This last post about wakacje (holidays) made me a little bit confused. OK, not a little. A lot. While writing it, I was unable to fully determine the grammatical gender of “wakacje”, and a random selection of my countrymen to whom I posed that question just looked at me with utter bewilderment.
“You mean it has a gender?” and “I’m sure it’s not masculine” were two of the most sensible answers. And mind you, we’re Poles discussing Polish grammar.
The “wakacje” question eventually turned into an even bigger problem when we discovered just how inconsistent Polish grammar books are. And boy! Are they ever!
We finally determined that the grammatical gender of “wakacje” is not quite neuter in the strict neuter sense, but can be called neuter for all intents and purposes here. It’s also an uncountable noun, which exists only in the plural form. And guess what? It’s not the only one. There’s more.
