accusative, vocative, locative, and instrumental, reflecting the original seven cases of Proto-Slavic, and indeed older forms of Serbo-Croatian itself. However, in modern Shtokavian the locative has almost merged into dative (the only difference is based on accent in some cases), and the other cases can be shown declining; namely: For all nouns and adjectives, the instrumental, dative, and locative forms are identical (at least orthographically) in the plural: ženama, ženama, ženama; očima, očima, očima; riječima, riječima, riječima. There is an accentual difference between the genitive singular and genitive plural of masculine and neuter nouns, which are otherwise homonyms (seljáka, seljaka) except that on occasion an "a" (which might or might not appear in the singular) is filled between the last letter of the root and the genitive plural ending (kapitalizma, kapitalizama). The old instrumental ending "ju" of the feminine consonant stems and in some cases the "a" of the genitive plural of certain other sorts of feminine nouns is fast yielding to "i": noći instead of noćju, borbi instead of boraba and so forth. Almost every Shtokavian number is indeclinable, and numbers after prepositions have not been declined for a long time. Like most Slavic languages, there are mostly three genders for nouns: masculine, feminine, and neuter, a distinction which is still present even in the plural (unlike Russian and, in part, the Čakavian dialect). They also have two numbers: singular and plural. However, some consider there to be three numbers (paucal or dual, too), since (still preserved in closely related Slovene) after two (dva, dvije/dve), three (tri) and four (četiri), and all numbers ending in them (e.g. twenty-two, ninety-three, one hundred four, but not twelve through fourteen) the genitive singular is used, and after all other numbers five (pet) and up, the genitive plural is used. (The number one [jedan] is treated as an adjective.) Adjectives are placed in front of the noun they modify and must agree in both case and number with it. There are seven tenses for verbs: past, present, future, exact future, aorist, imperfect, and pluperfect; and three moods: indicative, imperative, and conditional. However, the latter three tenses are typically used only in Shtokavian writing, and the time sequence of the exact future is more commonly formed through an alternative construction. In addition, like most Slavic languages, the Shtokavian verb also has one of two aspects: perfective or imperfective. Most verbs come in pairs, with