Universal quantifiers svaki and sav

English uses one word for three different ideas: every day, all day, all my friends. Serbian keeps them apart. svaki picks things out one at a time (every single day), sav covers the whole of one thing (all the milk, all the time), and the plural svi covers a whole group (all the students, everybody). Get the split right and you can say how often you do things and talk about whole groups and whole quantities without hesitation.

svaki: every, one at a time

svaki means every or each. Because it looks at the members one by one, the noun after it is always singular, and so is the verb: Svaki student uči (Every student studies). It agrees with its noun exactly like ovaj and taj, with the pronominal endings you already know.

This is the word that states frequency. A time noun in the bare accusative already answers when and how often; put svaki in front and it means every: svaki dan (every day), svako jutro (every morning), svako veče (every evening), svaku subotu (every Saturday), svaki put (every time). Two very common ones take the genitive instead, and are best learnt as fixed phrases: svake nedelje (every week) and svake godine (every year).

sav: the whole of one thing

sav means all in the sense of the whole of: all the money, all the food, all the time. It stays with a singular noun when that noun names one thing or one quantity. Its forms are short and a little irregular, so they are worth a table of their own.

Notice the odd one out: the masculine singular is sav, but every other form starts with sv- plus an ordinary ending: sva, svu, sve, svi. In other cases the endings follow the pronominal pattern: genitive svega (of everything), dative svemu (to everything), plural dative svima (to everyone).

sve on its own: everything

The neuter form sve works alone as a pronoun meaning everything. It is the subject or object of a sentence just like nešto from the last lesson, and the verb with it is singular: Sve je u redu (Everything is fine), Znam sve (I know everything), Sve sam kupio (I bought everything). When it is a subject in the past tense, the participle is neuter: Sve je bilo dobro.

svi: all of a group, everybody

The plural of sav means all of a group. Before a noun it agrees in gender: svi studenti, sve devojke, sva deca. On its own, svi means everybody, and the verb is plural: Svi su tu (Everybody is here), Svi znaju (Everybody knows). The past-tense participle agrees with the group: Svi su došli for a mixed or male group, Sve su došle for women only.

The confusion to avoid is svaki against svi. svaki takes the singular: svaki student uči. svi takes the plural: svi studenti uče. Both are true of every member, but svaki looks at them one by one and svi looks at the whole crowd. If the English is every or each, reach for svaki and keep the noun singular; if it is all the or everybody, reach for svi and make everything plural.

One more thing English hides: all day and the whole day is normally ceo dan in Serbian, not sav dan. sav attaches to quantities and masses (money, food, milk, time as in sve vreme), while a single stretch of time takes ceo (ceo dan, celu noć, celo leto).