This is the first part of the lesson. The rest, the exercises and the reviews are in the app.
Irregular nouns: the list you need to know
The Serbian noun system almost fits into three declensions (families of case endings) and three gendered plural endings. Almost: left outside is a list of words that earlier lessons put off “until later”. Later has come: today we collect the nouns that break their own pattern.
There are only a few dozen, but they include the most frequent words of the language: čovek “man, person”, dete “child”, ime “name”, dan “day”, tata “dad”. They are learned as a list, and English has quirks of the same kinds: child → children, person → people.
The stem grows: ime → imena, dete → deteta
The first group: neuters in -e. They are short in the nominative, but as soon as an ending is added, an extra piece grows between stem and ending. There are two such pieces: -en- in a handful of old words (ime, vreme, rame), -et- in the young of people and animals and a few other words, such as dugme “button” (dugmeta).
English knows the trick from Greek borrowings: drama but dramatic, where the short form hides the t of the stem, just as ime hides its n. The group also includes prezime “surname” → prezimena, pleme “tribe” → plemena and rame “shoulder” → ramena.
Nemam vremena za to.I don’t have time for that.
Children and young animals in -et- have no ordinary plural: its place is taken by a collective noun, one word naming the whole group.
The singular and the plural live separate lives: deca declines like the singular žena (dece, deci, decu, decom). Children are usually counted with the collective numerals: dvoje dece “two children”, troje dece “three children”; dva deteta is heard too, but less often (the lesson “Collective numerals”). In the same way jagnjad, pilad and unučad stand in for the plurals of jagnje “lamb”, pile “chick” and unuče “grandchild”; the lesson “Pluralia tantum & collectives” showed how they decline and that their verb may be plural or singular.
Ovo dete ima pet godina.This child is five years old.
There is also an -es- piece, but it has almost died out. The liveliest survivor is nebo “sky, heaven”: its usual plural is nebesa (Gen. nebesa, Dat. nebesima), much like the English the heavens. Other words in this group, čudo, telo and slovo, have two plurals: an ordinary one, čuda, tela, slova, and a bookish, solemn one, čudesa, telesa, slovesa (the plurals of “wonder”, “body” and “letter”, in the old sense “word”).
In practice: say nebesa, čuda, tela freely; the -es- forms you only need to recognise in songs, poems and sermons.
Words in -in: a suffix that vanishes in the plural
Now the opposite: the stem shrinks. A class of masculine nouns carries the suffix -in in the singular and drops it without a trace in the plural. The class is recognised by meaning: one person out of a group, a resident of a town, a member of a nation or community.
Likewise Beograđanin “a Belgrader” → Beograđani, seljanin “villager” → seljani. The rule in one line: singular in -in or -anin, plural without the suffix, with a bare -i, and never the long -ovi. But not every final -in is this suffix: in delfin “dolphin”, benzin “petrol” and magazin “magazine” it is part of the root (delfini, magazini). Test by meaning: one person out of a group loses it; a thing or an animal keeps it. There are exceptions among people too: domaćin “host” → domaćini.
Beograđani vole svoju reku.Belgraders love their river.
Cheat sheet
The cheat sheet — everything essential from the lesson on one page. In the app it opens at any time.
Irregular nouns
Four kinds: the stem grows or shrinks, the plural is another word, men in the žena declension. Plus two plurals.