Епископот Охридски Свети Климент, како и многубројните ученици и мисионери, кои нивното дело го продолжиле, се чини дека во временоското и просторното траење, кирилицата по малку неправедно како да се подзаборава. Поточно, сета нејзина убавина, инспиративност и сликовност, со се’ поретката употреба, како да потклекнува.

We protected our language. Let’s protect Cyrillic. Because a language does not exist without writing. And writing is best protected with practice. Even though it was created more than 10 centuries ago, right here on our territory, in a land of ancient civilizations, with the blazing work of Saints Cyril and Methodius and with the holiness of the St. Kliment of Ohrid Episcopy, as well as the numerous scholars and missionaries who continued their work, it seems, in its duration through time and space, as if Cyrillic is being somewhat unjustly forgotten. More precisely, it is as if, despite all of its beauty, inspiration and vividness, it is falling to its knees with ever rarer use.

Кирилицата е убава…

Cyrillic is beautiful

Еднакво убава, испишана со мајсторската рака врз пергаментот по кој се лизга перото, или со техниките на новите мајстори, сместени на тастатурите на компутерот. Со спојување и комбинирање на 31 буква од нашата азбука, можат да се изразат сите зборови на овој свет. Само со зачувување и со користење на кирилицата, може да се изрази сета нејзина убавина, но и да се зачуваат колективниот идентитет и индивидуалното определување на секој од нас. И затоа: додека пишуваме кирилица - постоиме. Се’ додека ја користиме кирилицата, сето она што е најблагодородно и највредно во нашето колетивно и индивидуално битие ќе биде зачувано. Зачувано од заборав и вредно за траење. А постои само она што трае.

Singularly beautiful, written by a master hand over a parchment with a gliding quill, or with the the techniques of the new masters, situated on the keyboards of a computer. With the coordination and combination of the 31 characters of our alphabet, all the words in the world can be expressed. Only by protecting and using Cyrillic can we express all of its beauty, but also only in that way can we protect our collective identity and the unique qualities of all of us. And thus, as long as we write in Cyrillic, we exist. As long as we use Cyrillic, all that which is noble and most precious in our collective and individual existence will be protected. Protected from loss and worthy for eternity. And only that which lasts exists.

Кирилицата постои и трае.

Cyrillic exists and lasts.

И затоа своето име пишуај го со кирилица… или името на својата земја… или името на својата мајка… на својата љубов… или имињата на своите желби и тајни. Обиди се да замислиш голема светлечка реклама испишана со кирилица како се “смешка” преплавена со светлоста на новиот ден и новото доба…Обиди се да погледнеш на табличките во улицата на твоето детство и ќе видиш убава, чиста и читка табла, испишана со убава, чиста и читка кирилица. Сети се на својата прва љубов, на првиот изговорен збор, на својата прва напишана буква, на своето прво писмо, на првата прочитана или напишана книга… и ќе видиш дека се’ е поврзано со твоето прво писмо.

And for that reason, write your name in Cyrillic… or the name of your country… or the name of your mother… of your love… or the names of your desires and secrets. Try to imagine a great luminous advertisement written in Cyrllic and how it would laugh awash in the light of a new day and a new age… Try to recall the signs on the street of your childhood and you will see a beautiful, clean, and readable sign, written in beautiful, clean, readable Cyrillic. Remember your first love, your first pronounced word, your first written character, your first letter, your first read or written book… and you will see that everything is connected with your first form of writing.

Богатството е во разновидноста. А кирилицата нуди толку многу разнолики можности за примена и за унапредување. Да ги откриваш сите нејзини волшепства и да бидеш уверен дека во рацете држиш силно и моќно оружје на модерното доба, кое го надахнува нашето постоење.

There is wealth in diversity. But Cyrillic offers all the various possibilities for use and progress. Discover all of her magic and be sure that in your hands you carry a strong and powerful weapon for the modern age, which defends our existence.

И се’ додека пишуваме кирилица, ќе постоиме!

As long as we write in Cyrillic, we will exist!

Писмото

Writing

Писмото е запишување на јазикот. Тоа е средство за просторна и временска комуникација. Писмото е припадност кон колективниот идентитет и индивидуалното определување. Вредноста на писмото се мери со систем на знаци, кои претставуваат елементи на говорниот јазик. А нашиот јазик - македонскиот, е јужнословенски јазик со една од најстарите книжевно-јазички традиции. И се пишува со кирилица.

Writing is the method of taking down a language. It is the means of spatial and temporal communication. Writing is belonging to a collective identity and individual quality. The value of writing is measured in a system of signs, which present elements of the spoken language. And our language, Macedonian, is a South Slavic language with one of the oldest written-language traditions. And it is written in Cyrillic.

