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66 Smoking is Dangerous: Verbal Nouns
English uses -ing forms for more than one purpose. Compare the sentences:
(1) I am swimming.
(2) I like swimming.
(3) Swimming is healthy.
In sentences #2 and #3, swimming can be replaced with to swim or even apples (I
like apples, apples are healthy.). The word swimming behaves similar to a noun in
these two sentences. Croatian has a special noun (derived from verbs) that’s used in
sentences like #2 and #3: verbal noun or gerund.
It’s basically derived from the pass. adjective. Most of them end in -n; we change it
to -nje and that’s the noun we need:
Volim plivanje A . I like swimming.
Plivanje N je zdravo N . Swimming is healthy.
But there’s really no passive adjective ‘plivan’, right? Right. The passive adjective is
just a formal step. You can skip it if you think it’s meaningless, but it’s worth
remembering that differences between pass. adjectives and gerunds are small,
especially when you recall all consonant alternations in passive adjectives. Formally
it goes like this:
verb pass. adj. gerund
pušiti smoke → pušen → pušenje
čistiti clean → čišćen → čišćenje
We can summarize rules for pass. adjectives and gerunds in one nice table:
inf pres-3 pass. adj. gerund
-ati
-an -anje
doesn’t
-nuti -nut -nuće
matter
-eti -et -eće
-e -en -enje
other
-i *-en *-enje
The verbs ending in -jeti (e.g. vidjeti) fall into the ‘other’ row.
The asterisk (*) in the table above signalizes a shift of the preceding consonant(s),
e.g. t → ć, c → č, etc. Of course, not all words that can be derived according to this
scheme are really used.
Gerunds enables us to say:
Pušenje N je opasno N . Smoking is dangerous.
Trčanje N je zdravo N . Running is healthy.