Breakdown of Zbog oskudnih resursa ovdje malo što raste.
ovdje
here
zbog
because of
rasti
to rise / to grow
oskudan
scarce
resurs
resource
malo što
hardly anything
Questions & Answers about Zbog oskudnih resursa ovdje malo što raste.
Why doesn't the verb have a negative particle here, like ne raste, since it translates to "hardly anything"?
Unlike the pronoun ništa (nothing), which strictly requires double negation in Croatian (as in ništa ne raste), the pronoun malo što is grammatically affirmative. It means "very little" or "hardly anything", so it pairs with a positive verb: malo što raste.
Does malo što always take a singular verb like raste?
Yes. Even though "hardly anything" might conceptually refer to a variety of plants in this context, malo što acts as a singular, neuter pronoun. Therefore, the verb is always in the third-person singular.
What case is oskudnih resursa, and why?
It is in the genitive plural. The preposition zbog (because of) always forces the noun phrase that follows it into the genitive case. The base words here are the adjective oskudan (scarce) and the noun resurs (resource).
If I needed to use malo što as the object of a preposition, how does it decline?
Only the pronoun half of the phrase changes. The word malo stays fixed, while što declines just like the standard question word. For instance, if you needed the genitive case, it would become malo čega, and the dative would be malo čemu. In our sentence, it acts as the subject, so it stays in the nominative malo što.
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