Кирилицата е едно од најстарите и најубавите писма. Јазикот го зачувавме. Да ја зачуваме и кирилицата. Зашто јазик без писмо - нема. А писмото најдобро со употреба се чува. Македонски се пишува со кирилица.

Cyrillic is one of the oldest and most beautiful writing systems. We protected our language. Let us protect Cyrillic too. Because a language without writing doesn’t exist. And writing is best protected with use. Macedonian is written in Cyrillic.

It is not at all true that a language does not exist without a writing system. The vast majority of the world’s languages are unwritten. At a certain point in history, all of the ancestors of today’s spoken languages were unwritten. Languages have existed for thousands of years, changing but maintaining a core continuity, without the aid of a written norm to maintain them. Written language norms and the use of language in text are both well worth studying, but they do not make up the whole of linguistics and certainly not the whole of the phenomenon of language. The declaration that a language does not exist without a writing system is hyperbole that does not face up to scientific scrutiny.

It is true, however, that practice is the best protection for a writing system. Languages can lose writing systems. The use of Chinese characters in Korean, for example, is dying out even though they are taught in school, because people have grown accustomed to just writing using the Korean alphabet, which is sufficient (and actually quite well-designed) for expressing the standard language in text.

Old English itself lost its own varient of the Latin alphabet, which was quite different from what we use to write modern English today. With the Norman invasions, French became the language of the court and the aristocrats, Old English mostly ceased to be used for official purposes, and the Old English variant of the Latin alphabet faded out of use. By the time English began to be written again (traditionally dated from Chaucer, whose language falls into the Middle English period), it was using French orthographic norms due to the longterm dominance of French. So the brochure is right to point out that it is possible to lose a written form if it falls into disuse. This does not necessarily affect the language though. While English changed, it did not cease to be spoken, and when it returned into official use in England, the language’s new orthography did not obliterate its spoken continuity. English changed enormously under the influence of French, but it did not disappear.

Macedonian is nowhere near that point yet, though. People may not write their text messages or Facebook profiles in Cyrillic, but they still write their journals and classnotes in it. Macedonian books are published in Cyrillic—no exceptions. Vacillations occur over how to properly Romanize Macedonian, not how to properly Cyrillicize it.

All the words in the world certainly cannot be expressed with Macedonian Cyrillic. That is impossible to even say with a straight face. Macedonian Cyrillic letters are well designed to express the sounds of the Macedonian language and no other. You do not have to look far to see this—Macedonian newspapers writing articles about Albanian politicians or other public figures in this country write their names in Cyrillic along with the rest of the article. Albanian, however, is written in Latin, and the two alphabets do not easily convert between one another. The Albanian sounds th (like the English “th” as in “thick”), dh (like the English “th” as in “this”), l (like the British English “l” in “leutenant”), and y (does not exist in English, like German ü) lose their distinctiveness in Cyrillic and thus Albanian names are given an incorrect, approximate Macedonian pronunciation. I run into this same issue when I’m teaching students English: if I want to write the pronunciation of a new word for students in Cyrillic, I have to take into account the fact that I cannot easily write the difference between the vowels in bead and bid or the vowels in bad and bed in Cyrillic.

This is not a problem unique to Macedonian. I can’t easily approximate Macedonian pronunciation using English’s version of the Latin alphabet. Every language’s writing system is designed to represent that language and will face problems when applied to another. Sometimes you can make adjustments by reshuffling the phonetic values of the characters, by adding diacritics, or by allowing two characters combined together to represent one sound. This was how the Latin alphabet was adapted to all the languages of Western Europe. It is also how Cyrillic was adapted to many of the indigenous languages of Siberia by the Soviets. But if you want to write “all the words in the world,” you need a writing system designed to do that, one that has a character (or a way of modifying a character) to accommodate every possible sound a human language can utilize as distinctive.

As a matter of fact, such a writing system exists: it’s called the International Phonetic Alphabet and linguists use it to describe the sounds of languages in a way that can be universally understood. By my count, the IPA features about 75 letters for consonant sounds that are made with the lungs, another 5 letters for consonant sounds that are made by clicking your tongue (heavily featured in Southern African languages), 29 letters for vowel sounds, and 62 additional diacritics to modify all these letters.

It takes a lot of characters to write all the words in the world. English’s writing system isn’t up to it and neither is Macedonian’s. What I think they were intending to say is that there is no need to switch to Latin in the middle of a Cyrillic sentence to represent some borrowed word, which sometimes occurs in the writing of young Macedonians, especially when the word is a recent English or French borrowing. Indeed, these words can be approximated in Cyrillic without doing too much damange to the comprehension of an educated reader. But, again, it is hyperbole to say that Macedonian is suitable for the whole world’s vocabulary.

