First palatalisation

Lesson opening

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

First palatalisation: k, g, h → č, ž, š

One and the same Serbian root sometimes has k, g, h and sometimes č, ž, š: junak but junače, Bog but Bože, duh but duše. This is the first palatalisation: in some forms of a word, k, g, h are replaced by č, ž, š. The idea is less foreign than it looks: English went through the same change long ago and still keeps the fossils, speak but speech, bake but batch. But in English the change is frozen in a few old words, while in Serbian it is a living rule of grammar. This lesson shows where Serbian applies it. You have already met two alternations of this kind, in “Fleeting a” and “Voicing assimilation”; palatalisation is the next in the series. The vocative (Bože!, druže!) and the conjugation of verbs like peći and moći depend on it.

Each sound moves from the back of the mouth to the front: k becomes č, the ch of church; g becomes ž, the s of pleasure; h (the Scottish ch of loch) becomes š, the sh of ship. English speak → speech is the first pair in miniature. Now for the three places where Serbian uses this rule most often.

1. The vocative case

The most frequent home of palatalisation is the vocative, the case you use when you call or address someone. English has no such case (it simply says “Friend!”), but Serbian changes the noun itself, and masculine nouns take the ending -e (we covered the forms in “Vocative forms”). When you call out to someone and the stem ends in k, g or h, that consonant must change:

Hence the living forms of address you will hear every day:

The same goes for rođak (relative, cousin) → rođače and đak (pupil) → đače: only the final consonant changes, and the đ in the root stays. Čoveče! is an everyday call, like English “Man!”. And remember that only the -e of address brings the change. Other forms of the same word keep the k: vojniku (“to the soldier”), vojnika (“of the soldier”), while the plural vojnici (“soldiers”) is already sibilarisation. Nouns in c behave in a similar way: stric → striče, otac → oče (“Vocative forms”).

Cheat sheet

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First palatalisation: k, g, h → č, ž, š

Rule: the velars k, g, h (made at the soft palate) turn into č, ž, š before the -e of address or of a verb and before a number of suffixes. An -e that ends another case changes nothing: ruke, junake. Not a “softening”: the sound is replaced. In Serbian: prva palatalizacija.

1. Vocative: the most frequent place

2. Verbs: present tense and aorist

3. Word formation