When I saw the manuscript for Spomeni na Neret I knew this was a special book, a treasure chest full of unique historical, linguistic and biographical information. And not just for the people of the village of Neret but for all Macedonians and others with an interest in the history, language and personal stories of the people of Macedonia and northern Greece. The 366 pages of neat handwriting were in the local spoken Macedonian dialect of the author and were transcribed using the Latin alphabet, known as Latinitsa, and this also presented me with some unique editorial challenges. Let me briefly highlight each of the above jewels from this treasure chest.

The author, Risto Katin, was born in 1924 in the village of Neret in southern Macedonia, now northern Greece. He begins by giving the local knowledge from the elders about the history and customs of the village, life under the Ottomans, and how it was affected by the Balkan Wars, the First World War and the Greek-Turkish War. Having grown up in the village, he then provides a first hand view of how it lived through the Metaxas dictatorship, the Greco-Italian War, the Second World War and the German Occupation, the Greek Civil War, and how these events and the policies of the Greek Government led to the large scale migration of Macedonians from Neret and from their many other ancestral villages in northern Greece.

Interwoven with the events of the times are personal stories and anecdotes of many of the families and people of the village, and these will be of particular interest to all Neretsi as well as to readers of biography. There are stories of families, village life, hard work, migrant workers, fortune, love, power, war, soldiers, partizans, bereavement, government policies, the Greek police, injustice, revenge, poverty, migration and other themes. All told in the beautiful and clear language of the local people who experienced the events.

An important part of these is the author's own story of how he met the love of his life, a girl from the village-next-door, and the many obstacles the couple were presented with as they tried to fulfil their commitment to each other.

Later, the book gives a first hand view of the migrant life of the Neretsi in Perth and Melbourne, including the establishment of the first Macedonian churches in Australia and the Neret Club in Melbourne.

Another priceless jewel in this book is the language. The author was tri-lingual in Macedonian, Greek and English, and chose to write the book in the spoken dialect of his village. The book reveals that this is a rich dialect with several thousand words and variations of words that I could not find in many Macedonian printed dictionaries and online dictionaries and translators. This necessitated me writing my own dictionary to capture these words and variations so that the dialect would be accessible to readers. The dictionary is titled A Dialectical Dictionary of Neret - Macedonian to English, and I am proud to present it as both a companion to Spomeni na Neret as well as a stand-alone book and a dialectical contribution to the Macedonian language and linguistics.

Of course, no one can write a dictionary off the top of their head. It involves a massive amount of research and the input of many people, so allow me to thank them.

Firstly, my parents and my relatives who were all from Neret and who, when I was a child and growing up, taught me enough of the words and language for me to understand most of the book.

But the author's Macedonian was far better than mine, so I turned first to my dozen or so dictionaries. The key ones were the Routledge Macedonian-English Dictionary, and the online Digitalen Rechnik na Makedonskiot Jazik (Digital Dictionary of the Macedonian Language), Google Translate, and Cooljugator: the Smart Verb Conjugator. I also used Zoze Murgoski's Macedonian to English and English to Macedonian Dictionaries, Chris Stefou's English-Macedonian Dictionary Based on the Lerin-Kostur Dialects as Spoken by Oshchimians, Kosta Peev's Na Makedonskite Govori vo Jugoistochniot Egejski Del (Dictionary of Macedonian Dialects in the Southeast Aegean Part), Olga Misheska Tomic's (with others) English-Macedonian Dictionary, and numerous online dictionaries and translators.

When I still could not find a word or its shade of meaning, I turned to the author's son, Tom Katis. Tom was extremely helpful and assisted with hundreds of words and word variations. I then turned to a Facebook group that I manage, Family and Friends of Neret/ Polipotamou. The members are Neretsi from around the world and as well as their own knowledge many still have access to aged parents, grandparents and other relatives of the author's era and the group was able to assist with hundreds of words including those about local customs and local geography. That left me with a hard core of over 50 of the hardest words, and for these I turned to the Macedonian translator, Elizabeth Kolupacev Stewart, who was able to assist with the great majority of these.

Please allow me to repeat my huge thank you to everyone who assisted with my understanding and editing of Spomeni na Neret and with the compilation of A Dialectical Dictionary of Neret - Macedonian to English. Without them, Risto Katin's fantastic book would have been much harder for me to edit and for readers to understand, and the dialectical dictionary would have been inadequate for the task. I am pleased to say that both books are available as free downloads at pollitecon.com.

For my own part, I have been a professional magazine and book editor for 38 years and these books have been two of the most challenging and rewarding projects of my career.

