Posts tagged with "noun"

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 »

Polish Nouns: Gender

Posted by Anna No Comments
May 11 2008

Polish nouns, like all Slavic nouns, are a bit funky. Not only are they marked for gender, they also have cases. Seven of them, in fact, which makes for an interesting learning experience.

But let’s start with the easy bit – gender. There are three:

feminine, as in kobieta (a woman)
masculine, as in mężczyzna (a man)
and neuter, as in dziecko (a child)

Some grammar purists will try to scare you into personal masculine, animate masculine, inanimate masculine, feminine, and neuter. But really? Who needs three different masculine forms? Sometimes one seems like too many already! So, let’s stick to the simple version. There are three genders altogether.

How to distinguish (or guess) which noun is what? There are rules for that, of course, with plenty of exceptions.

Feminine nouns end mostly with an “a”, the great majority of them, anyway. If there is no “a” at the end, but a consonant instead, the noun can still be feminine, for example: mysz (a mouse).

Masculine nouns most likely will end with a consonant, but sometimes with a vowel (as in the example above – mężczyzna).

And the poor neuter ones will have an “o”, or an “e” at the end, or something unusual like “-um”.

But remember, we are talking here about nouns in their singular nominative cases, just as they would be listed in a dictionary.

Confused yet? Don’t worry! It’s actually quite easy to determine what is what. In most instances, you can figure out the gender from the meaning of the noun. All you need is a little practice.

Unfortunately, this whole gender issue is quite important, because it affects other parts of speech, too, like adjectives, verbs and numbers. There’s no skipping or escaping it, and it all starts with a noun. That’s the bad news.

The good news is that in plural, three genders become two! (Well, technically not really, but for most intents and purposes you can think of them as two.)

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