EasyCroatian_r47.an

Easy Croaan (rev. 47b) / 77 As If: Advanced Clauses 434 / 600
Another construction corresponds to English so... that... While the English
construction looks quite different from the previous one, Croatian simply uses
tako... da..., but the da-clause is of indicative-type (i.e. any tense, but no perfective
verbs in present):
Knjiga N je tako debela N [da ću je A čitati danima I ]. The book is so thick [that I’ll 3f
be reading it for days].
Besides tako so, you can use toliko so many (don’t forget it’s a quantity adverb,
therefore, uncountable nouns have to be in G after it, and countable ones in G-pl):
3pl | moći pres-1
Vidim toliko vrabaca G [da ih A ne mogu izbrojati]. I see so many
sparrows [that I can’t count them].
Sometimes toliko is used with adjectives, so you’ll encounter toliko skupa... da...
and similar expressions:
Pizza N je bila toliko ljuta N [da sam popio litru A vode G ]. The pizza was so hot [that I
drank a liter of water].
(Croatian has one word for both angry and hot because of spices.) Besides these
words, you can see takav (takv-) such, usually before nouns (but it can be used on its
own, since it’s an adjective):
Magla N je takva [da svi N voze polako]. The fog is ‘such’ [that everyone is driving
slowly].
(The last type, without a noun, must be slightly rephrased in English.)
This type of clause is sometimes called result clause; bear in mind that they require
two things: a word like tako, toliko or takav (takv-) and an indicative da-clause.
In both English and Croatian, there’s also a third type, where the main verb is
negated; in English not... such... to...:
Nisam takav idiot N [da platim 1000 eura G za to A ]. I’m not such an idiot [to pay 1000
euros for that].
Now the part after da is not going to happen, so both English and Croatian switch to
an atemporal construction. We again see that Croatian clauses restricted to the
present tense often correspond to English to-constructions. However, the clause in
this construction can be also in the future tense:
Nisam tako glup N [da ću to A kupiti]. I’m not so stupid [that I’m going to buy it].
The last thing could be called the ‘weirdest construction’. It’s a kind of extension of
the negative + nego construction, introduced in 43 And, Or, But: Basic Conjunctions.
Recall:
To N nije mačka N , nego pas N . It’s not a cat, it’s a dog. (or: instead, it’s a dog)
You can also say it for verbs: