Genitive plural

Lesson opening

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

The genitive plural: the hardest form

You already know the genitive singular (grada, žene, noći, from “Genitive singular forms”). Its plural is a separate and much trickier beast, and for a foreign learner it is one of the hardest forms in Serbian. Not because there are many endings (there are only three) but because they come with a set of traps: an inserted vowel, an ending that makes a word look like its dictionary form on paper (pet žena, “five women”), and a handful of words left over from the days when nouns had three numbers, not two: the singular, the plural and a special one for pairs.

Why do you need the form at all? It turns up exactly where English puts a plural after a number or an amount: after numbers from five up (pet gradova, five cities; in longer numbers the last word decides, as in “Cardinals 1–10”: dvadeset pet gradova, but dvadeset jedan grad), after words of quantity (mnogo ljudi, a lot of people; nekoliko knjiga, several books), after many prepositions (iznad krovova, above the roofs) and for possession and negation in the plural (nemam para, I have no money). Without it you cannot say “five books” or “lots of friends”.

The ending -ā: the main one and the most frequent

The long -ā is the workhorse of the genitive plural. Almost all masculine nouns take it, nearly all neuters, and most feminine nouns in -a. In writing it is a plain “a”, but it is pronounced long, held for a moment longer than an ordinary Serbian a. That length is how a Serbian ear tells the genitive plural apart from look-alike forms.

Look at žena → žena and knjiga → knjiga: here the genitive plural looks exactly like the nominative singular. Only the length of the final a and the context tell them apart: pet žena can only be “five women”, never “five woman”. This is no misprint: the form does have an ending, the long -ā, which just happens to be written with the same letter.

The inserted a: the main trap

Here is where the real difficulty lies. When a stem (the word without its ending) ends in two consonants, Serbian will not let them pile up in front of the long -ā. It slips an a in between them. This is the same a you met in “Fleeting a”: there it drops out (pas → psa), here it appears, and masculine nouns that lost their fleeting a in the other cases get it back: momak, momka, momaka (of young men); pas, psa, pasa (of dogs).

The rule of thumb: look at the consonants where the stem ends. If, once you drop the final vowel, you are left with “sestr-”, “pism-”, “kart-”, the language inserts an a before the last consonant: sestara, pisama, karata. Where there is only one consonant (žena → žen-, grad → grad-) there is nothing to break up, and the bare ending is all you get. And some feminine nouns in -a take -i instead of an inserted a: majka → majki (of mothers), torba → torbi (of bags).

Cheat sheet

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The genitive plural: the hardest form

Three endings: long -ā, -i and the relics -u / -iju. The difficulty is not the choice but the traps: the inserted a, and a Gen. plural that looks like the Nom. singular (pet žena, “five women”).

Three endings

The inserted a: the main trap

Masculines: -ov- / -ev-

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