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Easy Croaan (rev. 47b) / 50 Because, In Order To, Why: Reasons 290 / 600
50 Because, In Order To, Why: Reasons
Nothing so far was really exciting. The most complicated thing you could say was
something like I wrote two long letters to your brothers. All such sentences were
simple (maybe it was not so simple to create them, but they are nevertheless called
simple).
Now, the exciting things: how to express things or events that caused something?
The simplest way to indicate cause of something is by using the preposition zbog.
It’s used when cause is a thing, or an event expressed by a noun. Words after it
should be in the genitive case. It corresponds to English because of and due to:
Trava N je mokra N zbog kiše G . The grass is wet because of the rain.
(It’s not hard to remember, since the English of often corresponds to the Croatian
genitive case.)
If something was not caused by a thing, but a whole event, normally expressed by a
sentence, there’s a small difference. (There’s a difference in English too, where you
have to use because, and not because of.) In such cases, the main way is to use the
conjunction jer:
Trava N je mokra N jer je padala kiša N . The grass is wet because it has rained.
The word jer and words after it are a kind of sentence-within-a-sentence. There will
be a verb inside, a subject, possibly an object and who knows what. Such subsentences
are usually called clauses (more precisely, this kind is called reason
clause). I will often emphasize clauses by enclosing them in square brackets [...].
(I called jer a conjunction, and zbog a preposition due to tradition – you will find such
classification in other grammar books. However, it’s often hard to tell if a word is a
preposition, a conjunction or something else. What is important for you is how to
use a word and not how it is classified.)
The word order in clauses is the same as in any other sentence; the word jer holds
the first position, so all the second-position words must come right after it.
Therefore, there are two "second positions" in one sentence, both filled in our
example by the word je²:
Trava N ¹ je² mokra N [jer¹ je² padala kiša N ].
A reason clause can be in any tense, for example in the present tense, or in the
future tense, if you predict that something will happen:
Trava N je mokra N jer pada kiša N . The grass is wet because it's raining.
Uzeo sam kišobran A jer će padati kiša N . I took an umbrella because it's going to rain.
Another, less often used way is to use zato što instead of jer; everything else is the
same: