Sein oder Nichtsein/Sign or Not Sign

In this last blog entry from our bicycle tour Budapest – Novi Sad – Timisoara, I will let signs on the roadside speak for themselves.

They will come in pairs, for you to compare and find similarities or differences. There will be a set of four place name signs with increasing numbers of versions (what languages is your and anyone’s guess), and finally a few stand-alone signs to contemplate and interpret at will.

Appealing or peeling?

Sign of price hikes

How much does the ferry across the Danube at Paks (Hungary) actually cost?

At the Deutsches Heimatmuseum

in Hajos / Hajosch

Looking into the mirror of a long-lost past – the words are transliterated from spoken Danube Suebian German

 

Where are we?

Where are we going?

Baja is Frankenstadt in German usage – there wouldn’t be enough space for this name though. – The Kiss Ranch: a new idea for wellness-oriented agroturismo?

 

The cemetery at Apatin, a Serbian-Hungarian-Suebian town with a share of Roma (whose gravestones I searched for in vain)

 

Bogojevo is near Novi Sad

Here we took a wrong turn

Which of these is in Rusyn?

This was our final destination.

If German nationalists had had their way, the city would be called Temeschburg now.

Multilingualism demands space: Serbian, Hungarian, Roumanian and Rusyn/Ruthenian sign in Zrenjanin.

My theory is that the human traffickers scratched off the name of the official border town, Srpska Crnja, and sprayed it over with the code word for the (illusionary) safe hav€n. Google Maps will show you the ideal location of Hetin for illegal border crossing between Serbia and Roumania.

On the sun deck of a Budapest tourist boat they know how to be polite – after pointing out the rules (otherwise and by the way).

Final proof that Hungarian will forever remain an opaque language to us Indo-Europeans. On the night train from Budapest to Zurich.