The part of the grammar page this lesson drills — read it here, then use it.
Rule 2 - enclitics carry no stress of their own
A closed set of short words - the enclitics - are never stressed. They lean on the stressed word before them and, just like the short form of бити covered earlier, can never begin a sentence or stand alone.
The full list is in the table below: the short forms of бити, the short personal pronouns, the reflexive се, and the question particle ли. When two enclitics land next to each other, they cluster in a fixed order right after the first stressed word.
Rule 3 - some consonant changes are written, some are not
When a voiced and a voiceless consonant meet at a morpheme boundary, Serbian spelling changes to match the pronunciation: под- (under) + -пис (writing) is written потпис (signature), with д devoiced to т in the spelling itself - the assimilation is written into the word, not merely pronounced.
On the other hand, Serbian does not mechanically devoice a consonant just because it sits at the end of a word. A word like друг (friend) keeps a normally voiced г in careful Serbian speech and always keeps it in writing - do not automatically turn final б/д/г/ж/з into п/т/к/ш/с out of habit.
| Kind | Words |
|---|---|
| Kratki oblici „biti“ | sam, si, je, smo, ste, su |
| Kratke lične zamenice | me, te, ga, je, ju, nas, vas, ih, mi, ti, mu, joj, nam, vam, im |
| Rečca i povratna zamenica | li, se |