Posts tagged with "gender"

The Mysterious Ways of Polish Surnames, part 2

Posted by Anna 6 Comments
Sep 12 2008

As David pointed out in the comment section to the previous post, we still have one more group of Polish last names to discuss. Actually, come to think of it, TWO more.
But let’s start with the easier one of the two:

4. Surnames ending in vowels OTHER than “a”, “i” and “y”. And yes, “y” is considered a vowel in Polish. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any Polish Nobel Prize Winners in this category.

But there is a guy that no doubt will be familiar to my Polish readers, and whose name makes a fine example here: Aleksander Fredro.
He was a playwright, poet and author who lived a while back (19th century). One of his famous comedies “The Revenge” (Zemsta in Polish) was made into a film by Andrzej Wajda in 2002, and as I remember it, it was quite decent.

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The Mysterious Ways of Polish Surnames

Posted by Anna No Comments
Sep 9 2008

My friend called me today and that should be good news, right? But it wasn’t. The poor woman was very stressed and urgently requested my help. You see, she was applying for a visa to one of those countries that still require a woman to provide information about her male guardian, either a father or a husband. So my friend dutifully filled out the visa application form, included her photos, paid the fees and waited. And then waited some more. Finally today she got a letter stating that her visa application was rejected due to her name (as printed in her passport) not matching with the name of her male guardian (father).

She doesn’t live in Poland, and apparently, the officials at the Embassy of The Very Strange Country over there were not familiar with the peculiarities of Polish surnames. And I don’t blame them. Even in the not so strange countries, it’s sometimes hard for the administrative automatons to comprehend the fact that some Polish last names can have both a feminine and a masculine form and some don’t. And that some last names decline (grammatically speaking, of course) and on certain documents they can be printed in different grammatical cases. And that with some last names it’s only the guys’ forms that decline, but not the girls’. Really.

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This and That

Posted by Anna No Comments
Aug 21 2008

The distinction between “this” and “that” is more or less clear in English. Or at least I’ve always thought so. But as one of our readers has pointed out, while “this” is easier to grasp when translated into a foreign language, things can get really goofy with “that”.

Fortunately, I can assure you that people who learn English have exactly the same problem, but in the opposite direction. And just look at “that” in the previous sentence. It’s a different “that” from when talking about “that house is nice”.

See? In English “that” is used just about everywhere and for just about everything.

Translating all those “thats” into Polish can be a real pain. In fact, I’ve been scratching my head and debating how to do it in the least painful way for the past couple of days.

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More Pronoun Fun: Ci, Te

Posted by Anna No Comments
Aug 8 2008

Ok, so today I’m supposed to tell you how to figure out the gender when it comes to plural nouns and adjectives. But first, we need to talk just a tiny little but about those plural nouns and their genders.

You see, those plural nouns can be confusing. They are even to me. And I should know this stuff, I’m Polish. But even so, I sometimes have to stop and think about it.

That we have three genders in singular you know already. However, in plural, those three genders become two. And they’re no longer so nicely organized into masculine, feminine, and neuter. Oh no! Polish can’t be THAT easy!

Instead, our plural nouns have two bizarre genders called:

- personal masculine
- everything else.

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Ten Ta To

Posted by Anna No Comments
Aug 6 2008

In my last post I quoted a Japanese lady who is learning Polish in Tokyo. She kindly gave us several examples of why she likes Poland so much. And to show off her Polish grammar, she even used a variety of adjective-noun combinations. I don’t know about you, but if it was me speaking in a difficult foreign language to a stranger, I’d stick to one gender and one number, just to keep things simple (and not to make a fool out of myself). But not our new Japanese friend. She had to really show off. And by “really show off” I mean use all three genders in singular and one in plural. How’s that for ambitious, huh?

So let’s take a closer look at what she said. She said that Poland was a beautiful country.
piękny kraj = beautiful country

Now, remember what I said about Polish adjectives? That they have to agree in gender with the nouns they describe?
“Kraj” (country) is a masculine (non-person) singular noun, so the adjective “piękny” (beautiful) must also be masculine and singular. This is actually easy, because it just so happens that our wonderful Polish adjectives are listed in dictionaries in their masculine singular forms.

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