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Waiting for Elijah is an intimate portrait of time-reckoning, syncretism, and proximity in one of the world’s most polarized landscapes, the Bosnian Field of Gacko. Centered on the shared harvest feast of Elijah’s Day, the once eagerly awaited pinnacle of the annual cycle, the book shows how the fractured postwar landscape beckoned the return of communal life that entails such waiting. This seemingly paradoxical situation—waiting to wait—becomes a starting point for a broader discussion on the complexity of time set between cosmology, nationalism, and embodied memories of proximity.
The book is famous for its depiction of life around the time of the division of Macedonia, its characterizations, and its use of language and historical setting. While Ion is in the army, Velika struggles as she watches her children and her village ravaged by war. In one famous scene, Ion, conscripted into the Serbian army, and his brother, conscripted into the Bulgarian army, come face-to-face one night on the battlefield. The author, Petre M. Andreevski, was a Macedonian poet, novelist and playwright who won numerous awards for his works, many of which have been translated into other languages. Pirey is his most famous novel and was a best seller in Macedonia. This is the first translation of Pirey into English.
Language rifts in the Balkans are endemic and have long been both a symptom of ethnic animosity and a cause for inflaming it. But the break-up of the Serbo-Croatian language into four languages on the path towards mutual unintelligibility within a decade is, by any previous standard of linguistic behaviour, extraordinary. Robert Greenberg describes how it happened. Basing his account on first-hand observations in the region before and since the communist demise, he evokes the drama and emotional discord as different factions sought to exploit, prevent, exacerbate, accelerate or just make sense of the chaotic and unpredictable language situation. His fascinating account offers insights into the nature of language change and the relation between language and identity. It also provides a uniquely vivid perspective on nationalism and identity politics in the former Yugoslavia.
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Outline of English Lexicology: Lexical Structure, Word Semantics and Word Formation.
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