International and English words

Lesson opening

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

International and English words: a foreign word with a Serbian passport

Much of the “difficult” Serbian vocabulary you know already: informacija, univerzitet, direktor, kultura, kapitalizam, telefon need no translation. But recognising a word and bending it correctly are two different things. An international word does not enter Serbian as it is: it gets a Serbian cut, and the cut is systematic. The ending tells you both the gender and the declension. The same conveyor belt works on English today: where Serbian once took in ministar, it now takes in menadžer.

Key one: the English ending predicts the Serbian one

The correspondences hold almost without exception: learn a dozen endings and you get thousands of words, and with each ending the gender (masculine, feminine or neuter), which English cannot give you.

The last row needs attention: -aža words end in -a and are feminine (ova montaža, jedna masaža), while muzej and jubilej are ordinary masculine nouns: u muzeju, do jubileja. Note that fakultet is a school within a university, not its teaching staff.

Key two: where the Serbian form parts company with English

The correspondences work until you hit four points of divergence; they produce almost all the mistakes.

First: Serbian keeps the Latin -ium in full. It is spelled -ijum: kriterijum, auditorijum, sanatorijum, and beside them akvarijum, simpozijum, medijum, podijum. The trap is criterion, which English took in its Greek form: Serbian follows Latin criterium. The Croatian standard trims the whole group to -ij (kriterij, akvarij, simpozij). But the rule is not universal: comment and commentary are both the short komentar, and the media are mediji.

Second: the gender comes from the Serbian ending. English gives no help, and other languages can mislead: a group of Greek words ends in -a in Latin, Spanish and Italian (problema, sistema), which suggests feminine. In Serbian they end in a consonant, so they are masculine, with all the consequences for the adjective and the verb.

pet minuta is not feminine: after pet “five” comes the genitive plural, minuta.

Third: Greek chi. English writes it ch and says k (chemistry, chaos, choir). Serbian reads it the Greek way and writes and says h, as in Scottish loch: hemija, hirurg, haos, hor, hronika (hirurg is a surgeon). Your k is what the Croatian standard has: kemija, kirurg, kaos. The same split runs through Evropa and Europa, evro and euro. A few words came another way and kept k: karakter, orkestar.

Fourth: meaning. A shared root does not guarantee a shared sense. Three traps:

Cheat sheet

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International and English words

A loan gets a Serbian gender, declension and register; the ending gives the first two.

Endings: English → Serbian

Four divergences

Fleeting a and words in -ista

The anglicism

Loanword or native word