03.01.2020 Views

EasyCroatian_r47.an

Create successful ePaper yourself

Turn your PDF publications into a flip-book with our unique Google optimized e-Paper software.

Easy Croaan (rev. 47b) / 88 Weird Words and Construcons 487 / 600

This is a completely weird rule, I have to admit. Even weirder, it often applies to

feminine nouns not ending in -a:

Sol N i mast N nisu bili skupi N . Salt and lard were not expensive. ®

The last feature seems to depend on the region.

(The rest is coming soon)

________

® Instead of the words above, these words are used in Serbia and most of Bosnia:

hlače pants, trousers → pantalone

majoneza mayonnaise → majonez

kazalište theater → pozorište

sol f salt → so (sol-) f

općina municipality → opština

ubojica murderer → ubica

Occasionally in Serbia, the family relation noun is not declined when before the

name, so you might hear and read teta Anu, sometimes spelled with a hyphen: teta-

Anu.

In some regions, and in parts of Serbia and Bosnia, words like kanu etc. are not

stressed on the last syllable. There’s a lot of variation among speakers from various

regions.

While Standard Serbian accepts masculine nouns in -a as both masculine and

feminine in plural, in actual speech in Serbia such words are understood only as

feminine in plural. Check the Google statistics (on the .rs domain) for gazda m

landlord, boss and tata m Dad:

novi gazde 52

nove gazde 7120

naši tate 4

naše tate 124

And when you examine the small number of occurrences of novi gazde, you find

that most of them are written by someone in Croatia.

Hooray! Your file is uploaded and ready to be published.

Saved successfully!

Ooh no, something went wrong!