14 My and Adjectives in Accusative

→  You can also read this chapter in French, Spanish or Finnish.

We now know how to say:

Jedemjesti jabuku. I’m eating an apple.

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:

Jedemjesti crvenu jabuku.  ▶  I’m eating a red apple.

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 nominative	veliko jezero big lake
masc. (not p/a)	same as nominative	velik(i) zid big wall
masc. (p/a)	-og (some -eg)	velikog konja big horse

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 wall 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.

(You’ll often see that, in most textbooks, only three genders are mentioned and the difference in the accusative case is not called gender. The division to four genders is the simplest explanation, in my opinion at least.)

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.

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 ‘same as nominative’, or ‘no change’, I wrote just ‘= N’):

noun type (N)		A
nouns in -a (≈ fem.)		-a → -u
neuter nouns (≈ in -o, -e)		= N
masculine not in -a	(not p/a)	= N
	(p/a)	add -a
fem. not in -a (e.g. noć)		= N

(They differ from the previous, approximate rules only for a few nouns, e.g. kokoš f hen and zvijer f beast – the approximate rules didn’t take the gender into account.)

I’ve included the approximate rules (≈) for gender in the table, e.g. nouns that end in -a in N are usually feminine, etc. The important criteria have nothing to do with the approximate rules: all nouns than end in -a change it in A to -u. As some masc. nouns end in -a, I’ve stressed that the masc. endings apply only to nouns not ending in -a.

I will introduce here a very useful adjective, moj my. This is simply an adjective in Croatian, but it’s not so in English. For example, you can say:

the red apple; the apple is red

If you try to replace the word red in the sentences above with my, you’ll see the problem. Not so in Croatian, where you simply say:

moja jabuka

Jabuka je moja.

While moj is used as any other adjective, it still has two peculiarities:

First, unlike other adjectives, it never has the optional -i in masc. N.

Second, in masculine (also in neuter gender, we’ll see later) it has special, shorter forms. There’s absolutely no difference in meaning, use, you can use longer or shorter forms wherever you like, but shorter forms are much more frequently used:

gender	N	A
fem.	moja	moju
neut.	moje	= N
masc. (not p/a)	moj	= N
masc. (p/a)		mog mojeg

There’s nothing special about forms for the feminine gender, they are in the table 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.

Poznaješpoznavati moju ženu. You know my wife.

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. The same double meaning holds for the words for boy/boyfriend and girl/girlfriend – but there are formal and colloquial words for them:

	girl, girlfriend	boy, boyfriend
formal	djevojka	mladić (»)
colloq.	cura	dečko (dečk-) m (Zagreb, etc.) momak (momk-) (Dalmatia)

In everyday speech and casual writing, words djevojka and mladić are quite rare. Keep in mind, here both formal and colloquial words have double meanings. Additionally, colloquial words vary by region (you’ll learn more regional variations later). So, you’ll mostly read and hear:

Ana je lijepa cura. (colloq.) Ana is a pretty girl.

Ana je moja cura. (colloq.) Ana is my girlfriend.

Marko je lijep dečko. (colloq.) Marko is a handsome boy.

Marko je moj dečko. (colloq.) Marko is my boyfriend.

Marko je moj momak. (colloq., Dalmatia) Marko is my boyfriend.

These words are completely unrelated to the Croatian words for friend: prijatelj (male) and prijateljica (female)!

Note that possession can also be expressed with the verb imati have, and then meanings also switch:

Imam ženu. I have a wife. (i.e. I’m married.)

Nemam curu. (colloq.) I don’t have a girlfriend.

Imam dečka. (colloq.) I have a boyfriend.

Imam momka. (colloq., Dalmatia) I have a boyfriend.

If all these endings seem overwhelming, 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
neut.	big lake	veliko jezero	no change
	big sea	veliko more
m. inan.	big wall	velik(i) zid	no change
m. anim.	big brother	velik(i) brat	velikog brata

Finally, you’ll see sometimes, in writing, that certain adjectives in A have endings like nouns, e.g. vidim crna konja. This is never used in everyday life and casual writing. Such indefinite adjectives will be briefly described in 99 Aorist Tense and Other Marginal Features. You can safely ignore them for now.

________

® Such longer endings are extremely rare in Serbia and Bosnia.

↓ Something Possibly Interesting (click to show)

Having only one word for both woman and wife isn't uncommon: French femme has both meanings; the same holds for German Frau.

