EasyCroatian_r47.an

Easy Croaan (rev. 47b) / 16 Giving to Someone, Going to Someone 96 / 600
are less often used and possession is implied:
Ana N pere kosu A . ‘Ana is washing hair.’ (= her hair)
prati
However, if she’s washing someone else’s hair, a common way – very common in
speech – to express it, is to add the person in the DL case:
Ana N pere Goranu DL kosu A . Ana is washing hair ‘to Goran’. (= Goran’s hair) prati
This is the preferred word order in such sentences – it’s, of course, possible to
rearrange words if you want to stress something. This is the same structure as with
the verb send or write – Goran will ‘get’ his hair washed, in the same way as he will
get a message, letter or gift.
Pay attention that in the sentence above, kosu is in A – it is the object, after all –
while Goranu is in DL. These two words are not attached to each other, don’t
depend on each other: this is just the most common word order in such
sentences.
Croatian has possessive adjectives – I’ve already shown moj my, others will be
shown a bit later – but with body parts, this is the preferred way. If you are familiar
with German, you’ll notice it uses the same system: the sentence above would
translate exactly as Ana wäscht Goran die Haare. Dutch and Romance languages do
it in the same way.
In fact, English is famous for using a lot of possessive adjectives, while a great
majority of European languages use them much less often. In most languages,
possession of body parts and many other things is simply implied – it’s expressed
only if something belongs to someone else, often by dative or something equivalent.
If your brain is spinning now failing to comprehend how DL can mean possession
of a body part, here’s another way to look at the sentence above: Ana is washing
the hair, and doing it to Goran.
The accusative case of neuter nouns is equal to their default, nominative form. It’s
not so for the DL case, and it becomes important that some neuter nouns have
specific case-base as well, not shortened (like masculine ones) but lengthened:
dijete (djetet-) child pile (pilet-) chicken
Pay attention how ije in dijete changes to je in its case-base (such alternations are a
cause of misspellings for many native speakers).
The next two verbs have a obligatory se² always with them (as explained already, it
must be the second word, if possible):
diviti se² marvel, admire
smijati (smije) se² laugh ®
For example:
Goran N se divi Ivanu DL . Goran marvels at Ivan.