EasyCroatian_r47.an

Easy Croaan (rev. 47b) / 86 More Verbs and Standing Outcomes 474 / 600
about completed actions, but also about the outcomes, especially for voluntary
actions – and the outcome of going somewhere is being there.
There’s another way to distance yourself from a past action expressed by a
voluntary perfective verb – by using another tense, not yet described: the so-called
plusquamperfect tense (in English, the name is often simplified to pluperfect tense).
It roughly corresponds to he had opened and like.
The tense is formed like the common past tense, but there’s an extra past form of
the verb biti (je² +), in the same gender and number as the other past form:
Gledala sam film A . I was watching the movie. (fem. speaking)
Bila sam gledala film A . (pluperfect)
You can visualize it as putting the verb in the past twice:
present gledam I’m watching
↓ ...put the verb gledati into the past
past gledala sam I was watching
↓ ...put the verb biti (je² +) into the past
pluperfect bila sam gledala I had been watching
Using this tense, we can put a distance from the action – there’s no ‘standing
outcome’:
Bio sam otvorio prozor A . I had opened the window. (But it was maybe closed later.)
It also serves to emphasize actions and states, like I was really doing it, I really did it,
it has really happened:
Bila sam gledala film A . I was really watching the movie.
Bio sam otvorio prozor A . I did open the window. (despite it being closed now)
However, this tense is actually very rare in speech, just check these Google results
(from the .hr domain):
form hits
gledao sam 152000
bio sam gledao
gledao sam bio
7
2
You will find this tense occasionally in literature. There are actually even more
tenses you’ll see sometimes in writing; they will be described in 99 Aorist Tense and
Other Marginal Features.
Let’s go back to verbs. The next family is weird – there’s no base verb (or pair) – all
verbs have prefixes. They are made attaching prefixes to this:
-premati («) ~ -premiti («)