EasyCroatian_r47.an

Easy Croaan (rev. 47b) / 77 As If: Advanced Clauses 435 / 600
On N ne spava, nego gleda televiziju A . He’s not sleeping, he’s watching TV instead.
The ‘weirdest construction’ is similar, but it says that the first (negated part) is an
understatement. An example in English would be:
I’m not (just) cold, I’m (actually) freezing!
And in Croatian, it looks like this:
Ne da mi DL je hladno, nego se smrzavam.
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What is ‘weird’ in this construction? First, ne¨ and da are glued into a complex
conjunction (still spelled as two words, of course, but usually pronounced as one
word). You can’t place anything in between. The conjunction (or whatever it is) nego
is optional:
Ne da mi DL je hladno, smrzavam se.
1
The second weird thing is that you can pull things (I mean, words) out from the da
clause:
Meni DL ne da je hladno, nego se smrzavam. (the same meaning, emphasis on the
person who feels it)
Pulling subjects out is quite common (but optional):
Voda N ne da curi, nego teče. Water is not just leaking, it’s flowing.
teći
The understatement in the first part can be also negative:
Ne da nije pročitao knjigu A , nije ju A ni otvorio. It’s not just that he didn’t read 3f A
the book completely, he didn’t even open it.
The English translation is not so elegant, but it’s a very compact expression in
Croatian.
________
® In most of Bosnia, instead of prošli tjedan last week, prošle nedjelje is used; in
Serbia it’s in the “Ekavian” form prošle nedelje.
In Serbia, besides osim, the word sem is also used, with the exactly same meaning
and grammatical properties.
• Examples
Kao da me nema tu As if I weren’t here is one of pop hits performed by Ivana
Vrdoljak, who performs under the name Vanna (the double n likely just makes it a
bit more foreign and therefore cool).
The title also features a negative existential nema° + me², but also tu in meaning
here, which is very common, but not strictly standard in Croatian. The chorus
contains a number of as if constructions. Note that the Croatian lyrics have