95 HRT, SMS: Acronyms

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In this chapter, I’ll focus on so-called acronyms. These are words made of first letters of some phrase, e.g. NASA, USA, UN.

In both English and Croatian, some acronyms are made from native expressions (like USA in English) but some are borrowed (e.g. KGB – do you know what it stands for?). Croatian has more borrowed acronyms than English.

Writing them is not really a mystery, but how are they pronounced? In English, they are either pronounced either as ordinary words (e.g. NASA) or letter by letter (e.g. USA).

In Croatian, they are pronounced in four ways.

The first way is to pronounce them simply as normal words (the same as in English NASA). This happens if there are 3 letters at least, and the first letter is a consonant, while the second is a vowel; for example:

CIA FER FIFA HAC

HAK HAZU HEP KUD

LED MUP NASA NATO

RAI RAM ZAMP ZET

So, NASA is simply pronounced as Nasa in Croatian. Futhermore, R is not considered a vowel in acronyms (so HRT, the acronym for Croatian Radio and Television, is normally not pronounced like a normal word).

Some acronyms above stand for Croatian organizations and bodies: HAC is the Croatian Highway Authority, HAK is a semi-official association of automobile drivers in Croatia, HEP sells electric power and heat, FER is a department of the University of Zagreb, ZAMP enforces publishing and performing rights of musicians in Croatia (cafe and restaurant owners who play any music must pay rights to them), KUD is an association dedicated to folklore, MUP is a department that manages police, personal ID’s and firefighters, and ZET manages public transport in Zagreb somewhow.

Pronunciation as normal words also happens if an acronym consists of a vowel (or two vowels) + a consonant + A, for example:

ETA IKA

IRA UEFA

(IKA is a Catholic News Agency in Croatia; the rest are well-known organizations.)

Additionally, some acronyms having two consonants, followed by a vowel, followed by a consonant are pronounced as simple words too, for example:

KSET SKUC

Some acronyms don’t fit into the patterns above, but they are nevertheless pronounced as normal words; the most frequent examples are:

UNESCO = Unesko UNICEF = Unicef

Some of these are obviously imported, e.g. check how UNESCO is pronounced as if having a k, but not UNICEF!

One important acronym is an exception: SAD, short for Sjedinjene Američke Države (i.e. United States of America, lit. United American States) is not pronounced like this, despite starting with a consonant and a vowel.

The second way is to pronounce acronyms letter by letter, where each letter is pronounced almost like a separate word (e.g. like English pronunciation of USA). Croatian has its "letters-as-words" pronunciation, essentially inherited from Latin:

A = a B = be C = ce D = de E = e F = ef G = ge

H = ha I = i K = ka L = el M = em N = en O = o

P = pe R = er S = es T = te U = u V = ve Z = ze

You can see two things: first, vowels are pronounced simply (R is again not treated as a vowel); most consonants are pronounced just as the consonant + e, but not all: some are pronounced as e + the consonant, and two are pronounced as the consonant + a (blame the Romans).

Another thing you can see... where are the other letters? Well, this is what we (and most other langugages in Europe) have inherited from Latin (actually, even Z was not originally in Latin, so its pronunciation varies a bit; besides ze, you can hear zet once a while). What about the rest?

The rest is much less established: J, Č, Ž etc. should be (according to style manuals) pronounced as the letter + e, while Š should be pronounced as eš. However, in real life, this is quite rare, you’ll see below what actually happens. Patience!

The letter W, appearing in some imported acronyms, is simply pronounced as ve. The letter X is iks.

So, this is how you pronounce e.g. BMW, HRT, NK, WC, and SAD, an exception mentioned above:

BMW = be-em-ve (a car maker)
HRT = ha-er-te (Croatian Public Radio and TV)
NK = en-ka (short for nogometni klub football club)
SAD = es-a-de (United States of America)
WC = ve-ce (a common abbreviation for toilet)

It’s interesting that the stress appears to be on the last syllable/component. This way of pronouncing is used for these acronyms and many others:

CD EKG EU KBC KFC

KGB HDZ HNK HV HZMO

HZZO IDS PDF PDV PMS

RH SDP TV USB UN

Here, HV is the acronym for the Croatian Army; HNK is the Croatian National Theater, HDZ, IDS and SDP are political parties; HZZO and HZMO are health and pension funds, KBC is used for major hospitals, PDV is value-added tax, EKG is electrocardiogram and so on.

