EasyCroatian_r47.an

Easy Croaan (rev. 47b) / 62 The Friend I Saw: Relave Clauses 365 / 600
Vjetar N [što tuče u lice A i dušu A ] The wind [that’s beating my face and soul]
Pričam o ljubavi jednoj DL [što bila je davno] I’m telling about a love [that was f
long ago]
It’s absolutely not required that you use this construction in speech, but be prepared
to see sometimes it in writing and maybe speech.®
There’s another colloquial thing you’ll sometimes see and hear. The
adjective/pronoun koji has the same form in masc. inanimate N and A: koji.
Nevertheless, you’ll see and hear kojeg(a) in masc. inanimate A – which is the form
for masc. animate A. For example:
Film N [kojeg A svi N čekamo: "Pedeset nijansi G sive G "]. (colloq!) The movie [we’re all
waiting for: "Fifty shades of gray"]. ®
Of course, you would expect koji in this sentence, but it’s kojeg in this example. You
can find this feature on many internet sites and in colloquial writing (Google for
the headline above: I found it on the internet). Teachers in schools spend a lot of
time “correcting” this – obviously, not with a complete success. Again, it’s not
required that you talk like that, but don’t panic when you hear or read such a bit
weird accusative forms!
________
® Instead of što and tko, forms šta and ko are used in Serbia and most of Bosnia;
the same applies to derived forms, e.g. netko is rather neko there.
In parts of Croatia where kaj or ča are colloquially used instead of što or šta, they
are used also after nouns, and don’t change then (and then an additional pronoun is
used in the relative clause). However, in Serbia or Bosnia, in such constructions, only
što can be used, never šta. Furthermore, such constructions seem a bit rarer in
Serbia.
Using kojeg instead of koji for masc. inanimate A is unknown in Serbia and Bosnia.
• Something Possibly Interesting
There are some fancy terms you’ll maybe encounter: the noun or pronoun the
relative clause is attached to is called antecedent; the word that starts the relative
clause is relativizer, and the additional pronoun in clause (used in rare cases when
indeclinable što is used) is called resumptive pronoun. And indeclinable što is also
called invariant relativizer (it doesn’t vary, i.e. change case). Now you can impress
your friends with some fancy words! Or forget these terms immediately.
Relative clauses starting with a pronoun which changes cases (e.g. with koji) are a
characteristic feature of European languages. Check this map in the World Atlas of
Language Structures: Relativization on Subjects.