Serbian 601 — two letters found in a Belgrade archive, and every adjective in front of them in the genitive.
The text is a short news item: two letters written by Nikola Tesla to Radoje Janković, Yugoslavia’s consul general in New York, turned up and were bought for the Adligat museum in Belgrade. Your job is to put the English adjectives in brackets into Serbian, in the genitive.
The genitive is the case Serbian reaches for constantly — possession, absence, quantity, and after a long list of prepositions. Here it appears because of possession above all: pisma čuvenog Nikole Tesle, the letters of famous Nikola Tesla.
| Rod | Nominativ | Genitiv |
|---|---|---|
| muški / srednji | čuveni | čuvenog |
| ženski | stara | stare |
| množina, svi rodovi | bogati | bogatih |
One thing worth saying out loud: in Serbian, a man’s name declines too. Nikola Tesla becomes Nikole Tesle, and the adjective in front has to match it. English speakers tend to freeze the name and decline only the adjective, which produces sentences that are almost right and immediately wrong.
Watch out for the soft stems as well. Adjectives ending in a soft consonant take -eg rather than -og: vrući → vrućeg, loši → lošeg. Serbian keeps that distinction all the way through the case system, and it is one of the few places where a spelling rule genuinely helps.
Prevuci reči u prazna polja
Drag the words from the top into the gaps, then press Submit.
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SR (lat): Prevuci reči odozgo u prazna polja, pa pritisni Submit.
СР (ћир): Превуци речи одозго у празна поља, па притисни Submit.
EN: Drag the words from the top into the gaps, then press Submit.
Ista reč, drugi izraz — sinonimi u biografskom tekstu.
Parafraziranje, Koča Popović →