Breakdown of Moj djed je umro tisuću devetsto devedeset devete godine.
biti
to be (sam, si, je)
djed
grandfather
godina
year
moj
my
devedeset
ninety
deveti
ninth
tisuća
thousand
devetsto
nine hundred
umrijeti
to die
Questions & Answers about Moj djed je umro tisuću devetsto devedeset devete godine.
Why does the sentence say devete godine instead of just the number?
In Croatian, years are expressed using ordinal numbers, so it's literally the "1999th year". To say an event happened in a specific year, the phrase is put into the genitive case, which gives us devete godine. Also, years are read as full thousands and hundreds, not in pairs like "nineteen ninety-nine".
Why do tisuću, devetsto, and devedeset stay as normal numbers, while only devete changes its ending?
When creating a large compound ordinal number (like the 1999th), Croatian only changes the very last word into an ordinal number. The preceding words (tisuću devetsto devedeset) stay as regular counting numbers. Only that final word (devete) takes the genitive ending to match the noun godine.
Where is the word for "in" in this sentence? Shouldn't there be a preposition?
To say that something happened in a specific year, Croatian doesn't use a preposition. Instead, it simply uses the genitive case for the year and the word for year (godine). The genitive case alone carries the meaning of "in the year of...".
As a quick review, why does the verb end in "-o" in je umro?
This is the past tense of umrijeti (to die). The past tense is formed with the helper verb je and the past participle umro. Because the subject is moj djed (a masculine noun), the participle must take the masculine singular ending, which is -o.
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