EasyCroatian_r47.an

Easy Croaan (rev. 47b) / 34 Stressed Pronouns 197 / 600
(1) Brijem sebe A . I’m shaving myself.
brijati
There’s a simple test to decide what you can emphasize: it can be done if you can
use myself and not you (or herself and not him, etc.) in English sentence. For
example, if you accidentally called yourself over the phone (e.g. your mobile phone),
you can emphasize it:
Zvao sam sebe A ! I called myself! (or dialed)
To put it simply, you can emphasize se² as sebe only if someone is really doing
something to themselves – e.g. shaving, washing and so on. Such use of se² is
sometimes called true reflexive.
In other words, sebe never shifts the meaning, where se² does shift the meaning of
some verbs. For example:
Zabavljam se. I’m having fun.
Zabavljam sebe A . I’m entertaining myself.
The form sebe must be used when prepositions, adverbs and conjunctions are
involved. For example, with the adverb (iz)van outside there’s an often used phrase:
(iz)van sebe pred. furious, mad, freaking out
This implies extreme excitation, you can be (iz)van sebe because you’re really
happy, but most often it just means you’re really angry:
Goran N je bio van sebe G . Goran was freaking out.
Such small phrases that can be used only with the verb biti (je² +) be are sometimes
called predicatives, abbreviated as pred.
Like other stressed forms, sebe must be used when you want to want to add
something to the object, e.g. use i¨ and. It also must be used whenever you refer to
subject and need the genitive case:
Bojao se sebe G . He was afraid of himself.
In the last sentence, the se² is the particle, and sebe is the object in genitive.
What about the DL sebi? It’s used when you send something to yourself, and with
prepositions. There’s a matching unstressed form si²:
Pišem si DL poruku A . I’m writing a message to myself. ®
pisati
Unlike svoj, this form is never replaced colloquially by mi² or like.
I’ve emphasized more than once that possession of body parts (and clothes worn,
etc.) is normally implied, and when they don’t belong to the subject, a possessor in
DL is usually added. In western regions of Croatia, especially in parts of Istria and
the Zagreb region, you’ll sometimes hear that even when a body part or a piece of
clothing belongs to the subject, a DL possession is nevertheless expressed by si² –
which is exactly the same construction as in German: