EasyCroatian_r47.an

Easy Croaan (rev. 47b) / A7 Stress (u/c) 521 / 600
stressed vowel with the rising intonation;
as a special case, if no vowels are underlined, the first vowel is stressed with
the falling intonation (you'll see the reason a bit later).
(There are also standard stress markings in Croatian. However, these markings are
not really transparent, so in certain books and linguistic works, alternative marks are
often used.)
Now, most textbooks (including the schoolbooks in Croatia) mention two classic
rules that restrict the place of stress:
#1 the falling intonation can appear only on the first syllable;
#2 the rising intonation cannot appear on the last syllable (therefore it cannot
appear at all in one-syllable words).
Now, the restriction #2 is actually obvious from my notation: you have to underline
two vowels, therefore, you need a word with at least two vowels! There's no way to
set a rising stress on the last vowel – only the first vowel you underlined will be
stressed.
However, the restriction #1 is not obvious, and it's actually not always respected in
real life, even in areas where people use stress very close to the standard at home
(enter non-initial falling tones into Google).
This all so far is only the introduction to real issues. The main feature of stress in
Standard Croatian is that it changes in various forms of one word. Moreover, the
vowel length changes in some forms! For example, the word lonac pot has all
possible alternations (rising vs. falling, short vs. long vowel):
sing. plur.
N lonac lōnci
G lōnca lonācā
On the other hand, there are words that have the same stress in all forms. To make
it even more complex, stress sometimes shift to prepositions.
Noun Stress
However, there's an underlying system, bizarre but regular. Let's first visit the noun
stress: nouns are basically divided into three groups. Let's first see how the a-nouns
(nouns ending in -a in N) behave: