Hello there! As you may recall from my first blog post, Македонија is the name of Macedonia in Macedonian. When you transliterate it from the Cyrillic alphabet (that is, switch it from one alphabet into another), Македонија becomes Makedonija.
I figured it was time for an update, but as of now I'm still waiting on my medical clearance -- 2/11 pieces of paperwork are currently under review, and all of them have to be reviewed and approved before I officially get clearance. I'm not worried (maybe just a smidge impatient!), but I've got a few things to take care of first - like finishing grad school in a couple of weeks!
In the meantime, here are some fun facts about Macedonia! Earlier I'd mentioned that Macedonia is about the size of Vermont. For those of you (like me) who may not be familiar with what that size really means, I found a site to compare it to a region I do know, like Seattle and the Puget Sound region.
So as you can see, it's not super big! That said, it's a country with a rich history. I've been envious to hear of Peace Corps volunteers just casually going for a walk around their village or town and seeing things like Roman ruins. When I visited Serbia in 2009, I've seen remains as old as the Byzantine era, but the history nerd in me is super excited about all the options available in a place like Macedonia!
Also, as some of you readers well know, I'm a huge language nerd -- guilty! So I thought to also include a little visualization of where Macedonian fits into the linguistic family tree. Macedonian is an Indo-European language, like most languages in Europe and most of the ones I have learned and studied. While it's easy to help provide reference for people and say "it's in the same family as Russian," here's a bit more information!
Russian falls under the East Slavic sub-group, whereas the stuff more pertinent to me is under the South Slavic sub-group. In undergrad I studied Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian (or BCS), and adjacent to it are Macedonian and Bulgarian. This means that thanks to BCS, I can understand a bit of Macedonian already. However, it's definitely also different! If you'd like to hear a little bit of what Macedonian sounds like, check out the song below; it's one of my favorites!
I figured it was time for an update, but as of now I'm still waiting on my medical clearance -- 2/11 pieces of paperwork are currently under review, and all of them have to be reviewed and approved before I officially get clearance. I'm not worried (maybe just a smidge impatient!), but I've got a few things to take care of first - like finishing grad school in a couple of weeks!
In the meantime, here are some fun facts about Macedonia! Earlier I'd mentioned that Macedonia is about the size of Vermont. For those of you (like me) who may not be familiar with what that size really means, I found a site to compare it to a region I do know, like Seattle and the Puget Sound region.
So as you can see, it's not super big! That said, it's a country with a rich history. I've been envious to hear of Peace Corps volunteers just casually going for a walk around their village or town and seeing things like Roman ruins. When I visited Serbia in 2009, I've seen remains as old as the Byzantine era, but the history nerd in me is super excited about all the options available in a place like Macedonia!
Also, as some of you readers well know, I'm a huge language nerd -- guilty! So I thought to also include a little visualization of where Macedonian fits into the linguistic family tree. Macedonian is an Indo-European language, like most languages in Europe and most of the ones I have learned and studied. While it's easy to help provide reference for people and say "it's in the same family as Russian," here's a bit more information!
Russian falls under the East Slavic sub-group, whereas the stuff more pertinent to me is under the South Slavic sub-group. In undergrad I studied Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian (or BCS), and adjacent to it are Macedonian and Bulgarian. This means that thanks to BCS, I can understand a bit of Macedonian already. However, it's definitely also different! If you'd like to hear a little bit of what Macedonian sounds like, check out the song below; it's one of my favorites!
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