EasyCroatian_r47.an

Easy Croaan (rev. 47b) / 33 School Yard and Bunk Bed: Relaons 189 / 600
33 School Yard and Bunk Bed: Relations
Croatian contains a big number of adjectives derived from nouns (and sometimes
from other words too) that are often represented in English as nouns-used-asadjectives.
Here’s what I mean:
school yard
Here school is actually used as an adjective, it describes what kind of yard it is, what
it belongs to. Such adjectives are sometimes called relational or quasi-possessive
adjectives. It’s interesting that such adjectives in English cannot have a comparative
(you cannot say more school) or even cannot be used as a property (you cannot say
the yard is school).
In Croatian, you cannot simply use nouns as adjectives – you have to turn them into
adjectives. It holds for some nouns in English too: you cannot use e.g. person as an
adjective (e.g. ‘person space’) you have to turn it into an adjective – personal.
The main way to turn nouns into adjectives in Croatian is to append -ski as if it were
a case ending (it’s not a case ending!):
brod ship → brodski
grad city → gradski
more sea → morski
škola school → školski
The resulting word is an adjective, so it must adapt to the noun case and gender.
Since dvorište yard is neuter (as expected) we have to use it accordingly:
Ovo N je školsko dvorište N . This is a school yard.
Bili smo u školskom dvorištu DL . We were at the school yard.
In some words that add -ski, the s gets fused with neighboring consonants and
vowels, and we sometimes get -ški, -čki or even -ćki, or other irregularities:
pošta post → poštanski postal
putnik passenger → putnički
Adjectives for cities, regions and countries are often irregular (and they are not
uppercase):
Bosna → bosanski
Dalmacija → dalmatinski
Istra → istarski
Slavonija → slavonski
Zagreb → zagrebački
Zagorje → zagorski
For countries, islands and cities that end in -s or -z, the final consonant is usually
assimilated into -ški:
Pariz Paris → pariški ®
Teksas Texas → teksaški ®
Tunis Tunisia → tuniški ®
Vis (an island) → viški
Relational adjectives are also created for cities having more than one word (e.g.
Banja Luka, a city in Bosnia-Herzegovina) and foreign ones, respelled according to