A Lucky Bounce to the Balkans

Writer/columnist Robert Ruark, a talented North Carolinian and drinking buddy of Ava Gardner, once wrote boastfully about a college weekend that began someplace like Philadelphia and got out of hand and wound up in Montreal. I topped him. I went to a college football game right outside Washington, D.C., one weekend and wound up in Yugoslavia for six weeks!

The previous summer I'd been named a delegate from the university to the national convention of the National Student Association. I came back as chairman for the Virginia-Carolinas region of NSA. In October I was in College Park, Maryland, for the Carolina-Maryland game. At half time, at the hot dog stand, who should be reaching for the same mustard squirter as I but National NSA president, Bill Dentzer.

"Who can believe this?" he said. "We've been looking for you for three days!"

I explained it was our big senior out of town football weekend and College Park, Maryland was a long way from Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and there was a lot going on and I was sorry he couldn't reach me. "Why were you looking for me?" I asked.

"We wanted you to go represent us in Yugoslavia," he said. I told him I'd love to.

"It's too late now," he said. "The plane leaves Monday from New York, and it's already Saturday afternoon and the State Department's closed, so there's no way to get you a passport..."

"Bill," I interrupted, "I have a passport. I can easily get back to Chapel Hill and pick it up in time to fly from New York on Monday."

By Wednesday I was attending sessions of a spirited Tito propaganda fiesta called the Zagreb Peace Conference and enjoying my first immersion in a language the mere mention of which impresses people even more than Chinese: Serbo-Croatian!

To my delight, I understood entire phrases from it from my university Russian. I became aware of "families" of foreign languages, something that doesn't occur automatically to Americans because English doesn't resemble its cousins very closely. It's something of a black sheep in the Germanic language family. They say the closest language to English is Dutch. Dutch is about as close to English as Betelgeuse is to Baltimore!

I'd noticed the summer before that Norwegian is usefully close to Swedish and Danish. Serbo-Croatian sounded to me like a jazzier, more "fun" kind of Russian. They use the Roman alphabet in western Yugoslavia, Croatia, and Slovenia, and in Serbia to the east they use the Cyrillic alphabet, with even more interesting letters in it than Russian uses.

Some of the mystique I'd always imputed to multilingual people began to fade. If you meet somebody who speaks, say, ten languages, your instinct is to be impressed to the tune of ten languages worth. If, however, you later learn that six of those languages are Russian, Czech, Slovak, Serbo-Croatian, Polish and Ukrianian – I'm not suggesting that you dismiss him as illiterate, but you ought to be aware that he got six of those

languages for the price of about two and three fourths! They're all members of the Slavic family.

The Yugoslav university students, my hosts, sent me back home aboard a Yugoslav ship, leaving me sixteen days with nothing to do but practice Serbo-Croatian with the other passengers. When I got back to school after a solid eight weeks' absence, I wasn't even behind in my German. German is widely spoken in central Europe and I'd spoken it widely enough during the adventure to float almost even with the class.


	A Lucky Bounce to the Balkans Writer/columnist Robert Ruark, a talented North Carolinian and drinking buddy of Ava Gardner, once wrote boastfully about a college weekend that began someplace like Philadelphia and got out of hand and wound up in Montreal. I topped him. I went to a college football game right outside Washington, D.C., one weekend and wound up in Yugoslavia for six weeks! The previous summer I'd been named a delegate from the university to the national convention of the National Student Association. I came back as chairman for the Virginia-Carolinas region of NSA. In October I was in College Park, Maryland, for the Carolina-Maryland game. At half time, at the hot dog stand, who should be reaching for the same mustard squirter as I but National NSA president, Bill Dentzer. "Who can believe this?" he said. "We've been looking for you for three days!" I explained it was our big senior out of town football weekend and College Park, Maryland was a long way from Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and there was a lot going on and I was sorry he couldn't reach me. "Why were you looking for me?" I asked. "We wanted you to go represent us in Yugoslavia," he said. I told him I'd love to. "It's too late now," he said. "The plane leaves Monday from New York, and it's already Saturday afternoon and the State Department's closed, so there's no way to get you a passport..." "Bill," I interrupted, "I have a passport. I can easily get back to Chapel Hill and pick it up in time to fly from New York on Monday." By Wednesday I was attending sessions of a spirited Tito propaganda fiesta called the Zagreb Peace Conference and enjoying my first immersion in a language the mere mention of which impresses people even more than Chinese: Serbo-Croatian! To my delight, I understood entire phrases from it from my university Russian. I became aware of "families" of foreign languages, something that doesn't occur automatically to Americans because English doesn't resemble its cousins very closely. It's something of a black sheep in the Germanic language family. They say the closest language to English is Dutch. Dutch is about as close to English as Betelgeuse is to Baltimore! I'd noticed the summer before that Norwegian is usefully close to Swedish and Danish. Serbo-Croatian sounded to me like a jazzier, more "fun" kind of Russian. They use the Roman alphabet in western Yugoslavia, Croatia, and Slovenia, and in Serbia to the east they use the Cyrillic alphabet, with even more interesting letters in it than Russian uses. Some of the mystique I'd always imputed to multilingual people began to fade. If you meet somebody who speaks, say, ten languages, your instinct is to be impressed to the tune of ten languages worth. If, however, you later learn that six of those languages are Russian, Czech, Slovak, Serbo-Croatian, Polish and Ukrianian – I'm not suggesting that you dismiss him as illiterate, but you ought to be aware that he got six of those languages for the price of about two and three fourths! They're all members of the Slavic family. The Yugoslav university students, my hosts, sent me back home aboard a Yugoslav ship, leaving me sixteen days with nothing to do but practice Serbo-Croatian with the other passengers. When I got back to school after a solid eight weeks' absence, I wasn't even behind in my German. German is widely spoken in central Europe and I'd spoken it widely enough during the adventure to float almost even with the class.