The 8th February is the Slovenian cultural holiday, Prešeren's Day.
In Slovenia, all cultural institutions open up their doors on that day, visitors may visit many concerts, plays or exhibitions free of charge. Association of dramatic artists of Slovenia prepare recital of Prešeren's poems in front of Prešeren's monument in Ljubljana. This year was the 32nd time it was organised under the slogan Beautiful words find beautiful places. How are Slovenian and Serbian words connected, how do speakers of the two languages understand each other, where are the roots of the language ties and how foreign students at University of Ljubljana see Slovenia and Slovenian words?
The answers to those questions could be heard during the lecture by Nataša Pirih Svetina, PhD, from the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Ljubljana, which we used to mark the Prešeren’s Day in Banja Luka. The title of lecture “How close and how far, at the same time, are Slovenian and Serbian?” made people interested. The author gave many examples thus explaining what caused biggest problems to Serbian speakers when learning Slovenian. We often think we understand each other great, while due to familiarity of the languages there may be misunderstanding. Let’s just think about the words ‘lice’ and ‘obraz’ (face and cheek), ‘mesto’ and ‘grad’ (city and fortress), ‘čas’ and ‘vreme’ (time and weather) … She spoke about accents, word order and cases. Nataša Pirih Svetina is in charge of courses for foreign students at the Faculty of Philosophy and that is why she made her lecture even more interesting by using motivation letters of students whose mother tongue is Serbian. In their texts we could see where and why mistakes occur. The interesting lecture at the Elementary School Georgi Stojkov Rakovski was attended by students of supply teaching lessons of Slovenian from three groups as well as members of the Association of Slovenians ‘Triglav’.
Barbara Hanuš
