EasyCroatian_r47.an

Easy Croaan (rev. 47b) / 81 Sneeze Once and Start Blooming 454 / 600
common in more eastern regions of Croatia (and in Serbia, but it’s nowhere
accepted as standard). The perf. verb usually corresponds to English fall asleep:
Goran N je brzo zaspao. Goran quickly fell asleep.
(Historically, the pair meaning sleep was also derived with just za-; however, the
verb spati (spi) sleep is now archaic in most of Croatia; it has been replaced by a
more regular spavati, but the older verb is still used in some dialects.)
Many inchoative verbs can be rephrased using phase verbs, e.g.:
zaplakati (zaplače) start crying = početi plakati
However, some frequent verbs like zaspati (zaspi) are never rephrased – they are
basically the only way to express the meaning fall asleep.
Inchoative verbs referring to states can be used with ‘frame’ and ‘round-trip’ time
expressions. When used with ‘frame’ expressions (za¨ + time), it means how long it
took to enter the state. For example:
Shvatio sam sve za pet minuta. I understood everything in five minutes.
When used with ‘round-trip’ expressions (na¨ + time), it means how long the state
entered held. For example:
Zaspala sam na sat vremena. I fell asleep for an hour.
You’ll sometimes see inchoative verbs used with ordinary time expressions (i.e. with
no prepositions) in the latter sense, i.e. how long the state lasted:
Zaspala sam sat vremena. I fell asleep for an hour. (sometimes used)
Some action verbs that have a meaningful start and completion of action, have two
associated perfective verbs! For such verbs, I will list both perfective verbs:
perfective
impf. done begin
↓ ↓ ↓
plivati ~ ot- ~ za- swim
Such groups of verbs can be called aspect triplets. Such common triplets are:
igrati ~ od- («) ~ za- («) play (game)
pjevati ~ ot- ~ za- sing
svirati ~ od- («) ~ za- («) play (music)
As you can see, the stress behaves the same in both perf. verbs. It really depends on
the base verb.
(Some textbooks use the term inchoative only for verbs which mean entering a
state, and call the start-of-action verbs ingressive. I’ll use one name for both kinds.)
While English often uses get + adjective to express entering a state, Croatian has