Instrumental of means

Lesson opening

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

Instrumental of means: with what and how

English has no instrumental case, so every time it wants to say with what, by what means or in what way, it reaches for a preposition: with a pen, by bus, by post, in a whisper. Serbian does the same job with a single ending. The first and most visible task of the instrumental is the tool and the means: what you write with, cut with, travel by, pay by. Pišem olovkom, sečem nožem, putujem autobusom: the tool simply goes into the instrumental, with no preposition at all.

You built the forms in the lesson “Instrumental forms”: -om/-em for masculine and neuter nouns, -om for nouns in -a, -i/-ju for feminine nouns ending in a consonant, and the shared -ima/-ama in the plural. This lesson is about meanings: the tool, the means, transport, the channel, the manner of an action, and the adverbs that froze in this case. One question will carry you through all of them.

A tool without a preposition: čime pišeš?

Ask “with what?” and the answer goes into the instrumental. Serbian puts no s in front of a tool, although English puts with there every time (this matters, and the mistake is shown below):

Notice what happens to the English. The preposition changes (with a knife, by card), but the Serbian stays the same: the noun in the instrumental, nothing in front of it. So don’t translate the English preposition; translate the question. Keep čime? (with what?) as your test: whenever it fits, use the bare instrumental. The tool can also be plural (Slikam bojama, I paint with colours; gledam očima, I look with my eyes); then the shared plural ending -ima/-ama from “Instrumental forms” does the work, and there is still no preposition.

The case English lost

To see what one ending buys you, look at English. Where Serbian uses one word, English needs a preposition: by bus, with a knife, by hand. A whole family of meanings (“with what”, “how”, “by which route”) that Serbian carries in an ending has to be assembled in English from a preposition and a noun. Yet English once had an instrumental too, and one fragment of it has survived into the present day in a most unexpected word: why, once the instrumental of Old English hwæt, “what”.

Cheat sheet

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

Instrumental of means: with what and how

The first job of the instrumental: the tool and the means. Test question čime? (with what? how?); always the instrumental with no preposition, whatever English puts in front (with, by, at, in). Forms (-om/-em, -om for nouns in -a, -i/-ju, -ima/-ama): see “Instrumental forms”.

Tool

Means and channel

Manner: exactly how

Frozen adverbs

Verbs that govern the instrumental