Compound words

Lesson opening

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

Compound words: two roots in one

You know two ways of making new Serbian words: a suffix on the right (pekar, gradski) and a prefix on the left (potpisati, nemoguć), in the lessons “Noun-forming suffixes”, “Adjective-forming suffixes”, “Verbal prefixation” and “Prefixes on nouns and adjectives”. The third way is the most visible: take two roots and fuse them into one word. The result is a compound, in Serbian a složenica; the process is called slaganje, “putting together”.

Water plus “fall” gives vodopad, earth plus “shake” gives zemljotres “earthquake”, field plus economy gives poljoprivreda “agriculture”. English builds the same way (a waterfall, an earthquake), so you will usually guess the meaning at once. The harder parts are these: which vowel sits at the seam, how the word declines and is spelled, and where Serbian does not compound at all, because a compound made up on the English model often does not match a real Serbian word.

The linking vowel: -o- almost always, -e- now and then

Serbian does not put roots end to end: a linking vowel, the “seam”, goes between them. English knows it from Greek: therm-o-meter, phot-o-graph. The first part loses its ending, and -o- grows onto what is left: vod-a → vod-o-pad.

Look at zemljotres, mišolovka, kišobran. Lj and š are “soft” consonants (the group that takes -em in the instrumental). Serbian once put -e- after a soft consonant, but over time replaced it with -o- almost everywhere, so the -o- comes even here. And unlike English raincoat or mousetrap, the parts never simply touch: kiš-o-bran, not “kišbran”. So expect -o- by default; -e- survives only in a handful of old words from lice “face”, kuća “house” and duša “soul”, easiest learned as a list: licemer, licemeran, kućevlasnik, kućepazitelj, dušebrižnik hypocrite, hypocritical, homeowner, building caretaker, pastor (“carer of souls”).

Before a vowel the -o- stays in place (vodoinstalater); in suncokret it simply merges with the o of okretati. Borrowed first parts arrive with the -o- built in: autobiografija, termostat, mikroskop.

Compound nouns: three patterns

Almost every compound noun fits one of three patterns. Read a long word from the end: the second part sets the meaning, the gender and the declension, just as a waterfall is a kind of fall.

Pattern 1: thing + action. The second part is a verb root; the word names an event, a thing or the one who does something. Most compounds follow this pattern:

Pattern 2: thing + thing. The main word is the second noun: poljoprivreda is a kind of privreda “economy”, and polje “field” says which kind. The points of the compass belong here too, written as one word where English uses a hyphen:

Pattern 3: quality + thing. The first part is an adjective. The most noticeable is vele- (from veliki), “big, large-scale”: velegrad, veleprodaja, velesila, veleizdaja metropolis, wholesale, superpower, high treason. The related samo- (samoposluga, samopouzdanje) is counted as a prefix; it was covered in “Prefixes on nouns and adjectives”.

A small group of its own starts with an imperative, a command form of a verb (the lesson “The imperative”): kažiprst “index finger” (kaži! “show!”, an old sense of kazati, + prst “finger”), cepidlaka “hair-splitter, nitpicker” (cepi! “split!” + dlaka “a hair”), palikuća “arsonist” (pali! “burn!” + kuća), pazikuća “someone who guards the house” (pazi! “watch!” + kuća). There is no linking vowel here: the seam is the -i of the imperative. English has the same type in pickpocket, scarecrow and killjoy. The group is small, and its words are learned whole.

Cheat sheet

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Compound words: cheat sheet

Two roots + a linking vowel: almost always -o-, even after a soft consonant (zemljotres, mišolovka); now and then -e-. Gender and declension come from the second part; the first never changes.

Noun patterns

Declension

Adjectives

They fold a phrase into one word: Crna Gora → crnogorski (but iz Crne Gore), duge godine → dugogodišnji, stara moda → staromodan, dobra namera → dobronameran, crne oči → crnook.

Solid if the first part specifies the second: tamnoplav, svetlozelen, srpskohrvatski. Hyphen if “and” fits: crno-beli, društveno-politički, srpsko-hrvatski.

Numbers

Compound numbers go in whole: petnaest → petnaestogodišnjak.

Semi-compounds (hyphen): only the second part declines

auto-put → auto-puta, auto-putem; spomen-ploča → spomen-ploče; general-major → general-majora; radio-stanica, remek-delo, rak-rana. Frozen too: Herceg Novi (two words) → u Herceg Novom, but u Novom Sadu.

Limits: an English compound ≠ a Serbian one