# Bosnian, Serbian, Croatian (BCS): Week



## dihydrogen monoxide

What are you more accustomed to use in your everyday speech. It concerns BCS.
a) tjedan
b) sedmica
c) nedelja
d) hefta
If you don't use some of these forms are you acquainted with them and where roughly are they mostly in use?


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## Duya

"Tjedan" is Croatian only. Tedan does not exist. "Hefta" is a Turcism, only in colloquial use among Bosniaks. 

Now, "sedmica" and "ned(j)elja" are in about equal use across Serbia and Bosnia. I'd say that sedmica is slightly more used in Bosnia, and nedelja in Serbia, but I might be wrong. Personally, I use both interchangeably.


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## dihydrogen monoxide

Now, there is something about the word hefta. It's of PIE origin and we can tell it's from Turkish because of the f phoneme in the word hefta, which is by the way taken from Persian. If it would be taken from Greek we would expect p phoneme. PIE goes back to *septm. However, this is a thing I don't understand. Persian as an Indo-Iranian group has PIE *p in p. So how do we get an f phoneme in Persian. We can tell the word goes back to PIE because Semitic languages have a different word. This is maybe off topic or perhaps it requires another thread.


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## musicalchef

DM, I don't really understand what you are asking in the last post, but "hafteh" is from "haft," the Persian word for seven, just like "sedmica" in BCS, I suppose.  What does PIE stand for?  

Persian has both "p" and "f" as phonemes and both are used extensively in loan words as well as words that are Persian in origin, so I'm not sure why you're asking why the "f" is there.


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## Athaulf

dihydrogen monoxide said:


> Now, there is something about the word hefta. It's of PIE origin and we can tell it's from Turkish because of the f phoneme in the word hefta, which is by the way taken from Persian.



How can we "tell it's from Turkish" because of this /f/?



> PIE goes back to *septm. However, this is a thing I don't understand. Persian as an Indo-Iranian group has PIE *p in p. So how do we get an f phoneme in Persian.


I know almost nothing about sound changes that happened from PIE to Persian, but it's definitely not true that PIE _*p_ is still _p_ in all Indo-Iranian languages. See here for a detailed account of sound changes from PIE to Old Persian, which affected many instances of PIE _*p_, among other things. It specifically mentions that in Proto-Iranian, PIE _*septm_ had already changed into _*hafta_. 



musicalchef said:


> What does PIE stand for?



Proto-Indo-European language.


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## dihydrogen monoxide

Thanks for correcting me. That's why I said it was Turkish I just confirmed it. Thanks for saying it went back to hafta. So then the sources weren't that reliable. I just wanted to say that if those languages had the word hepta instead of hefta it wouldn't be Turcism but Grecism. That's all.


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## farisca

I think it's "hevta", not "hefta", but I'm not so sure...


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## dihydrogen monoxide

Both variants exist hefta and hevta. The standard one is hefta but since ft is a bit hard to pronounce the f becomes replaced with v. I've heard hevta too. You could also ask is it evta or efta? I think someone with better knowledge could explain to you phonetically why f is replaced with v.


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## Athaulf

dihydrogen monoxide said:


> Both variants exist hefta and hevta. The standard one is hefta but since ft is a bit hard to pronounce the f becomes replaced with v. I've heard hevta too. You could also ask is it evta or efta? I think someone with better knowledge could explain to you phonetically why f is replaced with v.



Obviously, the difference between _f_ and _v_ is just in voicing, so one can easily change into another by voicing/devoicing. However, the exact circumstances in which such a change does or does not happen are complicated and vary greatly among different BCS dialects. For example, some Croatian dialects (e.g. most Kajkavian ones) devoice [v] into [f] whenever it's in front of a voiceless consonant; thus, you'll often hear Kajkavians saying _ofca_ instead of the standard _ovca_ (this particular devoicing doesn't happen in the standard language, although it does happen with many other voiced consonants). 

As for the concrete example of _hevta_/_hefta_, what probably happened is that [f] got voiced into [v] in some Bosnian dialects and not in others. Unfortunately, I have no idea when and where exactly this sound change happened, so I guess you'd have to ask an expert for Bosnian dialects. I guess I should add that this word sounds very archaic nowadays, and I suspect that even in Bosnia, many people wouldn't even know what it means.


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## farisca

I live in Sarajevo and I must say that people that live here use "hevta" very often. Children at their primary schools learn that they can call a week - _sedmica, nedjelja or hevta_. It is always pronounced as "hefta", but I think that according to the Bosnian spelling rules, the right way of writing it is "hevta".


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## Lazar777

I'm Serbian from Beograd and we use c) all the time, although I've also heard b) in Serbian.


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## sokol

Athaulf said:


> (...) As for the concrete example of _hevta_/_hefta_, what probably happened is that [f] got voiced into [v] in some Bosnian dialects and not in others. Unfortunately, I have no idea when and where exactly this sound change happened, so I guess you'd have to ask an expert for Bosnian dialects. (...)



I don't have any deeper knowledge of Bosnian dialects but I guess that in this case simple phonology could help: dialects where the sound shift of /f/ > /v/ happens in this position (at the end of a closed syllable: CVC - that is, consonant followed by vowel followed by consonant) probably because there might be no sound /f/ in these dialects - in _this _position.

(I should add that in ijekavian štokavian dialects - from which BCS standard language originally was derived - had no sound /f/, this sound only came with foreign words. I guess that anyway at the beginning of a syllable /f/ always will be pronounced /f/, but at the end of syllables assimilation seems to be not unusual: my Croatian grammar states that /grof ga gleda/ may sound /grov-ga gleda/, which is a simple assimilation rule - such exist in many languages. However, in this case assimilation cannot be what happens as in /hefta/ the next syllable begins with a voiceless plosive; therefore the only possible explanation which comes to my mind is a phonological one - i. e. the above mentioned one: dialects where at the end of a syllable no /f/ exists even in foreign words, therefore transformation into /v/.
Now if I am right here of course would be for native speakers of those dialects to say - I can only give this educated guess. ;-)


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## Athaulf

sokol said:


> I don't have any deeper knowledge of Bosnian dialects but I guess that in this case simple phonology could help: dialects where the sound shift of /f/ > /v/ happens in this position (at the end of a closed syllable: CVC - that is, consonant followed by vowel followed by consonant) probably because there might be no sound /f/ in these dialects - in _this _position.
> 
> (I should add that in ijekavian štokavian dialects - from which BCS standard language originally was derived - had no sound /f/, this sound only came with foreign words. I guess that anyway at the beginning of a syllable /f/ always will be pronounced /f/, but at the end of syllables assimilation seems to be not unusual: my Croatian grammar states that /grof ga gleda/ may sound /grov-ga gleda/, which is a simple assimilation rule - such exist in many languages. However, in this case assimilation cannot be what happens as in /hefta/ the next syllable begins with a voiceless plosive; therefore the only possible explanation which comes to my mind is a phonological one - i. e. the above mentioned one: dialects where at the end of a syllable no /f/ exists even in foreign words, therefore transformation into /v/.
> Now if I am right here of course would be for native speakers of those dialects to say - I can only give this educated guess. ;-)



What you write sounds plausible to me. Generally, throughout the Slavic-speaking world, /v/ and /f/ often have somewhat strange properties when it comes to the voicing/devoicing assimilation rules (see e.g. this paper about their status in Russian). 

It is true that /f/ came into Shtokavian dialects only through foreign words. There are many examples of loanwords in Bosnian dialects where /f/ mutated into some other sound. For example, in many parts of Bosnia, you'll hear the local Catholics calling their priest _pratar_ instead of the standard _fratar_ "friar". However, it's been quite a while since /f/ established itself as a regular phoneme and such sound changes stopped happening. For example, I've never heard /f/ mutate in German borrowings, which are historically more recent:_ frisch_ > _friško_, _Stoff_ > _štof_, _Schlafrock_ > _šlafrok_, etc. (Come to think of it, even _heften _has been borrowed as _heftati_ "to staple", "to rivet". )  At the end of the day, older loanwords in which /f/ changed are scattered around local dialects pretty chaotically. 

Even in the standard language, the situation with the assimilation rules about /f/ and /v/ is more complicated than with other consonant pairs. Standard BCS prescribes that /f/ devoices the preceding consonant, but /v/ doesn't voice it, and neither /f/ nor /v/ are ever supposed to get (de)voiced themselves. However, the rules of local dialects vary a lot in this regard. Among other things, some speakers tend to voice /f/ in front of voiced consonants, as in your example /grofga/ > /grovga/ (_ga_ is an enclitic), even though I don't think I ever do it (in fact, now that I've tried pronouncing this quickly a few times, I've noticed that I might in fact be devoicing /g/, but now I've been thinking about this phrase too much to ever be able to pronounce it again without conscious  thinking about these consonants ). 