Any acronyms containing dots (the most important is d.o.o., meaning limited liability company) are also pronounced in this way, so d.o.o. is de-o-o.

Also, names of variables in math are pronounced in this way; the variable y is pronounced ipsilon.

Also, letters used as names of rooms, categories, buildings, school groups are always pronounced this way. It’s interesting only characters inherited from Latin are used for this in Croatia; school groups in the 2nd grade will go 2. a, 2. b, 2. c, 2. d, 2. e, etc.

Wait, there’s more: there are two more ways acronyms are pronounced in Croatian!

The third way is pronouncing each letter ‘natively’, e.g. the letter K is pronounced as kə (that sound was explained in 01 Alphabet and Pronunciation) and all consonants follow this system. This happens basically if the acronym contains a letter J or some other letter not found in Latin (e.g. Š, Ž). Examples are:

HZJZ (Croatian Institute of Public Health)
JNA (Yugoslav People’s Army)
OŠ (Elementary school)
SFRJ (Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia)

For example, HZJZ is pronounced as hə-zə-jə-zə.

This is how most people in Croatia refer to sounds and letters (not labels or variables). For example:

Riječ počinjepočinjati s k. (pron. s kə) The word starts with a (letter) k.

If you think about it, this is the unambiguous way.

The fourth way happens when the pronunciation is borrowed together with the acronym; this mostly happens with the following recent loans from English, usually via movies and TV:

BBC = bi-bi-si CNN = si-en-en DJ = di-džej FBI = ef-bi-aj

PC = pi-si MTV = em-ti-vi UK = ju-kej

There are also a couple of such acronyms borrowed from French and German:

French: BCG = be-se-že TGV = te-že-ve

German: VW = fau-ve

The only option is to remember them. This table sums this up (the pronunciation is in slashes /.../):

as words /fifa/	letter-by-letter		borrowed /bi-bi-si/
	/e-ka-ge/	/hə-zə-jə-zə/
FIFA HAZU LED MUP NASA UEFA UNESCO (!)	EKG   d.o.o.   HRT   PDF   EU   TV   SAD (!)	HZJZ     JNA     OŠ     SFRJ	BBC   CNN   FBI   MTV   UK   TGV   WV

I’ve also listed UNESCO and SAD (= USA), since they’re the most common exceptions to the rules.

But there’s more to explain: How do these words behave in a sentence? What gender are they? Do they get case endings? What about derived possessive adjectives?

Words like NASA and UEFA are pronounced and understood as normal nouns: they normally change cases and make possessive adjectives. For example, in NASA would be pronounced u Nasi, as for any ordinary feminine noun in -a; from UEFA would be pronounced iz Uefe, etc.

But how are you going to write such words when they get some ending?

There are three ways, illustrated by some examples from Croatian newspapers:

Velike novosti iz UEFA-e Big news from UEFA

Zvonimir Boban otišao iz Uefe! Zvonimir Boban has left UEFA!

Rusi ipak ne izlaze iz UEFE Russians are not leaving UEFA after all

The first two ways are considered standard by the official spelling rules, but you’ll see all three in real life; the second one is likely the most common®. The same happens with possessive adjectives: you’ll see UEFA-in and Uefin. Here are some stats from the .hr domain (via Google™):

iz UEFA-e 8600 iz Uefe 17500

UEFA-in 8100 Uefin 9100

(Google™ doesn’t distinguish letter case in searches; iz UEFE is the least common way.)

