EasyCroatian_r47.an

Easy Croaan (rev. 47b) / 03 Objects 22 / 600
One more remark: there are other languages out there that have grammatical cases,
and call one of them accusative, e.g. Finnish, German, Greek, Latin and so on. The
accusative case in all languages tends to be similar, but details can be different. If
you know a lot how to use the accusative case in e.g. German, be aware that not all
of it applies to Croatian.
________
® Instead of kava, a slightly different word kafa is common in most parts of Bosnia
and Serbia. In Bosnia, the form kahva is used as well. Instead of juha, supa is
common in these countries, and in some regions of Croatia as well.
Standard Serbian insists that the word for TV must be stressed as televizija (you will
hear it on the Serbian Public TV); regardless of it, a great majority of speakers in
Serbia uses the same stress in that word as in Croatia. However, you will
occasionally hear televizija in parts of Croatia and Bosnia.
While many names are common in Croatia, Bosnia, Montenegro and Serbia, there
are some country-specific names. Actually, there are some names that are specific
for a part of Croatia, and uncommon elsewhere – despite the total population of
Croatia being about 4 millions.
The form šta what is considered standard in Serbia, Montenegro and most of
Bosnia. It’s very common in Croatia (including the cities of Zagreb, Split, Rijeka, etc)
but not standard. In Northwestern Croatia, many people colloquially use kaj for
what (you can hear it in Zagreb too). In parts of the coast, especially islands and
Istria, another word is often used colloquially for what: ča.
• Something Possibly Interesting
If we would pay attention to tones in words, object forms of some words would be
a bit more complicated to create. For instance, the noun voda water has the rising
tone in the nominative case, but the falling tone in the accusative vodu. However,
the noun riba fish has the falling tone in all forms. This is not a major issue, since
many people in Croatia have no differences in tone, or have non-standard tones
anyway, so we’re used various ‘accents’.
In Russian, this is a major issue. There are no tones in Russian, but the stress often
moves in various forms of one word. For instance, Russian water is N вода, A воду.
When written in Croatian spelling, it’s N vodа, A vodu – which seems identical to
Croatian, but there’s a catch: since the o in N is unstressed, it’s pronounced reduced,
much closer to the a sound, while in A it’s stressed and pronounced like o! Russian
pronunciation is more complex than Croatian.