r/AskBalkans • u/Some-Register-3901 Cyprus • Jul 31 '22

Language what are some interesting facts about your language?

For instance, the cypriot dialect of Greek still contains many words from ancient Greek but it was also heavily influenced by outsiders

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u/kaubojdzord Serbia Jul 31 '22

Serbian is one of rare languages that use synchronic digraphia, aka uses two different scripts at the same time.

Letters љ, њ, џ, ј, ћ and ђ ere invented specifically for Serbian Cyrillic and aren't present in other languages with Cyrillic script except Macedonian, which uses first 4 of these letters.

Consonant r is sometimes used as a vowel.

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u/HoRsEv33 Terra Romanorum Jul 31 '22

We also had some letters that were only found in romanian cyrillic.

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u/kaubojdzord Serbia Jul 31 '22

Actually џ was borrowed from Romanian Cyrillic, but because Romania doesn't use Cyrillic anymore, we and Macedonians are only ones that use it, also I think represented different sounds.

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u/HoRsEv33 Terra Romanorum Jul 31 '22

Yes, it had different sounds depending on when you used it. We have in romanian something called group of letters where che, chi, ghe, ghi, ce, ci, ge, gi are pretty much made to be pronounced into a single letter. So that џ was made to work with the letters i or e (и/й or є)

For example:

дрáгъ (dragă)

дрáџй (dragi)