Adverbs of place & time

Lesson opening

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Adverbs of place and time: where, where to, where from, and when

Pronouns showed you who is acting; now you will learn to say where, where to, where from and when it happens. These words are adverbs: short words that never change their form (ovde, tamo, sad, juče), and you cannot build a single real-life sentence without them. There are few of them and you hear them constantly, so they pay off at once.

There is one subtlety to tune your ear to from the start: Serbian carefully separates place (where you are) from direction (where you are going). Modern English mostly does not: “Where are you?” and “Where are you going?” use the same word. But English once had the full set, and you still meet it in Shakespeare: where, whither, whence; here, hither, hence. Serbian keeps that system alive in everyday speech, so think “whither” whenever something moves towards a place and “whence” whenever it comes from one.

Three questions about place: gde, kuda, odakle

Serbian asks about place with three different words, depending on whether you are staying put, moving towards a goal or moving away from somewhere:

English leaves “from” dangling at the end (“Where are you from?”); Serbian puts it at the front of the word, as the od- (“from”) of odakle. The answers follow the same three-way pattern. Watch how one and the same “here” or “there” changes shape with the question:

In practice Serbs often get by with ovde (“here”) and tamo (“there”, and also “to there”) for everything, but you do need to recognise the motion forms (ovamo “to here, this way”, odavde “from here”). The full three-step system “this one / that one / that one over there”, with the bookish forms onde and onamo, is completed in the lesson “Demonstratives”.

ovde, tu, tamo: three steps from “here” to “there”

Serbian words that point to a place have three steps, like the demonstrative pronouns (“this”, “that”). Their meaning depends on who is speaking and where; the steps are anchored not to a distance in metres but to the people in the conversation:

Add to these the vertical and the sides: gore (“up, upstairs; upwards”), dole (“down, downstairs; downwards”), napred (“in front; forwards”), nazad (“behind; back”), levo (“on the left; to the left”), desno (“on the right; to the right”), unutra (“inside”), napolju (“outside, out of doors”), blizu (“near, close by”), daleko (“far away”), and also svuda (“everywhere”), negde (“somewhere”) and nigde (“nowhere”).

Cheat sheet

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Adverbs of place and time

An adverb (prilog) never changes its form and answers “where?”, “where to?”, “where from?”, “when?”. Place has three questions, like old English where / whither / whence.

Three questions about place

Here, there, over there: where, where to, where from

Adverbs of time

The calendar around today