Characteristics of the Croatian language in AX Semantics
Fundamentals
In Croatian, you need to know the gender of a noun to form (together with number and case) the accompanying adjectives, determiners, numerals, and pronouns correctly.
Croatian has three genders for nouns: masculine (animate and inanimate), feminine and neuter. There are two numbers: singular and plural. Additionally, Croatian has seven cases for nouns.
| grammatical name | values | examples |
|---|---|---|
| gender | masculine inanimate | stari auto (the old car) |
| masculine animate | stari doktor (the old doctor) | |
| feminine | stara žena (the old woman) | |
| neuter | staro kazalište (the old theater) | |
| number | singular | stari auto (the old car) |
| plural | stari auti (the old cars) | |
| cases (noun) | nominative | pas (the dog) |
| accusative | Vidim psa. (I see the dog.) | |
| dative | Dajem loptu psu. (I give the ball to the dog.) | |
| genitive | psa zvono (the dog's bell) | |
| vocative | Ovo je bilo dobro, psu. (This was good, dog.) | |
| locative | Ptica sleti na psu. (The bird lands on the dog.) | |
| instrumental | Slijepac hoda sa psom. (The blind man walks with a dog.) | |
| adjectives (noun) | before noun | crvena kuća (red house) |
| verb tenses | present | on radi (he works) |
| past (imperfect) | on rađaše (he worked) | |
| past participle passive | rađen (done) | |
| past participle active | on je radio (he worked) |
The standard order of a noun phrase in Croatian is the following:
preposition + determiner + numeral + adjective + noun
See for example:
o ove tri popularne knjige
about these three popular book
PREP DET NUM ADJ NOUN
"about these three popular books"
Lexicon
Nouns
Croatian nouns are inflected for number and case. Lexicon entries for nouns may also be necessary for inflecting determiners, adjectives and pronouns correctly. They are omitted, if a lexicon entry is required, but missing.
Examples
The basic lexicon entry for kuća (house) contains:
- gender: feminine
- inflection table for case and number:
| Singular | Plural | |
|---|---|---|
| Nominative | kuća | kuće |
| Genitive | kućē | kuća |
| Dative | kući | kućama |
| Accusative | kuću | kuće |
| Vocative | kućo | kuće |
| Locative | kući | kućama |
| Instrumental | kućōm | kućama |
Note
If you need lexicon entries for countries, contact support about that and you will get them for Croatian with automatic handling of prepositions.
Adjectives
In the lexicon, the inflection table encodes gender/animacy, case, number and definiteness. For adjective position, the default is "before noun".
Verbs
Croatian verbs inflect for person, number, tense, and in some cases gender. The most common verbs are encoded in our software. If a verb inflects incorrectly, you should add it to the lexicon.
The future tense in Croatian can be formed via present tense of htjeti + infinitive verb. Thus, you can easily use present tense in verb containers to express the future tense. Take the verb jesti (to eat) for example:
jesti
(to eat [inf.])
Ja ću jesti.
(I will eat. [future])
Participles in Croatian can be used in a particular voice: active or passive. See the examples with the verb izgraditi (pf, to build) below:
Maria je izgradila kuću. = Maria has built the house. (active)
Kuća je izgrađena. = The house was built. (passive)
Container settings
Determiner
The AX NLG platform supports the following determiners for Croatian: definite, indefinite, demonstrative, medial, distal, and possessive.
Numerals
The noun will automatically agree with the numeral number when a numeral variable is used. Four types of numerals are possible on the AX NLG platform: cardinal, cardinal as digit, ordinal, and ordinal as digit.
| cardinal | ordinal | |
|---|---|---|
| text | jedan dan (one day) | prvi dan (the first day) |
| digit | 1 dan (1 day) | 1. dan (the 1st day) |
In Croatian, case and number for nouns and adjectives change based on numerals (if no other case than nominative or accusative is set). See for example:
| Numeral | case / number | example |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Nominative Singular | 1 crvena kuća (1 red house) |
| 2-4 | Genitive/Singular | 3 crvene kuće (3 red houses) |
| >= 5 | Genitive/Plural | 7 crvenih kuća (7 red houses) |
For Croatian, both cardinal and ordinal numerals are written out until 20, otherwise (above 20) the output is in digit form. Take cardinal numerals for example:
dvadeset automobila
(twenty cars)
vs.
21 automobil
(21 cars)
Prepositions
If users configure prepositions in the container, they are automatically adapted, if vocalization needs to happen. As the below example shows, s becomes sa when the next word starts with a sibilant or similar consonant (e.g., š or z).
s autom
(with the car)
sa školom
(with the school)
Preposition switch
On the AX NLG platform, the settings for the container Njemačka (Germany) are: preposition="u" and case="loc".
u Njemačkoj
(in Germany)
For the below sentence with a different place (i.e. Island (Iceland)), the platform settings are the same as above (preposition="u", case="loc"), but the lexical information changes the preposition and shows a switch from u to na:
na Islandu
(in Iceland)
Fleeting a
"Fleeting a" describes the phenomenon of a short a appearing and disappearing in the inflected forms of certain nouns. See the noun bórac (fighter) for example:
bórac [nom. sg.]
bórca [gen. sg.]
bȏrācā [gen. pl.]
Palatalization
Palatalization is a sound change that happens when the inflection suffix starts with the vowel e and the word stem ends with k, g or h (which change to č, ž and š). The AX NLG platform applies palatalization automatically, for example:
pȅći (to bake) → pèčēm (I bake)
vrag (devil) → vraže (devils)
jùnāk (hero) → jȕnāče [voc. sg.]