EasyCroatian_r47.an

Easy Croaan (rev. 47b) / 02 Simplest Sentences 17 / 600
However, forms like pjevati, called “Ijekavian” are also standard in Serbian (as
another standard variant) and you can occasionally read articles written in
“Ijekavian” in newspapers from Serbia. I will not mark all such words. In most cases,
if you want to obtain them, just replace -ije- or -je- in Croatian with -e-. Exceptions
will be marked: one of them are present forms of the verb piti, which are pijem, pije
also in Serbia. You can find more about “Ekavian” in A9 Bosnian, Serbian and
Montenegrin.
In most coastal areas of Croatia, but not in the very south (i.e. Dubrovnik area) most
words that have -ije- or -je- in Standard Croatian, have -i- instead, e.g. instead of
pjevati, the verb is pivati. That’s called “Ikavian pronunciation”. You will find it in
casual writing, some novels, movies and pop songs.
Instead of kuhati, the form kuvati is used in Serbia, and in parts of Bosnia and
Croatia (however, it’s not standard in Croatian).
In Serbia, meaning dance is usually expressed with the verb igrati which has other
meanings (play) in both Croatia and Serbia.
• Something Possibly Interesting
English is a distant cousin to Croatian and related languages. This will mostly be of
interest to language geeks. However, it can also help you remember things.
For example, the -m in the Croatian 1st person is related to the English I am —
thousands of years ago, a long lost language which was the common ancestor of
both languages had the -m in the first person form of some verbs. This consonant
has survived literally thousands of years.
Russian is a much closer cousin. For example, Russian verb meaning write has inf
писать, and the pres-3 пишет. If we would spell these words using Croatian
characters, it would be p’isаt’ (p’išet), which is almost identical to Croatian.
However, the pres-1 is p’išu. Russian has overall a bit more complex forms of words
when compared to Croatian.