About the Project

О овом пројекту

O ovom projektu


Abstract

This project will examine the influence of Turkish language, especially Ottoman Turkish, on Bosnian literature by examining the song and poetry culture Sevdah, which refers to a genre characterized by the feeling of longing, especially of lost or impossible love. The methodology will consist of examining the origin of all of the words in the text. As these texts have entered into the cultural consciousness of Bosnia, these texts can be examined as some sort of representation of Bosnian cultural language.

Using the Site

The "texts" page gives the option to view the texts in either Cyrillic or Latin letters. Both of these alphabets are used for Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian, and Montenegrin. At the present time, Croatia tends to use Latin primarily, and Serbia tends to use Cyrillic primarily, but this distinction is relatively recent, and there are still pockets in both of these countries which use the other.

Bosnian as a Language or a Dialect

Many people consider the languages Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian, and Montenegrin to be dialects of one language, Serbo-Croatian; however, the people of these respective countries have, since the time of Yugoslavia, denounced this name of their language in order to preserve the differences between the languages and their sovereignty. Whether someone sees these languages as dialects of one South-Slavic language or as four sister-languages, the sole element of importance is not putting them in a hierarchical structure. Therefore, since the origin of these texts is not necessarily easy to determine, especially as the borders have been drawn and redrawn, with the poets and authors regarding themselves under a wide variety of cultural and heritage-based identities, Sevdah as a unifying genre serves as a useful tool for centralizing the experience of Bosnian specific poetry.

Poem or Song

The line between poetry and song is not the same in the Balkans as it is in the rest of the European context. The word for both poetry and song is actually the same in Bosnian, just as in Croatia, Serbian, Montegrin, and likely other Balkan languages, pjesma. Because of this overlap, these may be referred to as "songs" or "poems" in English, but truly they all encompass both. For the purposes of examining them in this project, the musical element must be removed so that the text can be examined, placing it within the European conception of "poetry," while its Balkan genre has not changed.