Some language introspection around Croatian loud and quiet
You know how by studying people with certain forms of brain damage, scientists can learn a lot about the brain and how it works? I wonder if it is equally promising to study people with a broken understanding of a language in order to learn about languages.
I sat down today and started to introspect a small set of related words in Croatian that always bothered me. I am in a sense a native speaker of Croatian — I grew up in a household speaking Croatian, my mother and father spoke almost exclusively Croatian with me growing up. And yet, my Croatian is — although native — far from good. I didn’t read much in Croatian, Croatian was mostly just a spoken language for me growing up (fortunately, in Croatian the correspondence between how you read words and how you pronounce them is much stronger than in, say, English), and also I was growing up within a heavy local dialect that considerably deviated from standard Croatian. Finally, Croatian experienced quite a bit of development since the independence of Croatia, partly in order to intentionally delineate it from Serbian, partly just through the natural evolution of a language that happens during a few decades and which the diaspora using that language usually misses.
So much for background. The set of words I was thinking and trying to understand was around “loud” and “quiet”. Everything I write now is introspection, I did not look it up, which means it may be very wrong. Do not use it for language learning.
The actual words for “loud” and “quiet” are, I think, “glasno” and “tiho”. But I don’t remember hearing these words very often, and I associate with “loud” more “jako” than “glasno”. “jako”, literally, means “strong”. Thinking about its opposite, “weak”, I cannot come up with a word besides “slabo”. But “slabo” doesn’t really mean “weak”, it more means “bad”. But I cannot think of another way to say “weak”. So if a person is weak, you can only say that by saying they are bad — or by using the phrase “ne jako” — “not strong”, which I think I actually encountered more often than “slabo” for that sense of “weak”. Someone wouldn’t say “Ja sam preslab da to dignem” — “I am too weak to lift this”, but rather “Ja nisam dosta jak da to dignem” — “I am not strong enough to lift this”.
Similar for “quiet”, I think I heard “ne jako” more often than “tiho”. The command “ne tako jako!” — “not so loud!” more often than “tiho!” — “quiet!”. Or it would be “umukni!”, which is rather untranslateable but means something like “shut up!”.
Additionally, “jako” also means “very” and can thus be used to modify other adjectives, for example “jako slabo” — “very bad”, “jako tiho” — “very quiet”, “jako jako” — “very strong” or “very loud”.
Now I said that “glasno” means “loud”. Maybe I am wrong, and “glasno” really means “clear” (as in “loud and clear”, “jako i glasno”). This also would fit with the Russian usage in “glasnost” as “transparency” / “clarity”. So maybe “jako” indeed means both “strong” and “loud”?
The reason why I first thought it didn’t was because I mostly encountered the word in a slightly different context: making the TV louder or quieter (I grew up with a lot of time watching TV with the family). To make it louder, the command that would be used to the person with the remote was “pojačaj” — “make it stronger” / “strongify”, which makes totally sense when dealing with a device that produces sound. You want to make it stronger, and thus it becomes louder. The opposite of that was “smanji” — which literally means “make it smaller” / “smallify”. But you couldn’t say the TV is “malo” — “small” to say it is “quiet”, you would use “tiho” for that or, again, “ne jako” — “not strong” / “not loud”.
The funny thing is that the natural antonym of a word would often have a different antonym. So the antonym of “tiho” — “quiet”) is “jako”. The antonym of “jako” — “strong” is “slabo”. The antonym of “slabo” — “bad” is “dobro”. Maybe it is that these words are just polysemous, have several senses — i.e. “slabo” has one sense, “bad”, and one sense “weak”, etc., and all that is happening here is switching the senses while walking the antonym chain — but to be honest, between this and the much more frequent usage of negation, I have the intuition there is a little bit more going on here, but I cannot say what.
But in the end, it is probably just because of my broken understanding of Croatian.
- Previously published on Medium on April 10, 2017.
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