Breakdown of Bili su organizirali europski turnir prije nego što smo stigli.
biti
to be (sam, si, je)
stići
to arrive
prije nego što
before
organizirati
to organize
europski
European
turnir
tournament
Questions & Answers about Bili su organizirali europski turnir prije nego što smo stigli.
Why does this sentence use bili su organizirali instead of just organizirali su?
This is the pluperfect tense (Pluskvamperfekt), which is used to describe an action that was completed before another action in the past. Here, the organizing happened entirely before the arriving (smo stigli). It is formed using the perfect tense of biti (bili su) plus the l-participle of the main verb (organizirali).
Why is što required in prije nego što?
When prije nego (before) introduces a full clause with a conjugated verb (like smo stigli), standard Croatian requires you to add što. While you might hear native speakers drop it in casual speech and just say prije nego smo stigli, prije nego što is the grammatically correct form.
Could we use the imperfective verb stizali here instead of stigli?
No, you need the perfective verb stigli (arrived) because the arrival is a single, completed event marking a specific point in time. If you used the imperfective stizali, it would mean "while we were in the process of arriving", which changes the logical sequence of events.
How would the word order change if I explicitly started the sentence with the pronoun Oni (They)?
If you add Oni to the very beginning, the enclitic su must immediately follow it to satisfy the strict second-position rule. The sentence would become: Oni su bili organizirali europski turnir prije nego što smo stigli. Notice how su jumps in front of bili when a subject is added!
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