Length after the stress
Lesson opening
This is the first part of the lesson. The rest, the exercises and the reviews are in the app.
Length after the stress: a long vowel without stress
In “The four accents” you took the stressed syllable apart: the tone goes up or down, the vowel is long or short; four combinations, four marks. You also saw that an unstressed vowel can be long too, when it comes after the stress. This lesson is about that vowel. Grammars call this length post-tonic length (in Serbian postakcenatska dužina, or simply neakcentovana dužina, “unaccented length”). In Serbian it is neither rare nor an ornament of careful speech: grammar hangs on it.
A long ending is what tells žénā “of women” from žèna “woman”, nȍvī “the new one” from nȍv “new”, and On vidī. “He sees” from Vidi! “Look!”. For an English ear this is hard. English trains us to swallow unstressed vowels, turning them into a quick, colourless “uh” (the first and last vowels of banana), while Serbian asks you to hold them out in full. The aim of this lesson: to hear and read the length that tells a genitive plural from a singular, to hold it where grammar depends on it, and to understand people who shorten it in fast speech.
How to read a word with marks was shown in “The four accents”: the stressed syllable is the one under an accent mark, and a vowel with a macron is held without stress. In this lesson an accent mark appears where it matters for the example, and a macron appears wherever there is post-tonic length. If a word shows only a macron, its stress is on the first syllable.
Where length can stand: three rules
Where post-tonic length can stand is strictly limited, and there are only three rules. They are short, but they explain the whole picture.
The last row is the record-holder of the school grammars: one stress and three lengths in a row. Say it with English habits and you get something like “DEH-voy-uh-kuh”, the tail swallowed; in Serbian the word sounds long and even, as if rolled out flat: Ima mnogo devōjākā. There are lots of girls here.
The main job: the genitive plural
Length does the most work in the genitive plural ending, the form a noun takes after five and higher numbers and after words like mnogo “many”, malo “few” and nekoliko “several”. This ending is always long, in all three genders: usually it is -ā; in feminine nouns ending in a consonant (noći “nights”) and a few others (ljudi “people”) it is -ī; in the old forms ruku, nogu (“of hands”, “of legs”) it is -ū: rukū, nogū. The syllable before the ending is usually long too. So the genitive plural can be recognised by ear from its “long tail”, often two long syllables in a row.
Now look at the spelling. In Vidim učenīka “I see a pupil” and Ima mnogo učenīkā “there are many pupils”, the noun is written the same: učenika. The stress is in the same place in both, and both have the long -ī- in the middle. Only the long last vowel tells “pupil” (genitive and accusative singular) from “pupils” (genitive plural). In godina “year” and godīnā “years”, the second form has two long vowels.
The pair žèna — žénā is more complicated: the accent changes as well (short rising becomes long rising), and a length appears at the end. This happens a lot, because the genitive plural likes to change the accent; the next lesson, “Stress across a word’s forms”, is about exactly that. But the reliable part of the signal is the long ending: the accent behaves differently from word to word, while the ending is always long. Note that in feminine nouns in -a the genitive singular ends in -e (žene “of a woman”), so the form that looks like the genitive plural is the nominative singular: on the page, žena is both “woman” and “of women”.
Cheat sheet
The cheat sheet — everything essential from the lesson on one page. In the app it opens at any time.
Length after the stress in brief
What it is: a long unstressed vowel (post-tonic length). Dictionaries and word cards mark it with a macron: ā ē ī ō ū, the same vowel held longer (not the “long a” of cake). A macron is not a stress mark: the stressed syllable carries the accent (ȁ ȃ à á). One accent, possibly several lengths.
| Word | Stress | Lengths |
|---|---|---|
| čȉtām: I read | 1st syllable | ām |
| jùnāk: hero | 1st syllable | āk |
| dèvōjākā: of girls | 1st syllable | three in a row |
Grammar carried by length:
| Form | Ending | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| Genitive plural (all genders) | -ā (ljúdī: -ī; rukū, nogū: -ū); the syllable before it is usually long too | pet žénā, deset godīnā, mnogo učenīkā, pet jezīkā, mnogo ljúdī: five women, ten years, many pupils, five languages, many people |
| Definite adjective | -ī, -ā, -ō | nȍv “new”, nȍvī “the new one”; nova kuća “a new house”, novā kuća “the new house” |
| Its other cases | -ōg(a), -ōm(e), -īm, -īh | novōga, novōme, novīm, novīh |
| Instrumental singular of nouns in -a | -ōm | ženōm, rukōm, vodōm |
| Comparative | -ijī, -šī | novijī, lakšī: newer, lighter |
| Present tense, all 6 forms | -ām, -īm, -ēm… | čȉtām, čȉtāš, čȉtā, čȉtāmo, čȉtāte, čȉtajū; vidīm, vidē; pišēm, pišū |
| Verbal adverb, verbal noun | -ūći / -ēći, -nje | čitajūći, radēći; čitānje, pisānje: (while) reading, (while) working; reading, writing |
Same spelling, told apart by length: godina “year”, godīnā “years”; učenīka “pupil” (Gen./Acc. singular), učenīkā “pupils”; žèna “woman”, žénā “of women” (the accent changes too; Gen. singular žene); short imperative Vidi! Radi! Uči! (look! work! study!), long 3rd person On vidī. On radī. On učī. (he sees, works, studies).
Length without grammar (learned with the word): in the stem, dèvōjka, dèčāk, jùnāk (girl, boy, hero); suffix -ōst, rȁdōst, mlȁdōst, stȁrōst (joy, youth, old age); suffix -ār, zubār, kuvār, ribār (dentist, cook, fisherman).
In real speech lengths shorten: the genitive plural and the present-tense endings hold best, the definite adjective less well, lengths inside the word go first. Many in Belgrade and Vojvodina shorten them; Torlak dialects have none. A length swallowed? A word nearby (pet, mnogo) tells you the form. Macrons appear only in dictionaries and grammars, never in ordinary text.