Agreement with 2–4

Lesson opening

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

Agreement with 2–4: the “small plural” and the words around it

You already know the recipe: after dva, tri and četiri a noun takes a special form, the “small plural”: dva grada, tri žene, četiri sela. The lesson “Cardinals 1–10” gave you the recipe, and “Partitive & quantity” showed where it sits in the wider picture of counting. This lesson looks at the rest of the group: what happens to an adjective, a possessive and the verb, and how compound numbers such as 22 or 104 behave.

English has nothing like it: it has a singular and a plural, and two, three and fifty all take the same plural (cities). The small plural is a trace of the dual number, the ancient form for “exactly two” that you have already glimpsed in dva/dve and in ruku and nogu (“Genitive plural”). It has rules of its own: the adjective beside it does not behave as it does with a genitive, and the verb is plural. Learn them once, and counting stops tripping you up.

The small plural: one form for 2, 3 and 4

tri and četiri do not change for gender (bookish case forms such as triju are hardly ever heard), while dva/dve tells two genders apart: dva for masculine and neuter, dve for feminine. After all three the noun behaves the same way; only the ending changes, by gender:

Two cities, three friends, four pupils; two villages, three lakes, four places; two women, three books, four ladies. Feminine nouns that end in a consonant take -i: tri noći “three nights”, dve stvari “two things”. oba/obe “both” work just like dva/dve (“Cardinals 1–10”): oba grada “both cities”, obe žene “both women”. And remember your first landmark: if after such a number you see a masculine or neuter word with an -a tail, or a feminine word with an -e tail, you are looking at the small plural.

Like the genitive, but it behaves differently

The temptation is strong. You met the genitive singular earlier: grad becomes grada, žena becomes žene. Then after dva you see exactly grada, and it is only natural to file it as “genitive singular after a number”. Plenty of grammars and phrasebooks put it that way, and for the noun it works: in masculine and neuter nouns the two forms are identical, and feminine nouns in -a also look like the plural (žene). Compare:

Cheat sheet

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

Agreement with 2–4: the small plural

After 2, 3, 4, compounds ending in them (22, 33, 104) and oba/obe (“both”) a noun takes the “small plural”, a trace of the old dual. It looks like the genitive singular, but the adjective and the verb beside it have rules of their own.

Small plural endings

(cities, friends, pupils; villages, lakes, places; women, books, ladies.) Feminine nouns ending in a consonant take -i: tri noći, dve stvari. tri and četiri do not change for gender; dva/dve and oba/obe split masculine and neuter from feminine. The noun does the work.

The adjective is in the small plural too

So do words like “my”, “this” and “that”: moja dva brata, ova dva grada, te dve žene. Check the masculine: dva dobra druga, not “dva dobrog druga” (a genitive).

The genitive trap

The forms only look alike: the adjective takes -a (dobra, not dobrog), and the verb is plural.

The verb with 2–4 is plural

The participle agrees in gender: -a for masculine and neuter, -e for feminine. In conversation about people you also hear su došli. Present tense: an ordinary plural, Dva druga te čekaju.

Compounds: the last word is in charge