EasyCroatian_r47.an

Easy Croaan (rev. 47b) / A8 Dialects 529 / 600
short long/diphtongs
i
e
u ii
ie ee
ε
o
a
εε
uu
uo ou
oo
aa
The vowel ε – a kind of ‘open e’, like in English bad or German ä – is the
characteristic vowel for ‘Kajkavian’. Unfortunately, it’s usually written just as e:
there's no proper orthography for it (dialectologists usually use ȩ, which is not visible
on all devices, or sometimes æ).
Vowels ie, uo, ou are diphtongs, similar to English ow in low, how, but the i's and u's
in them are, unlike in English, pronounced very quickly, they are very short, so I could
have written them also as i e, u o, o u .
Unfortunately, long vowels ii, εε are too usually written just with i and e. Here are a
couple of words with various vowels:
dietε child (djete, usually spelled dijete)
mεεse meat (meso)
rouka hand (ruka)
suonce sun (sunce)
(For comparison, forms spoken in Zagreb are given in brackets).
In ‘Kajkavian’ (and in dialects in Slovenia) there's one important constraint: normally,
only stressed vowels can be long, i.e. there are no unstressed long vowels, while
stressed vowels can be either long or short. Since the vowel length and stress often
changes according to the word form (i.e. gender, case), this produces many
alternations:
dober (m) vs. duobra (f) good
rouka (N) vs. rukami (I-pl) hand
These are specific developments of old vowels and consonants in this dialect (other
‘Kajkavian’ dialects have very similar developments):
e, ë ě ə o ö l
short ε e e
o
-e
u ou
long εε ie
ie oo
aa uo
ou ou
Many ‘Kajkavian’ dialects (but not all) have -e instead of -o in all neuter nouns and
adjectives in neuter gender, i.e. sεεle village vs. std. selo.
When compared with the forms reconstructed for the old language – some 1000