Also, as a semi-relevant side remark, the application of assimilation rules to foreign words in BCS is a moot point. Sometimes it's done, and sometimes not. For example, _adhezija _"adhesion" would be impossible as a native word in standard BCS because [d] gets devoiced into [t] before [x], as in e.g. _od_ + _hraniti_ > _othraniti_; still, you'll usually found it spelled _adhezija_, and people will even make an effort to pronounce it that way. On the other hand, Latin _absolutus _has been borrowed as _apsolutan_, with * devoiced into [p] as if it were a domestic word; it's never spelled *absolutan. Overall, it's a pretty bad mess even with Latin and Greek words, let alone with more recent borrowings from modern languages...*


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## sokol

Athaulf said:


> (...) For example, I've never heard /f/ mutate in German borrowings, which are historically more recent:_ frisch_ > _friško_, _Stoff_ > _štof_, _Schlafrock_ > _šlafrok_, etc.


The time of borrowing might indeed be an important factor as to the treatment of foreign sounds - it often is. Though of course I personally can't say much about BCS as I don't know much about its ancient linguistic history.



Athaulf said:


> (...) (in fact, now that I've tried pronouncing this quickly a few times, I've noticed that I might in fact be devoicing /g/, but now I've been thinking about this phrase too much to ever be able to pronounce it again without conscious  thinking about these consonants ).


That is indeed a problem - if you think too much about a certain sound in your native tongue you may (depending on your predisposition) try to not pronounce it like suggested or alternatively try to pronounce it like that, either way you're no longer outside the system, you've become a victim of your own linguistic observation. 
(Happens to me too, all the time ...)


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## Athaulf

sokol said:


> The time of borrowing might indeed be an important factor as to the treatment of foreign sounds - it often is. Though of course I personally can't say much about BCS as I don't know much about its ancient linguistic history.



The German borrowings I have in mind are mostly due to innovations in technology and lifestyle in the late 19th and 20th century, when most of these innovations were coming from Austria, which was the case even long after 1918. Thus, they mostly deal with various household items, cooking, clothing, tools, machines and machine parts, mechanical procedures, etc. By then, /f/ was already established as a phoneme in pretty much all dialects of BCS, so it didn't change. 

By the way, nearly all of these German borrowings are considered as substandard in modern Croatian, and most of them are substandard even in Bosnia and Serbia, although they are heavily used in everyday life throughout the BCS speaking area (and in fact, you'll often sound odd if you use officially correct words instead of them in informal situations). I think they are particularly interesting because of that, since they've always been ignored by standardizers and prescriptivists, and therefore nobody ever tried to artificially make them more similar to the original pronunciation, so that the sound changes they underwent provide some very interesting insights into BCS phonetics and phonology.


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## sokol

Athaulf said:


> (...) and therefore nobody ever tried to artificially make them more similar to the original pronunciation, so that the sound changes they underwent provide some very interesting insights into BCS phonetics and phonology.



Yes, a very good point: so this really would indicate that whatever powers were at work when transforming /f/ to /v/ they seem to haven't been any more active when the German words came to the BCS region. And that they indeed have been active beforehand (in some dialects, or even many or all except Kajkavian) shows "hevta".


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## xpictianoc

EDIT: The following two posts have been moved here from THIS thread.

mnogo retko se čuje reč sedmica barem u Beogradu.


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## Duya

xpictianoc said:


> mnogo retko se čuje reč sedmica barem u Beogradu.



Nažalost, pošto dominantno _nedelja_ zna biti dvosmisleno. Nedavno sam se isfrustrirao pročitavši da je ulaz u muzej besplatan prve *nedelje* u mesecu... Ajd' znaj na šta se misli.


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## xpictianoc

Duya said:


> ulaz u muzej besplatan prve *nedelje* u mesecu... Ajd' znaj na šta se misli.


oj... i bih predpostavljao da se radi o prvoj sedmici jer ako reč je o nedelji (dan)  po meni trebalo bi da bude "ulaz u muzej besplatan prvom *nedeljom* u mesecu".


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## Orlin

Duya said:


> Nažalost, pošto dominantno _nedelja_ zna biti dvosmisleno. Nedavno sam se isfrustrirao pročitavši da je ulaz u muzej besplatan prve *nedelje* u mesecu... Ajd' znaj na šta se misli.





xpictianoc said:


> oj... i bih predpostavljao da se radi o prvoj sedmici jer ako reč je o nedelji (dan)  po meni trebalo bi da bude "ulaz u muzej besplatan prvim *nedeljom* u mesecu".


Znači izgleda da je mnogo bolje reći 'sedmica' i takvim slučajima da bi uskratio svaku mogućnost za dvosmislenost iako ta reč nije popularna?


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## el_tigre

Duya said:


> "Tjedan" is Croatian only.



Precisely. Because it is  originally kajkavian. 


Duya said:


> Tedan does not exist.



I heard that is the form that use(d) Serbs that emigrated from Croatia to Serbia recently ( 1995).They did not know proper Serbian verbs. Instead of them they use(d) ekavized Croatian ones. So we have /had:

uvjet=>uvet instead of uslov
tjedan=>edan instead of sedmica,nedelja

etc.


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## kloie

dihydrogen monoxide said:


> Now, there is something about the word hefta. It's of PIE origin and we can tell it's from Turkish because of the f phoneme in the word hefta, which is by the way taken from Persian. If it would be taken from Greek we would expect p phoneme. PIE goes back to *septm. However, this is a thing I don't understand. Persian as an Indo-Iranian group has PIE *p in p. So how do we get an f phoneme in Persian. We can tell the word goes back to PIE because Semitic languages have a different word. This is maybe off topic or perhaps it requires another thread.


hefta is the persian word for week in hafte=this week/hafteye ayande=next week


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## hello86

mi u Srbiji - Sandzaku kazemo hefta ili nedelja ali vise hefta.


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## glupson

Uvrijezeno u srednjoj Bosni i Sarajevu - sedmica. Nedjelja moze biti dvosmislena - sedam dana ili sedmi dan?

Hefta je definitivno koristena samo u govornom jeziku. Uz to idu sve izvedenice - hefticno, hefticnik, na hefticnoj bazi, itd. Postojala je tendencija da se prakticno svi turcizmi "ozvanice" kao knjizevni jezik, ali se sada postepeno gubi. Tako da hefta ostaje za upotrebu u porodicnom krugu.


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## nexy

Ja koristim isključivo reč '*nedelja*', dosta se može čuti i reč '*sedmica*' ali uglavnom na televiziji ili od ljudi koji dolaze iz drugih krajeva Srbije. Retko sam imao priliku da čujem nekog iz mog grada da kaže '*sedmica*'.  Reč '*hefta*' vidim prvi put u životu.


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## thegreathoo

Nedjelja is a really weird term to pronounce.  It really twists my tongue, for example sljedeće nedjelje,  it is almost impossible to pronounce the collapsing of djlj that quickly.  It has to be a newly-invented spelling, coming from the use of dj for đ in literature.  I bet the intent was to convey neđelja, which is colloquial and pronounces well.


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## Oranje

dihydrogen monoxide said:


> Persian as an Indo-Iranian group has PIE *p in p. So how do we get an f phoneme in Persian. We can tell the word goes back to PIE because Semitic languages have a different word. This is maybe off topic or perhaps it requires another thread.


It probably does require another thread but since you asked, I'll answer. It goes **p* -> *p* -> *f*. A /f/ phoneme in the place of an /p/ in Persian/Farsi virtually always indicates Arabisation. After the Arab conquest and adoption of Arabic Abjad script, consonants in certain words became mutated. Because the Arabic script had no way of expressing the phonemes /p/, /g/, /tʃ/ and /ʒ/ (Arabic speakers notoriously have trouble with the voice and unvoiced bilabial stops b and p in English for example), and thus /p/ was transcribed as ف which was already /f/. By the time the orthography adapted to better suit Persian phonetics certain words had mutated. Some remain interchangeable like Farsi/Parsi but some exist today only in the Arabised formed. If Turkish hefta is indeed from Persian then it was adopted from the Arabised form and not Old Persian. There is most likely a sound law for this but I don't know it.


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## Dunav

thegreathoo said:


> Nedjelja is a really weird term to pronounce.  It really twists my tongue, for example sljedeće nedjelje,  it is almost impossible to pronounce the collapsing of djlj that quickly.  It has to be a newly-invented spelling, coming from the use of dj for đ in literature.  I bet the intent was to convey neđelja, which is colloquial and pronounces well.



Naw man, *_nedělja > nedjelja _is a perfectly regular sound change in BCS. I'm sure some people pronounce it nedilja, nedelja, etc based on different reflexes on the yer, which we wouldn't expect if it was originally *_nedjelja. _

BCS loves to collapse tj and dj (and kj, gj in some cases) into affricatives so I don't doubt people say neđelja, still, it's colloquial for a reason.


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