Acronyms pronounced as words, but not ending in -A, are always understood as masculine (inanimate), and change so; spelling of case endings is a much smaller issue for them, because any ending is simply attached:

Upozorenje iz HAK-a A warning from HAK (rarely: iz Haka)

However, there is one more problematic acronym of this type: UNESCO. It’s masculine inanimate (despite ending in -o) but that -o is lost in speech whenever you add any ending, so how to write it? You’ll see possessives UNESCO-v and UNESCO-ov (4:1 in favor of the shorter option), DL forms spelled as UNESCO-u, UNESC-u, UNESCU and Unescu (of course, all are pronounced the same: Unesku). Acronyms really don’t fit well into having a spell-as-you-speak system and case endings!

Now, let’s move to the acronyms of the HRT-type: all these acronyms are usually understood as masculine inanimate, and the final vowel in their pronounciation is never lost (since it’s stressed, recall examples like kanu canoe from 88 Weird Words and Constructions):

Rasprava u UN-u (pron. u u-enu) Debate in the UN

Izbori u HDZ-u (pron. u ha-de-zeu) Elections in HDZ

Pucnjava u SAD-u (pron. u es-a-deu) Shooting in the US

With acronyms that are pronounced ending in -a – i.e. acronyms ending in -A, -K or -H – there’s some variation: they’re sometimes declined (i.e. they get endings) but you’ll often see them pronounced (and spelled) without case endings, i.e. as indeclinable:

u HNK-u (pron. u ha-en-kau) in Croatian National Theater

u HNK (pron. u ha-en-ka) (often used, condemned by some style guides)

This possibly happens because the brain gets confused a bit: here K stands for kazalište (a neuter noun); however, it’s pronounced ha-en-ka (so it sounds like a kind of feminine noun) and it’s spelled HNK (like some weird masculine noun). The brain can’t decide what to do, and does nothing. Again, some statistics (here in thousands):

u HNK-u	36
u HNK	80

An even more striking example is NK (for football club). It’s found before many football clubs, e.g. NK Hajduk. Naively, its DL would be u NK-u Hajduku. This is so rare that Google™ can’t find a single example of it. There are examples of u NK Hajduku (which is recommended by style manuals), but by far the most common is u NK Hajduk, where the first part is not declined because it’s a weird acronym, and the second part is not declined due to the ‘freezing’ explained in 88 Weird Words and Constructions.

In real life, when using acronyms pronounced letter-by-letter the Latin way and ending in -A or -K, it’s quite common not to add any case endings in both speech and writing. Examples are HNK, NSK etc.

If such an acronym is a part of a name, and the last word is spelled fully (e.g. NK Hajduk) the acronym never changes.

Actually, according to the recent style manual by the Institute of Croatian Language, no acronym used as a part of a name should change, but in real life you’ll often see both u KBC-u Rebro and u KBC Rebro (that’s the main hospital in Zagreb).

With acronyms RH (for Republika Hrvatska) and EU (for Europska Unija), there’s a strong influence of the full terms, so you’ll see people writing EU but pronouncing it fully. One effect is that these abbreviations are often treated as feminine, so you will frequenty read:

EU je odlučila... EU has decided... (fem., as Unija)

EU je odlučio... EU has decided... (masc. inanimate, considered standard)

The first option is quite common in media and casual writing, which annoys the language police a bit.

Interestingly, the orthography manual by the Institute of Croatian Language says that RH never gets any endings.

Acronyms of the HZJZ-type are understood as masculine inanimate and get normal case endings. Ones ending in -A (such as JNA) are understood as feminine, don’t get any endings, and you can’t derive possessive adjectives.

Finally, acronyms like BBC often end (in pronunciation) on -i, so any case (and possessive) endings will have inserted -j- (recall taksi, DL taksiju, Toni, DL Toniju), and you’ll see:

na BBC-ju (pron. na bi-bi-siju) on BBC

BBC-jeva serija (pron. bi-bi-sijeva) BBC series

However, you’ll also see spellings without -j-, i.e. na BBC-u and BBC-ev!

