The pluperfect

Lesson opening

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

The pluperfect: the past before the past

You already have three past tenses. The perfect došao sam reports a fact, the aorist dođoh puts a full stop, the imperfect dolažah draws a line. All three look at the past from today. The fourth, the pluperfect, works differently: it moves the observer into the past and from there points at something that happened even earlier.

“Got to the station” is the past; “had left” is the past before that past. Here English speakers are on home ground: “had left”, “had forgotten”, “had already eaten” are exactly this tense, and English uses it every day. The difference is how often. Serbian has kept the form: in the standard it is a full tense, and every grammar gives it. In everyday speech, though, its work is usually done by the plain perfect with već “already”, ranije “earlier” or pre toga “before that”, where English would still say “had”. You still need to recognise it, because it is common in written stories, and you will learn to build it in five minutes: you already hold every piece.

Two builds: bio sam došao and bejah došao

You know both bricks of the pluperfect already. The first is a past form of biti, and it comes in two varieties: the perfect (bio sam, bio si, bio je, bili smo, bili ste, bili su) or the imperfect from the lesson “The imperfect” (bejah, bejaše, bejasmo, bejaste, bejahu, short beh, beše, besmo, beste, behu). The second brick is the l-participle of the main verb: došao, došla, došlo, došli, došle. Put the two bricks together and the tense is ready.

Hence the two builds. With the perfect of biti you get the everyday variant, the one people write and say; with the imperfect you get the bookish one: it lives only in books, and is rare even there, so you will almost never say it yourself. The meaning is the same; only the register, bookish or everyday, differs.

Look at how the forms add up. In the first build the person is carried by the clitic, a short word that cannot stand first in a sentence (sam, si, je, smo, ste, su), and gender and number by both participles at once. In the second the person sits in the imperfect ending (-h, -še, -smo, -ste, -hu), so gender is shown only by the participle of the main verb: a man says bejah došao, a woman bejah došla.

In ijekavian pronunciation the bookish build sounds bijah rekao, bješe rekao; the two pronunciations were the subject of the lesson “Ekavian & ijekavian”.

Two participles, and both agree

The main mechanical difficulty of the pluperfect is agreement. It has two participles, and both adjust to the subject in gender and number. Conditional II, the past “would” (bio bih uradio “I would have done it”), is built the same way and follows the same rule: change the gender and you change both forms at once. English “had come” never changes, so this is where your attention has to go.

One picture fixes the rule: the two participles always match in gender and number, like a pair of shoes. If you see bila, the next form is došla, not došao.

The auxiliary clitic behaves as it does in the perfect: it looks for the second position and never opens the sentence. The first word can be anything, a participle, an adverb, an object, and sam comes straight after it. You have already met the second-position rule; here it works without change, and so does the queue of clitics from the lesson “Internal clitic order”: sam, si, smo, ste, su come before a pronoun, je after it. Bio sam mu rekao “I had told him”, but Bio mu je rekao “he had told him”.

Cheat sheet

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

The pluperfect

Past of biti + l-participle (“I had done”): the action was completed before another point in the past. A full standard tense, but in speech the perfect with već usually does its work.

Two builds

Agreement: both participles

• Clitic in second position: Voz je već bio otišao. The train had already left. je after a pronoun: Bio mu je rekao.
• Negate the auxiliary: Nisam bio rekao da dolazim. I hadn't said I was coming.
• Question: Da li si bio pročitao pismo? Had you read the letter?
• Check: bio sam without a second participle is just the perfect of biti: Bio sam bolestan “I was ill” against Bio sam zaboravio “I had forgotten”.

Two meanings

• What came first: needs a second point (kad, pošto, pre nego što, već): Kad smo stigli, gosti su već bili otišli. When we arrived, the guests had already left. Pošto je bio završio posao, seo je da se odmori. After he had finished the work, he sat down to rest.
• Reported speech: Rekla mi je da je bila izgubila ključeve. She told me she had lost her keys. Usually just the perfect: da je izgubila.
• Cancelled action (colloquial; ali or pa follows): Bio sam kupio kartu, ali sam je izgubio. I had bought a ticket, but I lost it. Bio sam krenuo, pa sam se predomislio. I had set off, but then I changed my mind.
• Aspect usually perfective; imperfective adds “long ago and no longer true”: Bio sam radio u toj firmi. I had once worked at that company.

Five constructions on the l-participle