While the beauty of Cyrillic is realtive (I find it to be quite beautiful), it takes a real stretch to say that it is an old writing system. Cyrillic began to be used in the mid-900s. In comparison, Brahmi came into use 1200 years previous to that, Latin 1600 years previous, Olmec (in Mexico) roughly 1800 years previous, and Chinese 2100 years previous. Cyrillic is a young script. This is neither here nor there in terms of its effectiveness in conveying Macedonian (in fact, general Cyrillic is quite well suited to express the sounds of your average Slavic language), but if you base your entire rhetoric about the ‘worth’ of a language on the age of its writing system, you have very stiff competition for the top prize from all over the world.

In all, this pamphlet expresses genuine and understandable concern about the use of Cyrillic in the public space, with a deeper underlying concern about Macedonian identity and the threats against it originating mostly from Greece and Bulgaria. In trying to assuage the concern, however, the pamphlet swerves from and occasionally strays totally off the path of factual accuracy. This is a general problem in Macedonian public rhetoric about the language, where the very real and very legitimate feeling of distress in having someone from outside your own country tell you that you don’t exist, you don’t speak a real language, and you’re not allowed to use your own name for yourself is channeled into furious argument for easily disprovable positions, like that modern Slavic Macedonian is descendent from Ancient Macedonian. Ancient Macedonian’s alignment in the Indo-European tree of languages remains difficult to prove (Greeks claim it, but the evidence remains inconclusive). However, it is without a doubt that Ancient Macedonian was not Slavic. Sadly, the popularity of factual distortions like this among some ends up damaging the credibility of all. Macedonian scholars and politicians who are making legitimate arguments supported by evidence and scientific consensus find themselves tarred with the brush of irrational nationalism preemptively.

As I said in a previous post, I support the general aim of this pamphlet. I wish young Macedonians used Cyrillic more often. I think the Latin rendering of Macedonian, especially when you neglect to use diacritics, doesn’t do the language justice. Hyperbole is emotionally effective and thus may be said to serve the cause of greater respect for Macedonian Cyrillic. But as I hope I’ve illustrated, it is damaging in the long term both to the cause of Cyrillic and to the broader cause of defending Macedonian identity.

имало бранови и мирно море
а сега што?

An official question on the Macedonian driving test: what do you do when you’re leaving a village by car and about to enter a highway?

Answer: Stop and clean your tires.

Yes, we know that’s weird, here’s why: in all likelihood you have cow shit on your tires. It’s slick stuff, and if you deposit it on the highway, it might cause an accident.

Also, did you know all Macedonians have to learn CPR before they’re allowed to drive?

Americans would revolt. There’d be guillotines on mainstreet and DMV employees lined up around the block for execution. We wouldn’t want people being able to provide emergency aid in case of an accident; that’s socialism.

за жал, за жал
јас не припаѓам за жал

Macedonian custom says that if you’re an unmarried man or woman and you’re at a large dinner party where chairs are packed all around a table, you must not sit at a corner. This will give you bad luck with marriage and prevent you from finding a husband or wife. No one could explain to me what the reasoning was behind it. I assume that if you’re married, the dangerous effects of corner sitting are blunted.

Unrelated: my mentor and the supervisor for my research, Prof. Victor Friedman, just had a Macedonian translation of his works published, including his dissertation The Grammatical Categories of the Macedonian Indicative, which in 1977 was the first book on the modern, standard Macedonian language to be published in the United States. The book was promoted with a presentation at the Macedonian Academy of Arts and Sciences, an old socialist-era building that manages to be surprisingly beautiful on the inside. The hall was packed with representatives of MAAS, professors from the university, students and colleagues of his, the media, and the government.

Among the government-related people attending was the first president of independent Macedonia, Kiro Gligorov. He successfully negotiated the withdrawal of the Yugoslav National Army from Macedonia, an extremely important accomplishment, as it kept Macedonia out of the horrific Yugoslav Wars that had ravaged Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina. On their way out, the (at that point) mostly Serbian army stripped the country of all weapons and military hardware they could take. They went so far as to detach faucets and sinks for the scrap metal. This left Macedonia in an extremely vulnerable position (with Greece engaging in an illegal economic blockade). That the country made it through this period intact and without violence is a testament to his negotiating skill. He also survived an attempted assassination by carbomb that left him blind in one eye, killed his driver, and injured others. The perpetrators have not been discovered to this day.

So it was a great honor when Prof. Friedman introduced me to him at the presentation. We did nothing more than exchange greetings, but Prof. Friedman hopes to give me the opportunity to talk with him more at some later time. It would be an incredible opportunity.

and by protecting my heart truly
i got lost in the sound