How Serbian works, where it came from, and what is worth knowing about it before the first lesson.
An earlier article on this blog traced a dozen everyday Serbian words back to five centuries under the Ottomans. Serbia has a second contact zone, quieter and further north: Austria-Hungary's long grip on Vojvodina, which left behind its own layer of completely ordinary vocabulary - a kitchen stove, an entire room, even a word that is secretly a distant cousin of English coach.
Serbian's word for Sunday, недеља, is also its word for an entire week - and once you know why, the other six day names stop looking arbitrary. Four of them turn out to be nothing but numbers, and even Russian's own понедельник is still quietly built on the very meaning Russian itself stopped using centuries ago.
Five centuries under Ottoman rule left Serbian with hundreds of loanwords - not the exotic kind, but the words for the pillow you sleep on and the coffee you drink first thing. Here is where a dozen of the most common ones actually come from.
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