This sums up behavior of various types of acronyms in real life in Croatia:

type	gender	cases	possessive
MUP	masc. inan.	MUP-a	MUP-ov
FIFA	feminine	Fife FIFA-e	Fifin FIFA-in
UNESCO	masc. inan.	all you can imagine
HRT	masc. inan.	HRT-a	HRT-ov
NK /-ka/		NK NK-a	NK-ov
RH	mostly fem.	RH	—
HZJZ	masc. inan.	HZJZ-a	HZJZ-ov
JNA	feminine	JNA	—
BBC /-si/	masc. inan.	BBC-a BBC-ja	BBC-jev BBC-ev
CNN		CNN-a	CNN-ov

When they are several ways in real life, I’ve listed the most common option (which is frequently not considered ‘correct’ by style guides!) first.

Some final remarks: you’ll maybe hear in some movies, from some older people SFRJ pronounced /es-ef-er-jot/. This was common in the past, but it seems that way has died out.

Also, some younger people might pronounce acronyms such as CIA in the borrowed way, which is very likely an influence of TV series, movies and video games. Keep in mind there might be some variation in terms related to technology and anything US-related, where some speakers might pick up pronunciation from YouTube™, movies etc.

________

® There’s actually one more way to say from UEFA: iz UEFA, i.e. not changing the acronym at all, both in speech and writing. This is quite rare in Croatia, but it completely dominates in Serbia! It’s also the most common way in Bosnia, but iz UEFA-e is used there as well (the same holds for Montenegro). Just check the statistics on the .rs (Serbia) and .ba (Bosnia) Internet domains, and compare them with the Croatian one:

	.hr	.ba	.rs
iz Uefe	17500	1900	2000
iz UEFA-e	8600	10000	800
iz UEFA	1000	23000	17000

When you check Serbian examples of iz UEFA-e, many look like copied from Croatian newspapers and web sites.

↓ Something Possibly Interesting (click to show)

Of course, Latin didn’t have the letter V as well, but somehow there’s no variation in producing that letter in the Latin-based way in Croatian, it’s always ve. Listing both U and V in the table of pronunciations inherited from Latin was cheating a bit from my side.

Latin names of letters were the source of English names as well. The letter B is actually pronounced bee, G is gee, while K is pronouced similarly to A. From the spellings you can see the older pronounciation was similar to Croatian and Latin. The English pronunciation has changed during the Great Vowel Shift, in the similar way as the word for a bee, the word see and many others.

You can see spellings like UNESCO-v on university web sites, in printed media, and so on. There’s really no reason why anyone should insist on UNESCO-ov, but some people like to insist.

The pronunciation of BBC as bi-bi-si is so well established in Croatia, that the orthography manual by the Institute of Croatian Language takes it for granted and just notes that -j- must be inserted before any endings (which is often done, but not always).

BBC has been very influential in Croatia for many decades. In the first years of Croatian TV, in 1950’s, most shows were imported from BBC. Various shows produced by BBC, such as many documentaries, were quite popular, and some comedies, such as Only Fools and Horses, had huge popularity in Croatia. The only foreign TV network that had a similar impact in Croatia was Italian RAI.

↓ Examples (click to show)

This sticker on the door of a pharmacy says they have a contract with HZZO (Croatian public health insurance), literally, they’re a contractual partner of HZZO – so HZZO goes to the genitive case – meaning they accept prescriptions from the public health system:

This screenshot from a newspaper web site shows an example I’ve listed above:

This screenshot shows another example (using the spelling recommended by style guides, but less common in real life:

This public transportation ticket from Zagreb has the acronym ZET on its left edge:

This billboard, warning about start of the new school year, says kids go sigurno u školu s HAK-om safely to school with HAK, where HAK got the instrumental case ending:

↓ Exercise (click to show)

Complete the pronunciation of the acronyms below (use hyphens when acronyms are pronounced letter by letter, e.g. ha-er-te):

Show a pop-up Croatian keyboard

SMS =

KFC =

HANFA =

RTL =

KGB =

MTV =

PMF =

JANAF =

WC =

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