EasyCroatian_r47.an

Easy Croaan (rev. 47b) / 47 Of Flowers, Thorns and Counng Children 276 / 600
not for those who have different vowel length in speech), but not for e.g. the noun
gost guest.
The collective numbers can be used on their own, and they imply a number of
people, of mixed or unknown sex. They behave as other adverbs, as if in neuter
singular, but you’ll sometimes see masculine plural as well:
Oboje N je otišlo. Both left.
otići past-n
Oboje N su otišli. (sometimes used)
otići past-mpl
Some collective nouns have shifted their meaning, and are used as nouns
independent of the base noun. Common ones are:
grob tomb → groblje cemetery
osoba person → osoblje staff, personnel
Finally, what about nouns like pile (pilet-) chicken? There are two ways to handle
plural for them.
First, you simply avoid such nouns. For most of them, Croatian has other nouns with
the same meaning, but completely regular:
noun
mače (mačet-) kitten
pile (pilet-) chick
štene (štenet-) puppy
replacement(s)
mačić
pilić
psić
štenac (štenc-)
In fact, people are avoiding such nouns so much that nowadays mačić is much more
often used than mače in Croatian.
The second way is to use mass nouns ending in -ad that behave as feminine nouns
ending in a consonant. They are not often used in the the spoken Croatian:
noun
mače (mačet-) kitten
pile (pilet-) chick
štene (štenet-) puppy
mass noun
mačad f
pilad f
štenad f
Certain nouns that are taken from English are treated as singular, mass nouns in
Croatian. An example is čips, known in American English as potato chips, and in
British English as crisps:
Ovaj čips N je stvarno dobar N . These potato chips are really good.
Observe how the Croatian sentence uses only (masculine) singular forms of
adjectives and verbs!