Tilen Fidler Joined the church in Maribor as a teenager, making the decision alone. Most teenage converts in Slovenija joined with their parents or other family members, or had to wait until they were considered adult and not have to do what their parents said. But Tilen decided all on his own. His parents were both nice and as supportive as they knew how to be. Because he was still just a kid and had no familial support network to continue to be active in the church, the missionaries, especially the elders tried to be as involved as possible with him.
One particular evening my companion Elder Newland and I went to Tilen's house to help him prepare a game for the branch's Family Home Evening later that week. Tilen had decided on a sort of trivia game and we were trying to help him come up with good questions. I seem to recall that it was a geography-themed trivia game, so all the questions we had to come up with needed to do with places and sights to behold or something. We may even have been getting the questions from a book and helping Tilen translate them into Slovene, which would explain our being there, actually.
We came to one question that he wanted to use: Where is the biggest rock on Earth? That would be a rock in Australia. Elder Newland was sitting back in the Fidler's dining nook, and letting me do most of the translating, which was actually a big help to me, as I'd only been there for about a year, and needed work on my language skills.
Where, as an interrogative - Kje? Where is - Kje je?
Biggest - here I had a trick. The word for Big was Velik, but the modifiers for -er and -est, which are adding -či to the end and naj- to the beginning, do not go with the word Velik. Bigger - Velikči? Biggest - Najvelikči? No. That's just stupid. The way to do it is to add the superlative modifiers to the word that generally means More - Več. Veči - bigger. Največji - biggest. There, much better! Kje je največji - where is the biggest?
On Earth was easy, we used that phrase all the time as missionaries - na svetu. Na Zemlji actually made more sense to me because it was an exact translation, but the proper, commonly used phrase was Na svetu. Ok.
Rock. The only word I knew was the word for stone - kamen. Where is the biggest stone on Earth? Kje je največji kamen na svetu?
But no, I couldn't just leave it. Feigning ignorance I added the diminutive -ček to the word kamen. Kamenček didn't mean a rock, it meant a little rock, a pebble. Smiling to myself I said the phrase out loud to Tilen and Elder Newland. My superlatives and my diminutive essentially canceled each other out.
"Kje je največji kamenček na svetu?" "Where is the biggest pebble in the world?" I asked the two of them?
"Kamenček? Kamenček?" Tilen asked. And then he burst into laughter at the literal absurdity I had just spoken. Elder Newland followed suit, and I continued to smile to myself, knowing that my playing with the language resulted in causing them merriment. Eventually we settled down and finished the game questions, but ever after all I had to do was look at Tilen and ask, "Kje je največji kamenček na svetu?" and he would just laugh and shake his head at Crazy Elder Young, who thought that the biggest pebble on Earth lay in Australia.
