Breakdown of Spavao sam tijekom dugog govora.
biti
to be (sam, si, je)
spavati
to sleep
dug
long
tijekom
during
Questions & Answers about Spavao sam tijekom dugog govora.
Why do we say dugog govora instead of dug govor?
The preposition tijekom (during) always requires the Genitive case. To match this, the masculine noun govor (speech) adds an -a to become govora, and the adjective dug (long) takes the masculine genitive ending -og to become dugog.
Could I write dugoga instead of dugog here?
Yes! Adjectives in the masculine and neuter Genitive often have an optional -a at the end. Both dugog and dugoga are perfectly correct and mean the exact same thing, though dugog is a bit more common in everyday speech.
Why use the imperfective verb spavao (was sleeping) instead of a perfective verb?
Spavati (to sleep) is an imperfective verb, which describes an ongoing state or process. Using it with tijekom shows that your sleeping was an ongoing background action that happened at the same time as the speech. If you wanted to say a completed action like "I fell asleep during the speech," you would use the perfective verb zaspao.
How do we know the speaker of this sentence is male?