>>Then you could hear people saying "troduplo", probably meaning "trostruko" (tri-fold, i.e. triple), but then it could mean only sixfold, if anyone took care to think about it.
>
>Interesting. Could that be interpreted as "triple-double"?

It could, but seems to be I was the only one with a gripe about that. Anyone else I knew just took it to mean "triple".

>OTOH, you mention German in several of your posts. Was Yugoslavia under a lot of German influence?

During the XIX century, parts of it were within Austro-Hungarian empire (Slovenia, most of Croatia, Vojvodina, and Bosnia for the last quarter of it). Also, when Serbia freed itself of the Ottoman rule, it sent its young to study in either France, Vienna or Heidelberg. Also, the south-Slavic intellectuals within the K-und-K empire were mostly gathering in Vienna. Though the intellectuals of those times took good care to translate any scientific vocabulary they needed (which became a tradition - I've graduated maths and I always have to recognize the things in English math books by their meaning, then translating from Latin and finding that our name for it is an exact translation already), they weren't so keen on translating everyday items.

Also, until the end of WWII, there was a significant German minority in the north, and them being more tech-savvy, they had all the words for machine parts, which have remained within the mechanics' jargon until today. Though, many of those words are twisted beyond recognition, by phonetic change making them slide smoothly through the declinations and pronunciation. For example, "Büchse" (box, I presume) became "biksna", "viertel" (quarter) became "frtalj" etc.

The third wave was the Gastarbeiter, people who went to German-speaking countries to work, and simply didn't have the vocabulary to parallel what they learned there, and upon return (though not too many have returned) they didn't adopt the verbiage of their native language, but rather kept the German expressions, which also made them sound more expert to their customers. One can tell a mechanic who has learned his trade on the job from one who learned it in the school by their language - the latter will more often use the domestic terms - "kvačilo" instead of "kuplung", or "kočnica" instead of "bremza".