Здраво и добро дошао, Brazilian dude!
Brazilian dude wrote:Живим у Бразилљи (и?)
Живим у Бразил
у.
Бразил is a masculine noun, and in this case the preposition у must go with locative. The locative singular ending for masculine nouns ending in a consonant is
-у.
Brazilian dude wrote: Of all those four languages, I think it has a striking resemblance to Macedonian, and having learned it has helped me a lot to understand Serbian.
I'm glad that somebody else is interested in macedonian. (I'm trying to learn it too.
)
Brazilian dude wrote:One question though. When you mentioned plurals with broadening that add evi or ovi, I thought of Macedonian, which has the same thing when the nouns is monosyllabic. Could that as well be the case in Serbian? All the examples I have seen with ovi or evi were of monosyllabic words, so I was wondering.
Well, yes, -ov-/-ev- broadening does affect mostly monosyllabic words, while mostly words with more than one syllable haven't got this characteristics - you just ad -i. Though this is NOT a rule. There are many examples of monosyllabic words that don't have a broadening (pas -> psi, reč -> reči, konj -> konji), and there are a few examples of words with more than 1 syllable taking the -ov-/-ev- infix.
- some of them are those that have dual forms:
* lišaj -> lišajevi / lišaji (lichen)
* gavran -> gavranovi / gavrani (raven)
* mehur -> mehurovi / mehuri(bubble)
- some of them are compound nouns, made out of a monosyllabic word which broadens and a prefix:
* međusprat -> međuspratovi (mezzanine) - sprat -> spratovi (floor in serbian)
* međukat -> međukatovi (mezzanine) - kat -> katovi (floor in croatian)
* mikrofilm -> mikrofilmovi (microfilm) - film -> filmovi
* podšef -> podšefovi (assistant director; literally 'vice-boss') - šef -> šefovi (boss, chief)
* polukrug -> polukrugovi (semicircle) - krug -> krugovi (circle)
- and finnally I have found two words that are monosyllabic, but don't directly fit into the above classification:
* feribot -> feribotovi (ferryboat) - but this is a foreign word, (even though in english it is a compound word, in serbian it's not, neither bot nor feri mean anything.) and I guess feriboti would sound a bit weird.
* mozak -> mozgovi (brain) - this is a noun that has two phonologic alternations: 1) the a has disappered 2) and that caused the assimilation of consonants (voiceless k had to change into voiced g, because it was behind a voiced consonant
). But even if the nominative singular has two syllables, the grammatical stem of the word "mozak" is "mozg-", which has only one syllable. So it could be treated as a monosyllabic word.
Brazilian dude wrote: I’d just like to know where to place the stress in Serbian (apparently it’s not so regular like Macedonian, Czech, and Polish, closer to Russian in this aspect).
The stress can fall on any syllable, except for the last one. I'm afraid there are no rules, but at least it doesn't affect the pronunciation so drasticly as in russian.
Once again, welcome, thanks for joining and good luck !