Tag Archives: Serbo

An Italian cellist’s journey into Serbian Language — Lesson 10

Under specific conditions in the Serbian language, words undergo subtle changes to certain consonants and vowels based on surrounding letters and sounds. These changes are called _Phonetic transformations,_ or, in Serbian, Гласовне промене—literally, “voice changes”.

An Italian cellist’s journey into Serbian Language — Lesson 8

The next chapter in our journey puts us against a _very complex_ topic: **accents.** Every language has accents, since one needs to know what syllable to stress and what not. This determines the _musicality_ of the language, with its intonation, crescendos and diminuendos, pauses, emphases, lengthening and shortening. For a musician, this is possibly the most fascinating topic ever!

An Italian cellist’s journey into Serbian Language — Lesson 7

As we saw [in one of the previous lessons], the Serbian language has a most useful peculiarity: you read what you write, you write what you speak! For someone coming from Latin-based languages (Italian, French, English, German, you name it), this is a blessing! We can imagine, though, how our languages may look and sound from a Serbian’s perspective. In this lesson, we will look at some _phonemes_ and at how they are transcribed into _graphemes_ in the different languages.

An Italian cellist’s journey into Serbian Language — Lesson 6

Phonetic transcription (Part 1) Both Italian and English have vocals and consonants, namely: Vocals are the same, with English sporting five more consonants (J, K, W, X, Y) than Italian. That’s 5 vocals each, 16 consonants in Italian and 21 in English, total 21 letters in Italian and 26 in English. Serbian beats them both,Continue reading “An Italian cellist’s journey into Serbian Language — Lesson 6”