The aorist

Lesson opening

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

The aorist: one word instead of a whole past tense

You build the perfect from two parts: the clitic sam (a short word that cannot stand first in a sentence) plus the l-participle, as in rekao sam, otišla sam. The aorist does the same job in a single word: rekoh, odoh. No auxiliary, no gender, just a stem and a personal ending. That is where its character comes from: short, sharp and often emotional. Ode voz! There goes the train!

In the lesson “The tense system in overview” the aorist sat at the bookish pole of the map, and the lesson “The perfect” noted that it long ago handed almost all the work of the past over to the perfect. All true: you will tell people about your day in the perfect. But do not write the aorist off. It lives on in a dozen everyday phrases, it carries the story in novels, folk tales and folk songs, and it hides inside the conditional, the Serbian “would”: bih, bismo. This lesson teaches you to build it, to recognise it in a text and, where it fits, to use it yourself.

Stem plus ending: two sets

The aorist is built on the infinitive stem from the lesson “Infinitive & stems”: for most verbs, the infinitive minus -ti. Verbs in -ći and -sti have a stem ending in a consonant that the infinitive hides (pas-ti, but pad-); how to find it is shown below. From there everything depends on its last sound. If the stem ends in a vowel (uradi-, napisa-, ču-), the endings attach directly. If it ends in a consonant (rek-, dođ-, pad-), a linking -o- comes between stem and ending, and the 2nd and 3rd person singular take the ending -e.

Notice two things straight away. First, the 2nd and 3rd person singular are identical: uradi means both “you did” and “he did”, and only a pronoun or the context tells them apart. Second, the 1st person singular has the very -h you have already met in bih in the lesson “Conditional I”. Here are all the forms; read each row in the order ja, ti/on, mi, vi, oni:

The last row is an old friend. You learned bih, bi, bismo, biste as the helper words of the conditional (radio bih “I would work”), and they really are the aorist of biti, simply stuck in a new role; only “they” says bi in the conditional, not biše. On its own, meaning “I was”, this aorist is hardly used today, except in a few lively phrases such as Šta bi s tobom? What happened to you?

Consonant stems: a short list worth learning

There are few verbs with a consonant stem, but they are among the most frequent in the language: the infinitives in -ći and -sti, plus a few such as doneti. You can usually spot the stem in the present tense (dođem → dođ-, padnem → pad-); for reći and peći use the l-participle instead (rekao → rek-), because the present already has rečem. Then add the endings of the second set, with the linking -o-: dođoh, not “*dođeh”. Before the ending -e, k, g, h turn into č, ž, š, the change from the lesson “First palatalisation”: rekoh — reče, stigoh — stiže.

The plural follows the same second set: odosmo, odoste, odoše “we, you, they left”, sedosmo, sedoste, sedoše “we, you, they sat down”. You will not have to learn the verbs one by one: prefixes act as a multiplier. Once you know dođoh, you get the whole family for free: uđoh, izađoh, prođoh, pređoh, siđoh, pođoh “I went in, went out, went past, crossed over, went down, set off” (the families themselves are the subject of the lesson “Prefixed verb families”). Learn separately the small group with an inserted -d-: dati → dadoh, dade “to give”, and on its model the verbs in -stati: ostadoh, ostade “to stay”, ustadoh, ustade “to get up”.

The aorist and aspect: almost always perfective

The aorist shows an action as a point: whole, with its end reached. That is why it gravitates to the perfective aspect, and almost every aorist you meet will come from a perfective verb: rekoh, dođoh, kupih, napisah, zaboravih. An aorist from an imperfective verb is possible, but rare and bookish, so English “I was doing” is never an aorist job. The exception is a handful of frequent verbs for which it is perfectly ordinary:

Cheat sheet

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

The aorist

A simple past in one word: infinitive stem plus personal ending, with no biti and no l-participle. No gender; 2nd and 3rd person singular are identical; the aspect is almost always perfective.

Endings

Consonant stems: verbs in -ći and -sti

• otići — odoh, ode (leave; odoše “they left”); naći — nađoh, nađe (find); stići — stigoh, stiže (arrive); pasti — padoh, pade (fall); sesti — sedoh, sede (sit down); moći — mogoh, može (be able); also doneti — donesoh, donese (bring).
• Prefixes multiply the pattern: uđoh, izađoh, prođoh, pređoh, siđoh, pođoh. The group with inserted -d-: dadoh, dade, ostadoh, ostade, ustadoh, ustade.
• Before the ending -e, k, g, h → č, ž, š: rekoh — reče, stigoh — stiže, mogoh — može.

Meaning and ready-made formulas

In conversation: a fresh event, just happened, witnessed or lived through; mostly 1st person, with feeling. The perfect also works in the formulas (Stigli smo!), but the aorist is livelier.

Where it lives: books, folk tales, folk songs (chains of events, speech tags); Belgrade speech (the formulas); south-eastern Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia (everyday storytelling too). Your everyday past, spoken or written, is the perfect.

Uđe, pogleda me i sede za sto. He came in, looked at me and sat down at the table.

— Ne mogu više — reče on i ustade. “I can’t go on,” he said, and stood up.

Traps of form

• 2nd person = 3rd: add the pronoun, Ti to ne reče, nego on.
• Same as the imperative for many verbs in -iti: Vrati se! “come back!” vs Vrati se jutros. “he came back this morning”.
• Same as the perfective present (dođe, reče, vrati se): after kad, ako, čim, da it is present (Kad dođe, javi mi.); with no conjunction, about the past, it is aorist (Dođe u pet i sede.).