Word: pavic
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...Milorad Pavic...
...PAVIC has chosen to write under an enormous number of self-imposed constraints. He even boasts in the subtitle that he has written a novel "in 100,000 words," and although I doubt that the translator has followed Pavic's linguistic game that strictly, I do not doubt that Pavic himself wrote exactly 100,000 words in the Serbo-Croat. My rough estimation of the English edition comes...
ACCORDING to my Webster's dictionary, the Serbo-Croatian language is a marriage of two immiscible languages, Serbian and Croatian, which still retain individual identities in the form of separate alphabets. Serbian words are written in the Cyrillic alphabet; Croatian words, in the Roman. Milorad Pavic, who is a Yugoslav poet, must be sensitive to this split down the middle of his language. He has written a novel whose conceit is that it is a dictionary of three immiscible languages, with three distinct alphabets, corresponding to the three major religions that have shaped the Western world: Greek (Christian), Arabic (Islam...
These three sections of the Dictionary of the Khazars contain all surviving information on a fourth language and culture, the language and culture of the Khazars. A fictional tribe created by Pavic, the Khazars flourished in Asia Minor until around the eighth century A.D., when, upon conversion to one of the three major religions, their nation and culture disappeared from the face of the earth. In Pavic's hands, the plight of the Khazars in the eighth century becomes a parable for the Middle East of today...
...frightened off by the number of languages. Pavic composed his novell-as-dictionary in a single language, Serbo-Croatian, and Christina Pribicevic-Zoric has translated the novel into lucid English. The novel, however, is divided into three separate dictionaries, Greek, Arabic and Hebrew, called the Red Book, the Green Book and the Yellow Book. To help orient the reader, Knopf's bookmakers have designed small icons, in the appropriate colors, that appear in the upper outside corner of nearly every page...