This is the first part of the lesson. The rest, the exercises and the reviews are in the app.
Collective numerals: three ways to count “two”
English counts everything with one word: two students, two children, two doors, the two of us. Serbian has three different sets of words here, and the choice is compulsory, like gender: take the wrong set and you say something you did not mean.
“Agreement with 2–4” and “Agreement with 5 and up” taught you to count things: dva grada “two cities”, pet gradova “five cities”. The lesson “Pluralia tantum & collectives” showed you nouns that an ordinary number cannot count (vrata “door”, deca “children”) and promised to come back to them here. Today is about counting people, and the nouns that demand a special number.
Two sets for people: dvoje versus dvojica
Both sets count people, and both come out in English as plain “two, three, four”. What decides between them is who is in the group:
Two irregular stems. Four does not give “četiri-” but četvoro, built on the old stem četvor-, the same Indo-European word that became Latin quattuor. Seven and eight lose their mobile “a”: sedam → sedmoro, osam → osmoro (not “sedamoro”, “osamoro”). Everything else is mechanical: the number plus -oro or -orica.
dvoje, troje, četvoro: where this set is compulsory
This set is no synonym of the ordinary number. Four situations require it.
1. A mixed group of people. If the group has both men and women, plain dva or dve will not do: it would force one gender on the whole group. This is where dvoje comes in:
Dvoje studenata je došlo na konsultacije.Two students (a young man and a young woman) came to office hours.
U sobi je bilo troje ljudi: dva muškarca i jedna žena.There were three people in the room: two men and one woman.
People named by an adjective are counted the same way: dvoje mladih “two young people”, a young man and a young woman.
From five up, people can also be counted with the ordinary number: pet studenata, deset ljudi (“Agreement with 5 and up”). The collective works there too for a mixed group: petoro studenata.
2. The noun deca and collectives in -ad. You know from “Pluralia tantum & collectives” that deca “children” is a collective noun that declines like žena. No ordinary numeral can count it; its only counter is the collective one. The same goes for collectives in -ad, such as unučad “grandchildren”:
3. The pronouns nas, vas, njih. English has a ready-made match here: “the two of us, the three of you, the four of them”. Serbian builds it the same way, with the pronoun in the genitive (“of us”) plus a collective numeral:
That is how you speak of a mixed group. If the group is all men, take the second set: nas dvojica, njih trojica. If it is all women, use the ordinary number: nas dve, njih dve.
Cheat sheet
The cheat sheet — everything essential from the lesson on one page. In the app it opens at any time.