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14 My and Adjectives in Accusative
We now know how to say:
Jedem jabuku. I’m eating an apple.
jesti
Jabuka je crvena. The apple is red.
But we still don’t know how to say I’m eating a red apple! If you want to put an
adjective before a noun in accusative, you have to put the adjective into the
accusative as well. To put an adjective into the accusative case, you have to take
into the account the gender of the noun beside it. Jabuka is feminine, so what’s the
feminine accusative ending for adjectives? Not really complicated, it’s -u, so we
have:
Jedem crvenu jabuku. I’m eating a red apple.
jesti
In this example, the adjective gets the same ending as the noun, but consider it a
coincidence. If you would take a weird feminine noun that ends in a consonant (e.g.
krv f blood) the adjective would still get the -u:
Imam crvenu krv. I have red blood.
This is what gender means: what adjective or pronoun forms you have to use.
Nouns have fixed gender – jabuka is ‘feminine’ because its default, nominative form
ends in -a, and krv blood just simply is – but adjectives adapt to the ‘class’ the noun
belongs to, and that ‘class’ is called ‘gender’ by tradition.
And now we’re going to see the four genders in Croatian. The masculine gender is
really two genders: one for masculine people-and-animals, another for everything
else masculine. Adjectives for masculine people-and-animals will get -og:
Imam crnog psa. I have a black dog.
These are all accusative adjective endings you need to remember. For neuter nouns,
and masculine other than people-and-animals, adjectives are the same as in the
nominative – of course, the N form depends on the gender. This table summarizes
the scheme (I’m here using p/a for ‘people and animals’):
gender adj. A example
fem. -u
veliku ribu
big fish
neut.
same as veliko jezero
nominative big lake
masc.
(not p/a)
same as
nominative
velik(i) zid
big wall
masc.
(p/a)
-og
(some -eg)
velikog konja
big horse
f