EasyCroatian_r47.an

Easy Croaan (rev. 47b) / 24 Past Tense 140 / 600
sam², where the auxiliary verb goes to the second position, and the past form
can, in principle, be anywhere:
Goran N je jednog hladnog zimskog dana G čuo... On a cold winter day, Goran
heard...
(Expressions like jednog hladnog zimskog dana will be explained later.) When
you see an auxiliary verb, the matching past form (or an adjective) can be
sometimes far away!
You have to be careful with the impersonal use of verbs. That’s whenever English
uses “dummy” it, but also in impressions. From now on, I will mark all impersonal
verbs in the present tense with a small circle (°):
Hladno je°. It’s cold.
Hladno mi DL je°. I’m cold. (lit. ‘It’s cold to me.’)
1
Drago nam DL je°. We’re glad. (lit. ‘It’s dear to us.’)
1pl
Dosta mu DL je°. He had enough.
3m/n
All such sentences in the past tense always use neuter singular past forms:
Bilo je hladno. It was cold.
Bilo mi DL je hladno. I was cold. (lit. ‘It was cold to me.’)
1
Bilo nam DL je drago. We were glad. (lit. ‘It was dear to us.’)
1pl
Bilo mu DL je dosta. He has had enough.
3m/n
Now you see why I have marked impersonal verbs in present tense with a °: it
reminds you that you have to use the neuter singular in the past tense – a form that
ends in -o. Of course, this is just a reminder I’ve invented for this work, nobody else
uses it. Please don’t use it when you write Croatian words and sentences!
I repeat: impersonal sentences have no subjects. There have no nouns or
pronouns in the nominative case. The last sentence translates literally as ‘it was
enough to him’. They are always in neuter singular in the past tense. As there’s no
subject, the past form defaults to its neutral, kind of genderless form.
The following sentences at the first glance look impersonal too, but they aren’t:
Ponoć N je. It’s midnight. (lit. ‘Midnight is.’)
f
Jutro N je. It’s morning. (lit. ‘Morning is.’)
While English sentences are impersonal, Croatian ones aren’t: in these sentences,
subjects are ponoć f midnight and jutro morning, so in the past tense, past forms
will get gender of subjects:
Bila je ponoć N . It was midnight. (lit. ‘Midnight was.’)
f
Bilo je jutro N . It was morning. (lit. ‘Morning was.’)
Another likely unexpected behavior is for sentences of the form ovo je..., to je... +
noun. In such sentences, the subject isn’t to, but the noun, so the past tense adjusts