This is the first part of the lesson. The rest, the exercises and the reviews are in the app.
Spatial prepositions with the genitive
If Serbian cases held a contest for “most popular with prepositions”, the genitive would win by a mile: more prepositions take it than any other case, so you could call it “the case of prepositions”. English nouns stay the same after a preposition (from the city, near the river); in Serbian the preposition chooses the case of the noun after it, and a whole family of them chooses the genitive. It starts with space: from where, as far as where, at whose place, above and below, between and around. For all of these Serbian has prepositions that take the genitive.
This lesson covers the prepositions of place and of “from where, as far as where”: od, do, iz, s(a), kod, oko, pored, blizu, iznad, ispod, ispred, iza, između, van, preko puta. The genitive’s other prepositions, of cause, purpose, time and more (zbog: because of; radi: for the sake of; tokom: during; protiv: against; umesto: instead of), wait for a later lesson, “Abstract & temporal genitive prepositions”.
Source and goal: od, iz, s, do
We start with four prepositions of the “reference point”: three say “from where”, one says “as far as where”. It is no accident that they take the genitive: long ago the genitive absorbed an older case that meant “from where”.
od and do often come as a pair: od kuće do posla, from home to work.
A subtle but important pair is iz versus s(a), and here English is no help, because it says from for both. iz is coming out of something (you were in the city → iz grada); s(a) is coming off a surface (it lay on the table → sa stola; you were at work → s posla). The trick: remember where you were. If you were u (in) a place, you leave it with iz; if you were na (on, at) it, you leave it with s(a). You come out of the house but home from work, and in Serbian that is iz kuće, but s posla. If you were at someone’s place (kod), “from” is od: kod lekara → od lekara; you cannot come out of a person. Go by the Serbian u or na, not by English: na fakultetu (at university) → sa fakulteta (from university).
Nearness: kod, pored, blizu, oko
The second group places something close to a landmark. The one that stands out is kod, which English has no single word for (French has one: chez).
Cheat sheet
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Spatial prepositions with the genitive
The genitive takes more prepositions than any other case; the spatial ones fall into three bundles.
Source and goal: od, iz, s(a), do
Nearness: kod, pored, blizu, oko
Relative position: iznad, ispod, ispred, iza, između, van