EasyCroatian_r47.an

Easy Croaan (rev. 47b) / 14 My and Adjecves in Accusave 85 / 600
above just for completeness sake. (There’s nothing special about neuter forms
either, since j is Croatian-specific.)
In fact, you’ll see that some adjectives and adjective-like words in Croatian tend
to have specific forms, but never in the feminine gender: all specific forms of any
adjective are limited to masculine and neuter genders.
For example:
Ana vozi mog brata na posao. Ana is driving my brother to work.
Ana vozi mojeg brata na posao. (the same meaning, but rarely used)
(As with other adjectives, you will sometimes find the form in A mojega, and the
shorter form moga – there’s no difference in meaning, such forms are just a bit
archaic.)
In the previous chapter, I’ve explained how there are two words for man in
Croatian. It’s interesting there’s only one word for both woman and wife:
žena woman, wife
If you use that word with a possessive adjective like moj (or any of the possessive
adjectives we’ll learn later) it’s understood as wife:
Vidim ženu. I (can) see a woman.
Poznaješ moju ženu. You know my wife.
poznavati
There is a word meaning precisely wife in Croatian, but it’s very formal and used
only in official records, in very formal speech and so on.
If this all sounds overwhelming to you, here are nouns and adjectives in a nutshell –
just learn this like a poem:
gender example N A
fem. big fish velika riba veliku ribu
big lake veliko jezero
neut.
big sea veliko more no change
m. inan. big wall velik(i) zid no change
m. anim. big brother velik(i) brat velikog brata
There’s an interesting rule:
If the majority of nouns (in a gender) have the same form in two or more cases,
adjectives (in the same gender) have identical forms as well. If they have different
forms, adjectives have different forms as well.
For instance, neuter nouns have the same form in N and A. Therefore, the adjectives
in neuter gender have the same form in N and A (you can check the table above).
Masculine nouns representing people and animals have different forms (they get an