Breakdown of To što on stalno kasni jako me živcira.
on
he
ja
I
kasniti
to be late
stalno
constantly
jako
very, strongly (colloquial)
to što
the fact that / that which
živcirati
to annoy
Questions & Answers about To što on stalno kasni jako me živcira.
Why do we need To što at the beginning instead of just Što or Da?
In Croatian, a whole clause can act as the subject of the sentence, but it usually needs a dummy pronoun to anchor it. To acts as the grammatical subject for the main verb živcira, and što introduces the subordinate clause explaining what to is. Think of it as saying "That thing, which is that he is constantly late, annoys me."
Could I use Činjenica da instead of To što here?
Yes, you can! You could say Činjenica da on stalno kasni jako me živcira. This translates literally to "The fact that he is constantly late..." and means exactly the same thing. However, To što is often preferred as a more natural and less formal phrasing in everyday speech.
Why is the enclitic me placed after jako, rather than immediately after the subject clause?
When a sentence starts with a long subordinate clause like To što on stalno kasni, the main clause usually resets its word order. Instead of treating the entire first clause as "position one" and awkwardly putting the enclitic immediately after it, speakers treat the first word of the main clause (jako) as position one, placing the enclitic me safely in position two right after it.
The subject of živcira is an entire clause. How do we know what form the main verb should take?
Whenever a clause or an infinitive acts as the subject of a sentence, the main verb defaults to the third-person singular. If this sentence were in the past tense, the active participle would take the neuter singular form (for example, ...jako me je živciralo).
Is živcira related to the Croatian word for "nerves"?
Exactly. It comes from the noun živac (nerve). The imperfective verb živcirati essentially means "to get on someone's nerves" or "to annoy." It requires the accusative case for the person being annoyed, which is why we use the short-form accusative pronoun me here.
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