EasyCroatian_r47.an

Easy Croaan (rev. 47b) / 88 Weird Words and Construcons 484 / 600
88 Weird Words and Constructions
There are a few details in Croatian which don’t really fit into the overall scheme of
things.
First, there’s a phrase which can be used to express color. It uses a color adjective
before the noun boja color, but both are the genitive case (singular):
Majica N je crvene boje G . lit. The T-shirt is ‘of red color’.
Hlače N su plave boje G . lit. The pants are ‘of blue color’. ®
Such expressions are old-fashioned and mostly obsolete. However, they are used in
questions, i.e. when you ask what color is something. The answer would be just a
color adjective, but in genitive singular (feminine, after boja color):
Koje boje G je majica N ? What color is the T-shirt?
— Crvene G . (G fem.) Red.
— Crvena N . (N fem.) Red.
Koje boje G je auto N ? What color is the car?
m
— Crne G . (G fem.) Black.
— Crni N . (N masc.) Black.
Alternatively, you can answer with an adjective in nominative, matching gender of
the thing the question is about, as in the examples above.
This reminds of English expressions like men of honor, book of great importance, and
so on. In fact, you will occasionally see more or less the same expressions in
Croatian, using od¨ + G:
Knjiga N je od velike važnosti G . The book is of great importance.
Then, there are expressions – often overlooked in grammars and textbooks – when
two nouns are used together, e.g. king George or Hotel California. The last noun is a
proper noun, i.e. a name (e.g. California), and a common noun before it describes its
title (e.g. king) or kind (e.g. hotel).
Croatian uses such expressions more often than English, e.g. in names of rivers,
lakes, cities and countries:
rijeka Sava the Sava river (lit. ‘river Sava’)
jezero Jarun the Jarun lake (lit. ‘lake Jarun’)
Grad Zagreb the City of Zagreb (lit. ‘City Zagreb’)
Republika Hrvatska the Republic of Croatia
Now, in some of these expressions, both nouns change case, and in others, the last
word (the name) is ‘frozen’ in N.
If nouns stand for a person (or an animal, as Croatian almost always treats humans
as a kind of animal), both nouns always change (examples show the accusative
case):