# Bosnian (BCS): Upeko minus... mazia pravo.



## dolcebellavita

Hi All,

Would someone explain what this frase means?

Many thanks,


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## sokol

Hi and welcome,

in which language, please?


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## Duya

It's Bosnian slang.

To cut the long story short, it means "it's freezing cold"... in a funny way to put it, but difficult to translate.


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## sokol

Thanks, Duya - and that's a big surprise to me - I would have sworn that this couldn't be any Western South Slavic language.

So when we're at it: "minus" surely refers to degrees below zero, but what about "upeko": could this really be "upekao" - "it burnt (hurt) minus"? And I'm completely lost with "mazia".


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## Duya

Yes, "upeko" is "upekao". Here, it's used jokingly, as an antithesis to common "upeklo sunce" (the sun burns). 

"Mazija" is a Bosnian(k) localism meaning "_studen, mraz_"; if I weren't born in Bosnia, I would probably haven't heard for it either (and I have heard it only a couple of times). I suppose it's of Turkish origin, but don't have an idea how it would be spelled in Turkish, and I can't find any similar Turkish word in the online dictionary.


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## sokol

Thanks for the explanation, Duya - now this makes sense.


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## dolcebellavita

Thank you for your help Duya! And for the interesting conversation over the origin of the words.


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## Transatlantic

"Upek'o minus" is a funny play on words. Normally, as Duya mentioned, you say "upekla zvezda" or "upeklo sunce", which means "it's scorchingly hot".

Never heard of the word _mazija_


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## dudasd

Duya said:


> "Mazija" is a Bosnian(k) localism meaning "_studen, mraz_"; if I weren't born in Bosnia, I would probably haven't heard for it either (and I have heard it only a couple of times). I suppose it's of Turkish origin, but don't have an idea how it would be spelled in Turkish, and I can't find any similar Turkish word in the online dictionary.


 
You made me curious too. There are really no words of an even similar root in Turkish that could be connected with cold, frost, winter or anything like this. But it makes me think of its metaphorical meaning, _mazija _like "God's punishment". Mazı (word of Persian origin) was used in Ottoman Turkish for "steel", and in that meaning it entered Balkan languages. Its second meaning was "hot iron", and it developed the third meaning: in old times, if a woman was accused for witchcraft, she had to prove her innocence by taking a piece of hot iron from boiling water with bare hands. Now I can't remember what was the proof of innocence, burned hands or vice versa (I think that Vuk Karadžić explained it neatly somewhere), but the process was called "vađenje mazije" or just "mazija", and with time it got the meaning I mentioned, "God's punishment" or even "disaster".


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## Duya

A simpler explanation just occurred to me: the root is *mazi* indeed, but it's simply šatrovački for "zima", not an exotic word from Persian .

If you google for it (e.g. "mazija hladnoca"), it occurs only almost exclusively in slang contexts. If it were of oriental origin, it would certainly have been recorded in older literature.


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