4 ms·

Croatian is the same. Noun declination makes some sense, as it sometimes allows you to omit prepositions (although I sure am glad English doesn't do that). But

• ithkuil 8y ago
  "gendered" verbs are a thing in Italian too: "I fell" becomes "sono caduto" or "sono caduta" depending on the gender of the speaker. Transitive verbs reflect the gender of the objects when using clitics, e.g. "I ate the apple, I ate it really" -> "Ho mangiato la mela, l'ho mangiata davvero". What's odd in Croatian is that the all the verbs behave as intransitive Italian verbs, reflecting the gender of the speaker: "I fell" -> "pao sam" or "pala sam" but also "pojeo sam jabuku" vs "pojela sam jabuku" if the speaker is a woman. I'm not a linguist, but as a native speaker of both, I always thought it had something to do with the fact that in Croatian the verb "to be" is the only auxiliary verb used to built past tenses while in Italian transitive verbs use the verb "to have". The past participles in many languages behave very similarly to adjectives and thus I thought it might not be surprising that you'd decline them according to number and gender as you'd do with any adjective. So if when you fall you "are fallen", you decline the "fallen" participle/adjective according to the subject, namely you in this case. Thus instead of "have eaten" Croatian says "am eaten" (not meaning the passive voice but just using the verb to be as axillary instead of have) as a consequence you notice the "gendered verbs" more often than in other languages. As to why Italian declines participles when clitics are involved, I assume it adds some redundancy so you can more easily guess what the clitic refers to.