Taking words apart

Lesson opening

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

Taking words apart: how to understand an unknown word without a dictionary

Earlier lessons gave you the tools one by one: suffixes for nouns, adjectives and verbs, prefixes on verbs and on nouns and adjectives, compound words, prefixed verb families. This lesson puts them into one kit and runs them in reverse: instead of building a word out of parts, we take a finished word apart, the one that is not in your dictionary and that you need to understand now.

The pay-off is practical. In a job advert, a contract or a certificate you will meet words like nezaposlenost, preporučeno, neupotrebljiv, saradnik, obaveštenje, and behind almost each stands a root you know. You already do this in English: unemployment is un- + employ + -ment, unusable is un- + use + -able. Taking words apart gives you a way to read without the dictionary on every line, and a way to grow your vocabulary by multiplication: one root plus the prefixes and suffixes you know gives not one word but twenty.

A word in cross-section: four slots

The parts come in a strict order: prefix (there can be two), root, suffix (there can be several), ending. Five typical “long” words from real texts:

Chopping a word into pieces is only the first move. Real analysis goes step by step back down the chain: the word was built one step at a time, usually one part per step, and you remove the parts in reverse order. For the first word the chain runs: nezaposlenost ← nezaposlen “unemployed” ← zaposlen “employed” ← zaposliti “to employ, take on” ← posao “work, job”. Five words, four steps: at each one you either recognise the word and stop, or take one more step to the left.

Step one: strip the ending and find the root

The ending is not part of how the word is built: it changes from form to form while the word stays the same. Compare radionica, radionice, radionici, radionicom: only the tail moves, the start stays put. So first put the word into its dictionary form (a noun in the nominative, a verb in the infinitive) and mentally drop the ending.

Then comes the hunt for the root, with one technique: find a shorter relative. radionica → raditi “to work”; obaveštenje → obavestiti “to notify” → vest “a piece of news”. A relative found means the root is right. The difficulty is that a root does not always look the same: sounds change where the parts meet and disguise it like a mask. You have met four such masks; here they are together:

In practice: if a root will not come, try the mask in reverse. See ruč-, try ruk-; see -ođ-, try -od-; see -šlj-, try -sl-. That is how preporučiti “to recommend” gives away the ruka “hand” inside it, rođendan “birthday” gives away roditi “to give birth” and dan “day”, and mišljenje “opinion” gives away misliti “to think”. English roots wear masks too: the hard c of electric turns into an s sound in electricity. Serbian đ and ć hide a root more deeply: vođa “leader” hides voditi “to lead”, and plaćanje “payment” hides platiti “to pay”.

The final suffix decides what kind of word it is

The last suffix tells you the most: it shows whether you are looking at a person, a place, an idea, a quality or an action, even before you recognise the root. English works the same way: -ness and -ity make ideas, -er and -ist make people, -ize makes verbs. Here is a skeleton key put together from the three lessons on suffixes (“Noun-forming suffixes”, “Adjective-forming suffixes”, “Verb-forming suffixes”):

Hence the rule: read the word from right to left. The final suffix says what sort of word it is, the root what it is about, the prefix which way it turns the meaning. A new suffix can also change the part of speech: rad “work” (noun) → radni “working, of work” (adjective); rad → radnik “worker” (noun) → radnički “workers’, of workers” (adjective). One root, four words.

Cheat sheet

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

Taking words apart

Word = prefix + root + suffix + ending (prefiks, koren, sufiks); all the words of one root are a family. Step back down the chain, do not chop: nezaposlenost ← nezaposlen ← zaposlen ← zaposliti ← posao.

Five steps

Final suffix = kind of word

Read right to left: suffix = what it is, root = what about, prefix = which way. A prefix keeps the part of speech (red → nered, moguć → nemoguć); a suffix can change it: rad → radni; rad → radnik → radnički.

The root in a mask

The family: learn a root, get twenty words

Note a new word with its family: čitati → čitalac, čitaonica, čitanje, čitljiv.