The word rak means both crab and cancer, but when it refers to an animal, it’s treated as masculine animate, and when it refers to the disease, it’s masculine inanimate. The same holds for two meanings of the word miš mouse – the animal is masc. animate, the thing to move pointer on the screen is not (but there seems to be some regional variation in this).

However, the name of a football club from Split, Hajduk, is usually treated as masculine animate, even when referring to the club: it means highwayman, outlaw. Car brands (e.g. Mercedes) are also often treated as masculine animate.

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 -a in A), so adjectives in masculine gender for people and animals have different forms in N and A (they get -og in A). You’ll later see that nouns ending in -a – by and large feminine – have the same form in nominative plural and accusative plural. Therefore, you can immediately conclude that adjectives in the feminine gender have the same form in nominative plural and accusative plural.

Adjectives follow the pattern (but not the endings) of the majority of nouns in a given gender. For instance, feminine nouns in a consonant (e.g. noć f night, sol f salt) have some cases identical (e.g. N and A singular), but it has absolutely no effect on the pattern of adjectives, since such nouns are really a minority.

Very few Croatian grammars treat gender in Croatian in a consistent way, by having 4 genders. It’s much more common in Czech grammars (Czech is a close cousin to Croatian, with essentially the same system). However, Russian (which has essentially the same system as well) is always described with three genders. There are even people who claim that there have to be three genders, since it’s ‘natural’, and ‘this is what we were taught in schools’.

There is an alternative way of explaining this difference in accusative endings, which is not actually at odds with the one above, but it could explain why the difference is only in accusative, i.e. the object case. In many languages, certain objects, normally more individual ones, persons, animals, get special marks. For example, specific people in Spanish get a when objects of the verb. This is called differential object marking. However, this difference in Croatian applies only to the masculine gender, so the simplest explanation must be gender-related!

↓ Examples (click to show)

Crno-bijeli svijet Black-and-White World is one of the most popular songs by Prljavo kazalište Dirty Theater, a rock band from Zagreb. The song opens with the famous line:

Moje ime je Davorin Bogović	My name is Davorin Bogović
a ovo sve oko mene	And all this around me
to je crno-bijeli svijet...	It’s a black-and-white world...
Crno-bijeli televizori	Black-and-white TV’s
rijetki noćni tramvaji	Rare night trams
moja bijela djevojka	My white girlfriend
uvozni ekskluzivni program	Imported exclusive shows
mama, tata, pas i kravata...	Mom, Dad, a dog and a tie...
(Jasenko Houra)

See how moj my and other adjectives adapt to the gender of nouns after them. All the forms are in N, just different genders.

The second line has ovo sve, lit. these all; such forms will be explained later. It also uses oko mene, where the form mene will be explained later (it’s in the so-called genitive case).

The fourth and the fifth line use plural forms, which are not yet explained, but for masculine adjectives and many masculine nouns, it’s simply -i in N plural.

The sixth line has no racist implications whatsoever: everything around the guy is black and white, no colors – and colors are perceived as good, i.e. color TV’s were new and better than old black-and-white ones – and the girlfriend is just a part of the black-and-white world, i.e. she isn’t anything extraordinary. The seventh line uses program which can mean many things; my translation as (TV) show is only one possibility.

You can find various performances on YouTube™.

This is a recent cover performance on the Croatian public TV flagship music show, featuring young performers (check their names on YouTube); note that the singer uses his name in the first line:

(The four performers were all contestants in The Voice Croatia; you can watch their auditions here, here and here. The audition of the guy will be used as an example later.)

And here’s the original video clip by Prljavo kazalište from 1980:

You can clearly hear how everyone pronounces bijeli and rijetki without the i: only two syllables, as if written bjeli and rjetki (which makes spelling of these words hard for many Croatians).

↓ Exercise (click to show)

Fill in the right forms of adjectives and other words (a hint: all forms use the accusative case):

Show a pop-up Croatian keyboard

Čekamo . We’re waiting for my sister.

Sutra idemo . We’re going to a big beach tomorrow.

Ivan pije . Ivan is drinking cold beer.

Damir ima . Damir has a little brother.

Imamo . We have a black cat.

Ana auto. Ana is driving my car.

Idemo . We’re going to my apartment.

Jedem . I’m eating a cold pizza.

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