Tuesday, October 04, 2005


Prishtine buildings 10: this reads "Nazi was here"; as I mentioned earlier, "Nazi" isn't a short form of "national" in Albanian, so I think the writer must be (a) Nazi.

[Corrected on the 14th of January 2007]

Frederic Gernstein and Bytycci were both kind enough to draw my attention to one of the other occasions I misread the nickname Nazi, derived from Nazim or Nazmi.

Frederic Gernstein asked,
who is this absolute idiot who assumes that the only way of intertpreting the meaning of "Nazi" is as a short form of "nazist"?
I am not Albanian either, but it does not take much of knowledge to notice that any Albanian called Nazim (a muslim name), will be called Nazi for short.
Idiot!
He's absolutely correct and, after a friend pointed it out to me, I felt very stupid as well as ashamed for having misinterpreted it so.

Bytycci also observed that:
Nazi is simply a nickname of names like Nazim or Nazmi. It doesn't have anything to do with Nazis. It is pronounced differently too. That's why you have the Cafe te Nazi also. It means, At Nazi's.
There is no short form for "National" in Albanian. The translation is "Kombetar" ose "Nacional".

2 comments:

  1. who is this absolute idiot who assumes that the only way of intertpreting the meaning of "Nazi" is as a short form of "nazist"?
    I am not Albanian either, but it does not take much of knowledge to notice that any Albanian called Nazim (a muslim name), will be called Nazi for short.
    Idiot!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Nazi is simply a nickname of names like Nazim or Nazmi. It doesn't have anything to do with Nazis. It is pronounced differently too. That's why you have the Cafe te Nazi also. It means, At Nazi's.
    There is no short form for "National" in Albanian. The translation is "Kombetar" ose "Nacional".

    Cheers

    ReplyDelete