EasyCroatian_r47.an

Easy Croaan (rev. 47b) / 05 Accusave Case 32 / 600
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® In Serbia, where “Ekavian” forms prevail, verbs like vidjeti have inf videti, but the
pres-3 is just vidi.
Instead of kruh, hljeb is used in most of Bosnia, and in the “Ekavian” form hleb in
Serbia; instead of vlak, voz is common in these countries.
Standard Serbian spelling allows only case-bases suc- and svec-.
In most of Serbia, Kruno has forms like Marko, so it would rather be ne poznajem
Kruna, but the name is really rare in Serbia.
The form šta is Standard in Serbia and most of Bosnia.
• Something Possibly Interesting
If you think this system is weird and complicated, you might be interested that
Russian has the same system. For instance, Russian words for brother and horse are
identical to Croatian ones, they are just spelled with Cyrillic letters as брат and конь
(Russian spells Croatian nj as n + special ‘softening’ character ь). In the accusative
case, they get the same ending, -а, since they belong to people and animals.
And then the Russian complications begin. You would expect A коньа, but Russian
spells the combination ь + а as a special character: я. So it’s rather коня, despite
that being really just adding an а, exactly like in Croatian...
It’s not all: the stress in the Russian word for horse shifts to the added -а, making the
first o unstressed and pronounced similar to а, despite the spelling. But the stress in
брат doesn’t shift: you have to learn by heart which nouns shift the stress... so
Croatian is not that bad after all.
Of course, this Russian stress shift corresponds to a change of tone in the Standard
Croatian word for horse (falling in N, rising in A), but we can ignore tones in
Croatian.
• Examples
Putujem I’m traveling, a pop song from Yammat – a Croatian band, despite its name
– uses a really simple grammar in most verses:
Svaka priča ima kraj Every story has an end
Svaki kamen zavičaj Every stone a homeland
More ili planina A sea or a mountain
(Saša Ljiljak)
The words svaka and svaki are different forms of the adjective svaki every, each.
Adjectives are quite adaptive in Croatian; they will be introduced in 10 Gender.
The word zavičaj (which roughly translates as homeland, but the meaning is more