An Italian cellist’s journey into Serbian Language — Lesson 8

Accents

The next chapter in our journey puts us against a very complex topic: accents. Every language has accents, since one needs to know what syllable to stress and what not. This determines the musicality of the language, with its intonation, crescendos and diminuendos, pauses, emphases, lengthening and shortening. For a musician, this is possibly the most fascinating topic ever!

This topic is usually studied by Serbian natives in the 7th and 8th grade of the primary school, and was part of the final exam. At the beginning of the XXI century, though, this was removed from the exam as it was deemed too difficult and the success/failure rate was too unsatisfactory. This gives you a hint of what we are up against.

Introduction

The Serbian language has four accents, classified by intonation (ascending or descending) and by the length of the vocal upon which they fall (long or short). Furthermore, the letter Р (R) can function as a vocal and accept one of four accents:

Accent (Акценат)	Ascending (Узлазни – Ascendenti)	Descending (Силазни – Discendenti)
Long (Дуги – Lungo)	Acute accent (´)	Circumflex accent (ˆ)
Short (Кратки – Corto))	Grave accent (`)	Double grave accent (˵)

Trying to memorise them has proven very hard for me. A trick I found is this: if the accent has any component towards the right-hand side, then it is a long one. I realise this is different in English and Italian, since “grave” is used in Italian to indicate low-frequency sounds (or “bass” sounds), but it can work anyway. Try to think of a piano keyboard: low-pitched sounds are towards the left and high-pitched sounds are towards the right. So are the grave and acute accents.

Now, talking to native Serbians who will always pronounce better than me and who have an unmatchable awareness of words’ pronunciation, I was told that the difference between a descending and ascending accept is almost imperceptible, whereas that between a long and short one is apparent. I asked them to read from my book several words marked with ascending and descending accents of the same length, and we both came to the same conclusion: this is not at all a priority at this point in my journey. I believe that a different direction of accent may influence the declination of cases in a certain word, but we are not there yet.

Rules

Every word can only have one accent. Its kind and position depend on the word’s length. For example:

1. monosyllabic words can only have a descending accent, either long or short:
   
   1. LONG: Дŷг (long – lungo), Дâн (day – giorno), нôћ (night – notte)
   2. SHORT: Трг (square – piazza), Сȁн (dream – sogno)¹
2. Descending accent can appear only on the first syllable: рâдимо (we work – lavoriamo), рȁтник (warrior – guerriero)
3. polysyllabic words can have all four accents: Другáрица (friend (f.) — amica), Девóјчица (young girl – ragazzina), Истина² (truth – verità), Судбина³ (destiny – destino), Лепòта (beauty – bellezza), Пишемо⁴ (we write – scriviamo), Жȁлостан (sad – triste).
4. Disyllabic words always have the accent on the first syllable: лéђа (back (body part) – schiena), дéте (child – bambino).
5. Accents can never appear on the last syllable.

If you thought this was hard enough, well, it is not, since the position of an accent inside the same word is not fixed, but can change during the declination of the same. For example, the nominative singular of the word for earth (terra – зèмља) has a short ascending accent on the first vowel, while its genitive plural has a long ascending accent on the second vowel: земáља. We have not yet seen anything about declination, so we will leave it there as a teaser.

Exceptions

The meaning of some words can change in base of the accent, in the following cases:

1. Words can keep the same general meaning, but change the accent’s position during the declination (as we saw above).
2. Words written in the same way, and with the same kind of accent, but placed on different syllables, change meaning: зèлени (green – verde) as an adjective is different from зелèни (green (v.) — verdeggia) as verb.
3. Words written in the same way, with the same accented syllable, but with a different kind of accent: Грâд (city – città) and грȁд (hailstorm – grandine)

Bottom Line

That’s it for today, since the next subject is quite deep and can be confusing: proclitic and enclitic words.

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See you (hopefully soon) for another lesson.

1. So far, I could not find a way to write the double grave accent diacritic over the letter р. ↩
2. Long, ascending accent on first letter ↩
3. Long, ascending accent on у ↩
4. Long, descending accent on и ↩