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Easy Croaan (rev. 47b) / 29 Plural of Masculine Nouns and Adjecves 168 / 600

29 Plural of Masculine Nouns and Adjectives

If the world were a simple place, Croatian masculine nouns would have their

nominative plural made just by adding an -i, and accusative plural just by an -e. Well,

it’s almost so, but there are few twists.

Most masculine nouns do simply get an -i in nominative plural:

krevet bed → kreveti beds

prozor window → prozori windows

tanjur plate (to eat from) → tanjuri plates ®

What about the accusative case? It has just an -e instead of -i:

Goran N pere zube A . Goran is ‘washing’ his teeth.

prati

(Yes, in Croatian, teeth are ‘washed’ and not ‘brushed’.)

And now, a few complications.

A few masculine nouns shift their stress in plural. One such noun is quite common:

mjesec moon/month → mjeseci

A couple of nouns that get simply an -i in nom. plural undergo a consonant change if

they end in either k, g or h. It does not happen in the accusative plural, only when an

-i is added (that is, in the N-pl):

N N-pl A-pl

putnik traveler putnici putnike

razlog reason razlozi razloge

uspjeh success uspjesi uspjehe

prozor window prozori prozore

However, most one-syllable nouns (that is, nouns that have only one vowel) get a

longer ending; most of them -ovi:

brod ship → brodovi

grad city → gradovi

lijek cure → lijekovi

sin son → sinovi

vrt garden → vrtovi ®

zid wall → zidovi

(I hope you remember that e.g. lijek is just a spelling convention, the word is actually

pronounced as ljek, and therefore has only one syllable, so it gets longer endings for

plural.)

The consonant alternations described above (e.g. k → c) do not happen if the noun

gets longer endings in plural:

vlak train → vlakovi ®

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