Posted by Anna Ikeda
I just realized that we’ve never really finished talking about the genitive case (dopełniacz in Polish). My bad. We had too much fun with all the other things, lazy males and beetle tongue-twisters, and we totally forgot about the declensions. So, let’s get it done and over with this genitive.
I told you that in Polish this case has five different uses, or rather, it’s used in five different situations. We’ve already covered four of them, if I remember correctly. I didn’t really want to talk about the last one, because needless to say, it’s my least favorite, and that’s why I’ve been procrastinating.
Anyway, let’s quickly recap. The genitive case is used:
- 1. to indicate when something (or someone) belongs to someone
- 2. when a verb affecting the object expresses negation
- 3. in expressions of quantity
- 4. in expressions of description or origin
and finally, the last one:
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Posted by Anna Ikeda
Since we’re in the midst of a little grammar kick, I thought we might as well continue. But to keep things interesting, we should let the adjectives rest for a while and talk about something else. Remember when we discussed the genitive case – dopełniacz? Yes, I know, it was a while back. So here I’m going to give you some time to go and read the past entry about dopełniacz. It’s no rush, I’ll be here when you’re done. In the meantime, while you’re busy reading, I will prepare some new interesting dopełniacz examples.
OK, you’re back? That was quick!
Last time when talking about dopełniacz, I said that it has five different functions in Polish. And I think we discussed two of them in that post. Let’s review:
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Posted by Anna Ikeda
It’s time for some grammar now, don’t you agree? And since we’ve already started with nouns and declensions a couple of weeks ago, I think we should continue.
The case we’re going to discuss today is my least favorite. Why? Because on the surface, it seems deceptively easy. Almost too easy, in fact. Yet when you start looking at it up close, it’s anything but. Of course, in everyday speech we don’t stop to think, “oh gee, there’s a genitive in this sentence”. We just say what we need to say without paying much (or any) attention to the grammatical bits and pieces.
And yes, it’s time for the GENITIVE case today.
dopełniacz = genitive
You all know what the genitive case does in English. It shows that one noun is the possessor of another noun. And it also indicates various relationships other than who owns whom or what. In English, in it most basic form it’s done by the handy construction of “apostrophe plus s”. Like this one:
Agata’s cat.
Actually, as several generations of Polish children know, it’s not Agata, but Ala, who has a cat. So let’s keep the tradition alive and add Ala to our examples:
Ala’s cat.
That’s in English, stick an apostrophe and an “s” and your work is done. In Polish it’s not quite as simple, because to decline a noun you need to change its ending. In this example, our nouns are two lovely ladies named Agata and Ala. Read More »
). And young people often use it's shortened form "nara" (just like you said) 