Finally, I have saved the most important thank-yous to last. Thank you to the author, Risto Katin, for writing the book. Through his foresight and dedication, he has captured his spoken dialect and given his fellow villagers a priceless insight into their village and family histories. For other Macedonians and readers, the priceless insight is into one of the most difficult periods in modern Macedonian and Greek history. Thank you also to Victor Chris for introducing me to Risto's son, Tom Katis. And thank you to Tom for making the manuscript available and for assisting me with many of the words and their meanings.

Spomeni na Neret was a pleasure to work on and I hope readers find equal joy in reading it.

About Risto Katin

Risto Katin was born in Neret on 8 May 1924 and died in Melbourne on 4 August 2007 aged 83. Katin's mother tongue was Macedonian and like the Macedonians of his era, and even today, he spoke Macedonian at home and went to the village school where all learning and speech was only in Greek. At the time it was not uncommon for Macedonian students to only attend a few years of primary school. Katin's family is not sure for how long he attended school. However, we do know that Katin was literate in Greek and that his spoken Macedonian and spoken Greek were both excellent. His family reports that his spoken Greek was better than many native Greek speakers. He was also literate in Macedonian using the Macedonian Latinitsa (Roman) alphabet, which he learned later in life and in which he wrote this book. Through his many years in Australia he also became a competent English speaker.

In the village, Katin was a tailor making a variety of men's and women's clothing. He spent three years in the Greek Army. He became the kodjobashia - mayor/ president - of the village. At a time when food was scarce, he wrote a letter to Queen Frederica of Greece about the dire situation.

Katin migrated to Australia in 1954. He lived in Perth for six months where he worked in a steel factory. He then moved to Melbourne and worked for many years at the MacRobertson's chocolate and confectionary factory. He then worked in security in the city for the Rio Tinto mining company.

This book was written in the late 1990s, well after he retired. Katin said his reason for writing was to tell his children and grandchildren about their roots, about where their father and grandfather came from and the life and customs of their forebears, and why he and many other villagers from Neret and from many other Macedonian villages and towns in Greece left their homeland and came to faraway Australia.

On Editing the Text

The original manuscript is written in spoken Macedonian in the dialect of Neret. As he was living in Greece and due to the policies of the Greek Government, the author had no formal education in Macedonian, his native tongue. Thus he wrote as he spoke. This is an asset of the book as his speech is not influenced by literary Macedonian and so captures the local dialect.

But this presented me with some editorial challenges, among them that the written speech ran many words together and lacked punctuation and other writing conventions. To turn the text from speech into writing, the editing included identifying and separating the individual words, finding the natural sentences, adding capitalization and punctuation, paragraphing the text, and identifying the natural chapters.

For example, as a native Macedonian speaker of high proficiency, Katin would run many short words together in speech and this was mirrored in his writing. This created a need to separate compound words into their component words; so for example:
- voseloto became vo seloto (in the village)
- zanasheto became za nasheto (for our)
- namoite became na moite (for my)
- ininio became i ninio (and their)
- nesamo became ne samo (not only)
- dasakam daprava became (to want to make)
- zadago became za da go (so they could)
- dasigo became da si go (so as to)
- danemuga became da ne mu ga (so as not to)

This is a small sample.

Katin's spelling is very good as overall his spelling is faithful to his pronunciation. So I adopted a minimal interference approach to spelling to help preserve the local pronunciation. This may have left what appear to be some spelling errors or inconsistencies but if so they are a small price to pay.

An example of this spelling/ pronunciation dilemma is the word naodva, meaning 'is found' or 'is located'. The Macedonian root word is najde, with a j for the y sound to make 'nay-de'. It means 'find'. Rather than change Katin's spelling to the formal najodva, I kept his naodva.

Similarly, he wrote otamo when literally this is two words, ot tamo, meaning 'from there'. As the Macedonian dictionary has ottamu (pronounced ottamoo with oo as in book) with the same meaning I have left it as otamo. Note the difference between the o and oo sounds.

He also wrote iotamo when this is literally i ot tamo, meaning 'and from there'. In this case I changed iotamo to i otamo.

Macedonian is a rich and beautiful language with a huge number of short words of one or two letters and one or two syllables. To me this suggests it is a very old language that has undergone a long process of word shortening. So where possible I have tried to preserve this feature of the language.

Standardization

Overall, I kept changes to the text, grammar and spelling to a minimum, even where there may be some irregularities. This was because I judged that retaining the author's speech and capturing the variations in the language were more important than conforming to a modern or literary standard of the language.

There was some minimal standardization of spellings. Among these, for example, as he used both kazhish and kazhis (meaning 'tell'), I standardized this to kazhish. The author used both lazhovno/ lazhovnoto and lazovno/ lazovnoto (meaning both 'false'/ 'the false' and 'alias'/ 'the alias') and it was logical to standardize these to the zh spelling of the root word. It is worth noting that while I found lazhen, lazhna and lazhno in the dictionaries, I could not find the lazhovno and lazhovnoto variations nor any lazovno based words.

The author's frequency of useage also guided my standardization. For example, for the word 'lawyer' and its variations, the author used both avokat and avukat. As he used avokat twice as often, I standardized the spelling to avokat.

The spellings for 'legs': nozi, notzi and notzhi were all used. As nodzi and its derivatives are also commonly used in Neret, I retained nozi and also used nodzi.

I retained some similar usages, eg abar and aber, which mean 'a message', 'news'. Katin uses both words. The Routledge Macedonian-English Dictionary uses aber, but I have retained both aber and abar as Katin uses abar noticeably more often and this may indicate a dialecticality (dialectical usage).

The author used narot instead of narod (meaning 'people', 'nation') but used narodo instead of naroto (the formal is narodot) for 'the people', 'the nation'. I kept both narot and narodo.

Likewise, I retained both od and ot, meaning 'from', as he used both forms very frequently, and not just on their own but also as prefixes.

I retained both kanbana and kambana, meaning 'church bell'. The Routledge Macedonian-English Dictionary uses kambana but Katin uses both in near equal number and I cannot be certain that there is no dialectical usage.

I also retained both deteto and detto, which both mean 'the child', 'the boy'. Deteto is grammatically correct but detto captures the speed of pronunciation.

I also retained both Krpeshina and Krapeshina, as both spellings of the village next to Neret were commonly used and together they give a better understanding of how the pronunciation of the name has developed.

The book has numerous loanwords from English and Greek, and combinations of English-Macedonian and Greek-Macedonian words. These sometimes needed standardization. For example, he spelled variant words based on communism and communist, such as komuniski and komuniskata, mostly with an o as the first syllable so I standardized with an o the few instances where he used u, such as kumuniski and kumuniskata. He also used both o and u in the second syllable and I standardized these to u.

The words Afstralia and Astralia were standardized to Afstralia. Both versions were used copiously but the latter is from the author's experience in Australia while Afstralia retains the dialectical sound and is closer to Avstralija, the standard Macedonian spelling. A small number of word variations were also standardized based on Afstralia.

Often the loan words were Macedonianized by being combined with a Macedonian word or ending. For example, I retained Anglichanite, Angliskite and Ingilizite, which all translate as 'the English'. All work and I am not aware of any variation in their meaning, so I kept all three as used.

In some instances I have retained Australianizations to illustrate the process of linguistic transference. Two examples are the author's word theori, despite the existence of the same Macedonian word teorija; and basoite - the English word 'bus' combined with the Macedonian plural ending oite for 'the' - giving 'the buses'.

The author had some interesting acronym variations. He used EAMTO, literally 'the EAM', for the People's Liberation Front, and ELASTO, literally 'the ELAS', for the People's National Liberation Army. I standardized these to the accepted EAM and ELAS.

A question in regard to Macedonian words that are already in Macedonian dictionaries and for Macedonianizations of English words is whether Katin;s spellings of some of these words are dialectical, idiosyncratic or incorrect. In many cases I have chosen to keep his original spelling. In addition to not wanting to lose a possible dialectical pronunciation, this was also because, overall, Katin was very careful, his handwritten text was very legible, the 366 pages have almost no crossings out or changes, he had a good ear for the sound of words, and he was fluent in at least three languages.

Pronunciation Guide

Most letters in Latinitsa are pronounced as they are in English. The variations are:

a - as in appoint
ai - as in paid (note, standard Latinitsa spelling is aj)
c - is ts as in sets
dj - is j as in jam
dz - as in the 'ds' sound
e - as in egg
ei - as in hey (note, standard Latinitsa spelling is ej)
i - as in ink
j - is y as in yes
o - as in or (but shorter)
oi - as in boy (note, standard Latinitsa spelling is oj)
u - is oo as in book
zh - as in treasure/ treazhure and pleasure/ pleazhure

Of particular interest is that the author mostly uses the letter i as in ai, ei and oi to get the ay, ey, and oy sounds where standard Latinitsa would use aj, ej and oj. In these cases to standardize such a big manuscript to j instead of i would be a huge job and could create inconsistency and perhaps some confusion with the dj letters and sound.

So where the author has used the letter i instead of j in this way, I have retained that useage. I think this adds an excellent option to Latinitsa and helps to free the letter j from its unLatin y sound.

To conclude let me repeat that this is a wonderful book with something for everyone with an interest in Neret, Macedonia, Greece, history, biography, and language. I hope you enjoy the book as much as I did.

Victor Bivell
Editor

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