EasyCroatian_r47.an

Easy Croaan (rev. 47b) / 41 Somewhere, Nobody, Everything... 238 / 600
41 Somewhere, Nobody, Everything...
There are couple of very useful words – usually called indefinite pronouns – that
generally derive from question-words by adding a ne-. They don’t mean negation,
but some-:
nekamo somewhere (destination)
negdje somewhere (location)
odnekud from somewhere (origin)
These words are used as generic locations, destinations or origins:
Auto N je negdje. The car is somewhere.
m
The next two indefinite pronouns change in the same way as the question-words
tko who and što what (introduced in 28 Asking Who and What):
netko someone nešto something
Both pronouns behave grammatically as the pronouns they’re derived from, that is,
netko as masc. sing., nešto as neut. sing.:
Netko N je bio tamo. Someone was there.
Nešto N je bilo tamo. Something was there.
Netko N spava. Someone is sleeping.
However, if you want to express just the opposite, that is, nobody is sleeping, in
Croatian, you have only one option: you have to use negation (that is, the verb must
be put to negative), and you must negate the pronoun as well. Croatian uses double
negation as a rule:
Nitko N ne spava. Nobody is sleeping.
It’s very simple to make negative forms of indefinite pronouns: if they begin with
ne-, change it to ni-. Unfortunately, there’s an irregularity: when ni- is prefixed to
što, the result is ništa:
Nemam ništa A . I don’t have anything. (lit. ‘I don’t have nothing.’)
There’s an often used phrase, used when you look you might be hurt, but you aren’t
(or just pretend you aren't):
Nije° mi DL ništa N . I’m fine. (lit. ‘It’s nothing to me.’)
1
Of course, instead of mi², you can use any noun or pronoun in the DL case. Since
ništa is really the subject, it behaves like što, therefore 3rd pers. neut. sing. is used in
the past tense:
Nije joj DL bilo ništa N . She was fine.
3f
To negate adverb-like indefinite pronouns, again replace ne- with ni-, moving it to
the beginning of the word: