Posts tagged with "genitive"

Genitive Case, part 2

Posted by Anna No Comments
Jul 21 2008

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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Cases in Polish: Genitive

Posted by Anna 12 Comments
Jun 27 2008

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 »

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