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Easy Croaan (rev. 47b) / 20 At My Friend’s: Genive 116 / 600
20 At My Friend’s: Genitive
There’s another case to learn, and it’s a very useful case. It’s used in constructions
like my sister’s apartment and car keys, but also in measuring, counting, with many
prepositions, etc. It’s called genitive (just G for short). In some other languages (e.g.
German) the genitive case is mainly associated with possession. In Croatian,
expressing possession is just one of many uses of the genitive case, and it’s not its
main use!
Nouns get the following endings in genitive:
noun type (N)
G
nouns in -a (≈ fem.) -a → -e
neuter nouns (≈ in -o, -e) -o or -e → -a
masc. nouns not in -a add -a
fem. not in -a (e.g. noć) add -i
As for the DL case, the endings of most masc. nouns and or neuter nouns are the
same, and there’s no distinction for people and animals.
We can put it immediately to use. First, it’s used when English uses something-ofsomething,
e.g.:
kraj filma end of the movie
The second word is always in G, regardless of the role the whole phrase gets. If you
use the phrase when e.g. the DL case is required, only the first word changes:
To N je na kraju DL filma G . That’s at the end of the movie.
This construction is frequently used when something ‘belongs’ to something, but it’s
not possession:
broj telefona phone number
vlasnik bicikla bicycle owner
ključ auta car key
vrh planine mountain top
While in such expressions in English, phone and car are used like adjectives, in
Croatian they are nouns in genitive (lit. number of the phone, top of the mountain,
etc.) If you want to describe a noun (e.g. vrh peak) with an adjective, you need to
adapt the adjective to the noun gender and case, and normally place it in front of
the noun (in poetry and some other circumstances, the adjective can be after the
noun):
visoki vrh (N, N)
na visokom vrhu (DL, DL)
But if you describe a noun with another noun, you should put it after the noun, in the
G case, and it stays in the G case, no matter what! (Another way is to turn the noun