Breakdown of Vladar ga uze i progovori svojim ljudima.
on
he
ljudi
people
i
and (additive)
uzeti
to take
svoj
one's own
progovoriti
to speak up
vladar
ruler (person)
Questions & Answers about Vladar ga uze i progovori svojim ljudima.
How do we know uze is a past tense verb here?
uze is the 3rd-person singular aorist of the perfective verb uzeti (to take). In standard spoken Croatian, you would normally hear the perfect tense je uzeo, but the aorist is often used in literature and storytelling to describe sudden, completed actions in the past.
Wait, doesn't progovori look exactly like the present tense?
Yes, it looks identical to the 3rd-person singular present tense of progovoriti (to speak out). However, context tells us it is the aorist tense here. Because it follows uze (which is clearly aorist) and describes a narrative past event, we know it means he spoke rather than speaks. In the standard everyday past tense, this would be je progovorio.
Why use svojim instead of njegovim to say his?
svoj is the reflexive possessive pronoun used when the subject of the sentence owns the object. Since the ruler (the subject) is speaking to his own people, we must use svojim. If the sentence used njegovim, it would mean he was speaking to some other man's people!
Why is the pronoun ga placed before the verb uze?
The word ga is an enclitic, which means it is an unstressed word that must strictly occupy the second grammatical position in the sentence. The noun Vladar takes up the first position, so ga must tuck in right after it, pushing the verb uze to the third position.
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