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Serbian Noun Declension - Learn Serbian Grammar
Serbian Noun Declension - Learn Serbian Grammar
Nouns (as well as pronouns and adjectives) in Serbian have seven cases: nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, locative, instrumental and vocative, in both singular and plural.
palavras chave: serbia, serbian, language, grammar, noun, declension, cases
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I remember visiting this website once...
It was called Larisa Zlatic Study Serbian Service
Here's some stuff I remembered seeing:
Its how a noun changes (declines) its form depending on its position in a sentence, i.e., whether its a subject, a direct object, an object of a preposition. This different positioning of a noun in a sentence is called case (or pade).
Nouns (as well as pronouns and adjectives) in Serbian have seven cases: nominative, accusative, genitive, dative, locative, instrumental and vocative, in both singular and plural.
A full declensional paradigm for nouns is shown in Table 2 below. Adjectives and pronouns have similar (yet slightly different) endings and are dealt separately.
But before I suffocate you with further grammar lingo, let me give you a practical example of a noun declension. For fun, Ill decline my name: Larisa.
Table 1: Declension of proper name Larisa (feminine noun)
Larisa is a good teacher. (Larisa = subject; Larisa = nominative case)
I see Larisa. (Larisu = direct object; Larisu = accusative case)
He is giving a book to Larisa. (Larisi = indirect object; Larisi = dative case)
I am going with Larisa. (Larisom = object of preposition sa; Larisom = instrumental case)
Im going to Larisas (house). (Larise = object of preposition kod; Larise = genitive case)
As you can see, Larisas name keeps changing its phonological shape (the ending) depending on what function it has in a sentence (subject, direct object, indirect object, object of preposition).
Table 2 below shows declension patterns for all four classes of nouns (masculine, feminine, neuter, singular, plural). This table should be always in front of you when you compose a sentence, until you memorize (yes, you will) all the endings.
To make sense out of this table, you should also read descriptions of usage of each case, given in separate files.
Table 2: Suffixes (or endings) for Serbian Noun Declensions
As you can see, there are basically four declension classes, although I lumped neuter nouns in Class I, as many traditional grammars do. Each noun belongs to one of these classes depending on its phonological form of the stem. For example, a noun such as prozor (window) has a masculine gender, ljubav (love) has a feminine gender, and selo has a neuter gender. Of course, here were talking about grammatical gender and not semantic gender (maleness/femaleness), as is the case in English.
How can you tell which noun belongs to which declension class?
Follow these basic rules for classifying nouns in declension classes:
If a noun ends in a consonant, most probably its a Class I masculine noun (e.g. prozor window, kompjuter computer).
in singular nominative case (or dictionary form), its a Class I neuter noun (e.g. sel-o village, mleko milk, polj-e field, prase piglet). However, there are some male proper names that end in these vowels, and are classified as Class I masculine noun (e.g. Marko, ore, Rade), not neuter nouns. So, semantics wins!
in singular nominative case, its a Class II noun, and these nouns are feminine. There is a small group of male-denoting nouns that also end in
, (e.g, sudija judge, Steva male name, gazda master, landlord, gospoda gentlemen). But grammatically, these nouns act as feminine. So, forget about their semantics and decline them as feminine.
Class III nouns are all feminine and end in a consonant, just like Class I nouns. How then to distinguish Class I masculine nouns from Class III feminine nouns? Class III nouns typically denote abstract objects (e. g. ljubav love, smrt death, bolest illness, mladost youth).
This class of nouns is not productive, i.e. when a new noun that ends in a consonant is imported into the language, it goes into Class I (masculine nouns), not into Class III (feminine nouns). For example, the loan noun
stres (from the English stress) is classified as a Class I masculine noun. For this class of nouns, most cases end in
If this is overwhelming, dont panic! Try to tackle each case separately and learn when to use it. You can do that by browsing through individual noun-case pages and doing exercises given there.
Table 3: Some examples of noun declensions used in sentences
Beograda = direct object of the noun razglednice (genitive)
*There is a group of reflexive verbs (verbs that always occur with the reflexive pronoun se) that take the genitive case, not the accusative case. For details, read about the usage of genitive case.
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