EasyCroatian_r47.an

Easy Croaan (rev. 47b) / 47 Of Flowers, Thorns and Counng Children 273 / 600
47 Of Flowers, Thorns and Counting Children
We learned how to make the plural of nouns. However, if you ask an average
Croatian speaker what the plural of list leaf is, chances are he or she will answer it’s
lišće, and not listovi, the form you learned so hard! What’s going on?
Also, what is going on with the noun brat brother? How do you talk about brothers
in Croatian? Or children?
It turns out that for some words standing for things that exist as individual items, but
which often come in hard-to-count heaps, there’s another singular noun that stands
for the whole heap. Such noun is usually called a collective or mass noun.
Mass nouns in singular stand for any amount, except for a single item (that is, if you
see a single leaf, you should use list). English hasn’t many mass nouns, but has one
for leaves – foliage.
Mass nouns are more frequent in Croatian. Actually, they are so often used for any
larger amount of some things that regular plurals of certain nouns are used very
rarely.
Common nouns having often used mass nouns are:
noun
cvijet flower
grana branch
grm bush ®
kamen stone
list leaf
trn thorn
mass noun
cvijeće
granje
grmlje
kamenje
lišće
trnje
As you can see, all mass nouns above are neuter, and end in either -će or -je. For
instance, if Ana likes flowers, you would say:
Ana N voli cvijeće A . Ana likes flowers.
Bear in mind that cvijeće is a singular noun:
Cvijeće N raste. Flowers grow.
rasti
The noun list doesn’t mean only leaf of a plant; as in English, it could also mean leaf
of paper (list papira), e.g. in a book. For such ‘leaves’, the mass noun is never used –
the regular plural noun is used instead.
There are a couple of mass nouns where the original, individual noun is no longer
used; such nouns are used for any amount, but have singular forms only:
piće drink(s)
smeće garbage