DYK Fremen speak Serbian? In Frank Herbert's Dune there is a (wrongly translated) passage that is used b6 Serbian Dodola singers

Posted by _belly_in_my_jelly_@reddit | AskBalkans | View on Reddit | 29 comments

Page 336 of Frank Herbert's Dune.

"Ima trava okolo!

I korenja okolo!"

The translation should read:

There is grass around!

And there're weeds around!

But it doesn't chamge the meaning.

Not trying to say Fremen are Serbs, but rather how wonderful is the mixture of influences in this work

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Volaer@reddit

Interestingly, tráva means grass and koření means spice in Czech as well as does okolo/around.

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I spent three years in Serbia, my wife is a Serb and the languages are very similar. We (Czechs) have more in common with southern Slavs than with eastern ones in my opinion. We also have words that we 100% share with almost identical pronunciation but have opposite meanings. For example úžas (CZ for wonder) and užas (SER for horror) or divno (CZ for odd or strange) while in Serbian it means wonferful.

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Professional-Fee-488@reddit

I can confirm, I had a Czech colleague at my previous job in Belgrade, worked together for years, great guy. We became super close and at one point he took me to his hometown, Cheb. I met his mom, grandparents and some of his childhood friends there and quickly learned that we indeed are very similar, relationships with family and friends, humor, respect the same values, the way we deal with emotions etc. one of the best and most relaxing holidays Iever had, and Cheb is absolutely lovely. I've since moved to east Asia for work but we still maintain regular contact and sometimes drink together via whatsapp.

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amazingamy19@reddit

I think people don’t understand just how much of the Slavic “remnants” are still alive and present in Serbia, directly or indirectly.

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Panceltic@reddit

What do you mean by remnants? Serbs are literally Slavic

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amazingamy19@reddit

Remnants of Slavic customs and traditions, before Christianity and Byzantine influences.

People often don’t know that some of that customs come from Slavic origin.

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Aragohov@reddit

You may be surprised how lexically close Bulgarian is to Serbian and Russian (but not Ukrainian) because of the official orthodoxy influence and later political-cultural ties (Russian ужас (pronounced užas) means horror and Russian дивно/divno means wonderful). But grammatically-wise Serbian and especially Bulgarian are the most different from other Slavic languages.

And false friends is a known thing probably because one word had broader meaning in the past then evolved in isolated communities to mean different things (probably most well-known false friend that Czech and Russian share is pozor, which means attention in Czech but shame in Russian, also pozornost, pozor (vigilance, attention) in Serbo-Croatian, it comes from "zreti" or to look, so initially the word meant "look at this" or something like that, compare to modern Russian informal "позырь" pozyr'! (take a look!)

My favourite example that I consider noteworthy is plen, which means "plunder" or "trophy" in Serbian but "imprisonment" (usually about POWs or figuratively) in Russian. I suppose that reflects the sad fact that our Slavic ancestors 1200 years ago saw POWs as legitimate spoils of war to be sold on slaves markets...

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Aragohov@reddit

You won't believe that but 90% of Slavic languages have trava as grass, okolo as nearby/around and korenj as root, including Russian (трава, около, коренья) which at times of Frank Herbert was seen as a main competitor for English as global language.

Only "ima" gives these sentences uniquely Southern Slavic flavour (Bulgarian, Slovene, Serbo-Croatian would use it). Other Slavic families would likely use jest/je or mat/ma and it's derivatives.

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Panceltic@reddit

Slovenian certainly doesn’t use „ima” in this case :) we’re firmly in the „je” camp.

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bljujemvatrupecemleb@reddit

in serbia you can also use "je(ste)" instead of "ima", but it comes off as somewhat assertive because it commands that the nominative case be used instead of the accusative and so turns the observed object into something that sounds like it has almost some kind of minimal agency to react to circumstances

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Panceltic@reddit

Wow, so interesting!

Slavic langauges are basically 80% same.

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shadowdance55@reddit

No wonder Tolkien didn't like Herbert. He probably thought he was lazy af.

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Putrid_Speed_5138@reddit

Tolkien is a fantasy writer. His narrower world is more detached from history and reality.

Herbert is a sci-fi writer. His wide world is anchored in today's realities, imagining their possible evolutions in a long time horizon.

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_belly_in_my_jelly_@reddit (OP)

luckily for him, he wasn't around for potter 😂

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DepressedMetalhead69@reddit

fremen are very obviously visually arab they speak some kind of serb dialect lost among the stars for uncountable eons omg arrakis is kosovo

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b) kolo, because they like someone's ass

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Stverghame@reddit

This crossed my mind when someone posted about Dune yesterday on this sub

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_belly_in_my_jelly_@reddit (OP)

ah, my bad, thanks for pointing it out!

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branimir2208@reddit

Od Srbije do Arakisa

From Serbia to Arakis

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BalkanTrekkie2@reddit

Yes I actually first noticed this years ago when reading Dune in English.

Apparently Herbert drew insipration from Eastern cultures when writting it.