by At the end of last month I wrote my first in a series of posts on the Serbian language, where I mostly talked about the Cyrillic and Latin alphabets. Here is part two.
English doesn’t have grammatical gender. Tables and eggs and combine harvesters aren’t male or female or somewhere in between. For anyone trying to learn it, that’s a real blessing. English pronouns are gendered, however. How many genders English pronouns have isn’t quite clear, especially as all sorts of weird and wonderful creations like xe and zir and emself have cropped up in recent years. (I never teach any of that stuff, but I bet some English teachers do. I do however touch on singular they occasionally.)
Serbian, on the other hand, has three genders, masculine, feminine and neuter, whether you’re dealing with nouns or pronouns. Romanian also features a neuter gender which acts as masculine in the singular and feminine in the plural, but Serbian isn’t like that: it has three distinct genders that act in three separate ways. A horse (konj, a three-letter word because nj counts as a single letter) is masculine, a cat (mačka) is feminine, and a tree (drvo) is neuter. A useful rule of thumb is that nouns ending in a consonant are masculine, those ending in -a are feminine, and those that end in -o ar -e are neuter. There are exceptions, though.
So how do you say “a cat” or “the cat”? “A horse” or “the horse”? The answer is, you don’t! Like most Slavic languages, there are no articles at all in Serbian. There’s no equivalent of a or an or the. Like the situation with genders I mentioned above, this is another example of having features in common with Romanian, but more “extreme” compared to what I’m used to in English. (Romanian has words for a and an but no word for the; to make a noun definite you instead have to alter or add letters to the end of the word.)
I’m quite happy with Serbian’s lack of articles. Definite articles in particular can be a minefield, as I’ve found out whilst learning Romanian and as an English teacher. It isn’t at all obvious to a non-native speaker that “Pacific Ocean” needs the in front of it, but “Central Park” doesn’t, and I commonly hear things like “after the lunch” or “both my parents are the teachers”. Even textbooks sometimes make mistakes here; one of my books tells you never to use the with islands. The author has obviously never been to New Zealand. As yet, I’m not sure what Serbians use to get round their lack of articles, but they seem to make extensive use of their words for “this” and “that”. I’ll talk about those in my next post in the series.
As for the gendered pronouns, these are on, ona and ono for he, she and it respectively. For “they”, you use oni for a group of men or a mixed-gender group containing at least one man; one for a group of women only; and ona for a group of things that are neuter. (Children happen to be neuter too, so you use ona when talking about kids, no matter whether they’re boys or girls or a mixture.) There’s a big added complication here, and that’s cases. The pronouns I’ve just mentioned only apply to the most simple nominative case, which we use when the pronoun is the object of the verb, as in a sentence like “He is happy” which would be On je srećan.
