EasyCroatian_r47.an

Easy Croaan (rev. 47b) / 14 My and Adjecves in Accusave 83 / 600
Usually, the two masculine genders are called masc. animate (the gender for
masculine people and animals) and masc. inanimate (the gender for everything else
‘masculine’).
You might ask: why is the gender of nouns like zid wall called ‘masculine’ at all, when
it has no people or animals in it? How is a wall masculine? Name of that gender is
simply a tradition; also, looking at the endings in the nominative case, adjectives
referring to these nouns get the same endings as for the nouns konj horse and brat
brother. The pronoun referring to a table will be on, usually translated as he.
If your brain still short circuits because of the term masculine inanimate, shorten it
to just ‘inanimate’.
Strictly speaking, the gender of masculine people and animals includes also beings
that are neither, e.g. gods, angels, ghosts, all creatures from Lord of the Rings,
snowmen – and robots! It’s important that something is perceived as having its own
will (or mind), even if it’s a microscopic worm. Such ‘genders’ are not at all
uncommon among world languages.
Something interesting: only in accusative (singular) adjectives have different endings
for all 4 genders. In most cases – I will introduce them later – there’s one adjective
ending for the feminine gender, and another for everything else. This makes
everything much simpler than it could be.
Examples for all 4 genders:
Imam crnu mačku. I have a black cat.
Vozim crni auto. I’m driving a black car.
m
Vidim crnog konja. I see a black horse.
Vidim žuto sunce. I see the yellow sun.
(The noun auto, despite ending in -o, is a masculine inanimate noun, one of
exceptions I have already listed when I introduced genders.)
Since in the masculine inanimate gender adjectives have the same form in N and A,
the -i is optional in A as well – but it’s almost always used when adjectives are
placed before nouns, as here. (Standard Croatian insists on a small difference in
meaning between adjectives with -i and without; it will be described later.)
There’s an alternative ending in masculine-people-and-animals (-eg). It’s attached to
adjectives that get an -e in the neuter nominative (and accusative) – i.e. to
adjectives that end in a Croatian-specific letter:
Vidim smeđeg konja. I see a brown horse.
You will sometimes see (in books and newspapers) adjectives having the ending -oga
or -ega instead of -og or -eg. There’s no difference in meaning: it’s just an older
form that’s sometimes still preferred in writing.®
As promised, here are the exact rules for the accusative case of nouns (instead of