Adjective-forming suffixes

Lesson opening

This is the first part of the lesson. The rest, the exercises and the reviews are in the app.

Adjective-forming suffixes: turning a thing into a quality

A noun names a thing; an adjective names a quality. Between them stands a short bridge: the suffix. Take grad “city” and add -ski, and you have gradski “city, urban”; take kiša “rain” and add -ovit, and you have kišovit “rainy”; take brbljati “to chatter” and add -ljiv, and you have brbljiv “talkative”. One root grows not only a family of nouns (the lesson “Noun-forming suffixes”) but a set of qualities too.

This lesson teaches two skills. The first is reading: meeting an unfamiliar maglovit, the tail tells you “lots of this”, the root magla tells you “fog”: “foggy”. The second is building: vojnik “soldier” gives vojnički, not “vojnikski”, and you will know why. The hard part is the joint: before a suffix, the end of the stem often changes.

-ski: the main suffix of relation

To say “having to do with something”, Serbian usually reaches for -ski, the suffix it still uses to make new adjectives. Where English puts one noun in front of another (“city bus”, “school yard”), Serbian turns the first noun into an adjective: grad → gradski “city”, škola → školski “school”, svet → svetski “world”, more → morski “sea”, zima → zimski “winter”, student → studentski “student”, žena → ženski “women’s, female”.

One sound change shows up at once: selo “village” gives seoski “rural”, because the stem’s final l turns into o before a consonant, the same change that gave the past form radio “(he) worked” from an older radil (the lesson “L-vocalisation”).

One more sign. Adjectives in -ski are relational: they name a link to a thing, not a quality there can be more or less of (nothing is “very city”). So they have no short form, even after je (Film je srpski), and decline in the long form: gradskog autobusa “of the city bus”, u gradskom prevozu “on public transport in town” (the lesson “Definite vs indefinite”).

What happens before -ski: -čki, -ški and the “swallowed” s

With -ski the joint matters most: the stem changes its last consonant, and the suffix’s own s often dissolves into the new hushing sound (č as in “church”, š as in “ship”).

The first four rows are the change you met in “First palatalisation”: k, c → č and g, h → š, and the hushing sound swallows the s of the suffix. The rule: stem in k, c, expect -čki; stem in g, h, š, expect -ški. Hissing sounds are simpler: the two s merge into one, hence ruski. The b row is voicing assimilation (the lesson “Voicing assimilation”): before voiceless s, Srbin loses the buzz of its b: srpski.

The last row is the exception. In speech a d before s turns voiceless too, so gradski sounds almost like “gratski”. But in writing, d stays put before -ski: gradski, sudski, ljudski “human”. With t there is nothing to change: bratski “brotherly”, hrvatski. The standard chose a recognisable root over an exact record of sound.

Cheat sheet

The cheat sheet — everything essential from the lesson on one page. In the app it opens at any time.

Adjective-forming suffixes

Adjective = stem + suffix. Know the tail, know the kind of quality: relation, material, quality, tendency. A suffix’s meaning is a habit, not a law.

-ski: relation (long form only: Film je srpski)

-an / -ni: quality and relation

Material and “whose”

Quality, tendency, abundance