Professional paper
On the Need of Recognising Differences Between English and Croatian
Nenad Raos
Abstract
The influence of English on the writing style of Croatian scientists can be attributed to the fact that Croatian scientists write mostly in English, as well as to their generally poor writing skills. This paper focuses on seven differences between English and Croatian which the author feels need to be addressed: 1) the use of passive mode is less common in Croatian; 2) verbs are more expressive in Croatian than in English; 3) there are seven cases in Croatian, which change the forms of nouns, pronouns, and adjectives; 4) Croatian needs less explicit expressions than English, 5) in English, in contrast to Croatian, adjectives are usually derived from the Latin words; 6) in Croatian, grammatical difference between genders is more pronounced; and 7) identical words may have different meaning in English and in Croatian. The paper brings examples of unidiomatic Croatian influenced by English, which have been taken from published professional articles and titles of theses.
Keywords
Croatian; English; linguistics; natural sciences; style
Hrčak ID:
5986
URI
Publication date:
13.12.2006.
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