Day 3: some word formation, verb conjugation

It's now day 3. Skimming through the grammar yesterday I found the section on word derivation to be particularly interesting so let's see if I can find any examples of interesting derivation in the dictionary. The Latin-like derivations (nevtralni, telivizijni, tradicijni, etc.) don't need to be included since as an English speaker those are already easy....except -ovati I suppose. Let's look for examples of -ovati (English -ate, -ize, etc.):

accept - akceptovati
bloc - blok (m. noun), becomes blokovati (to block)
cancel - anulovati...

A search reveals 220+ entries that end in -ovati so looks like this suffix is crucial to remember.

Diminutives are formed by either -ok or -ik for masculine nouns (the former if they end in a hard consonant), -ka for feminine, and -ko for neuter. This is from the word stem though and not the word itself, so kniga becomes knižka and not knigaka for booklet.


I recognize the formation bez-(noun)-nik from the former Soviet magazine called Bezbožnik (atheist/Godless person), so I guess technically bezknižnik would be a bookless person too. Headless person would be bezglovnik.

Verb to noun - a person doing something is -tel', formed from a verb. Naučiti (to teach) becomes naučitel' (teacher). Let's look for some others:

abductor - pohititel', from pohititi.
buyer - kupovatel', from kupovati.
donor - daritel', from dariti.
follower - posledovatel', from sledovati.
judge - suditel', from suditi.

Okay, that's enough of that for now. Let's get back to verb conjugation.

Past tense looks to be really easy, just -l on the stem, and add -a, -o, -i to that if you are feminine, neuter or plural. I'm a guy so that's just -l when I do things in the past tense.

Drink - piti, so ja pil is I drank.
Ponder - dumati, so ja dumal is I pondered.
Travel - putovati, so ja putoval is I travelled. I see an example of that on the Slovianski forum too.

Easy.

Now I want to travel with a plane (samolet, m.) in the past tense. Ja dumal samoletom.

Future tense is easy, and just uses biti in the future with the infinitive. For me that becomes ja budu (I will be) and the other forms are ti budeš, on/ona/ono bude, mi budemo, vi budete, oni budut.

My cat will sleep - moj kot bude nočovati.
Your girlfriend will not die - tvoja prijatel'ka ne bude umirati.
Our countries will not disappear - naše deržavi ne budut izčezati.

Imperative looks like fun, it's just -j (or -ij) after the stem, and add an extra -mo to that for let's, and -te for second person plural.

So...use! becomes... koristaj! or koristajte! and let's use! becomes koristajmo! All from koristati.


I may write some more later on today, but that's it for this morning.