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Easy Croaan (rev. 47b) / 74 It Just Happened to Me 421 / 600

74 It Just Happened to Me

Croatian has an interesting way of expressing that something happened, you were

involved, but you weren’t in control, it just happened – to you.

As you can probably guess, it involves the DL case, which usually corresponds to

English to + person / personal pronoun:

To N mi DL se dogodilo. It happened to me.

It’s kind of similar to expressions like hladno mi je, but now subjective feelings are

not important. Consider the following sentence:

Čaša N je pala. The glass fell.

We don’t know why it happened. Just adding a person in DL changes its meaning

subtly:

Čaša N mi DL je pala. I dropped the glass (accidentally).

If you know some Spanish, you can notice that’s exactly the same as adding an

"indirect object pronoun" (which, of course, corresponds to the Croatian DL case) to

sentences like these:

(Spanish) Se cayó. It fell.

(Spanish) Se me cayó. I dropped it.

If you look into an English-Croatian dictionary, you will probably find that there’s the

verb pair ispuštati («) ~ ispustiti («) listed having one meaning drop, but that verbs

are not the first choice, especially in speech, when you accidentally drop something!

If you want to stress that somebody dropped something intentionally, another verb

pair is used:

bacati ~ baciti (A) throw, intentionally drop

A similar difference is expressed with two a bit similar verb pairs that both translate

to English as leave:

ostavljati ~ ostaviti + A

ostajati ~ ostati (ostane) + DL (accidentally!)

The case roles in the second pair are "rotated": what is left is in N, while one who

was affected (that is, the person who left something by accident) is in DL:

Jakna N mi DL je ostala u autu DL . I left the jacket in the car (accidentally).

If we would use the first verb pair, it’s not said whether is was intentional or not,

could be either way. Notice how the person affected is now the subject, and what is

left is object:

Ostavio sam jaknu A u autu DL . I left the jacket in the car.

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