{"id":178,"date":"2008-08-08T13:08:57","date_gmt":"2008-08-08T17:08:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/polish\/?p=168"},"modified":"2008-08-08T13:08:57","modified_gmt":"2008-08-08T17:08:57","slug":"more-pronoun-fun-ci-te","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/polish\/more-pronoun-fun-ci-te\/","title":{"rendered":"More Pronoun Fun: Ci, Te"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ok, so today I\u2019m 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.<\/p>\n

You see, those plural nouns can be confusing. They are even to me. And I should know this stuff, I\u2019m Polish. But even so, I sometimes have to stop and think about it.<\/p>\n

That we have three genders in singular you know already. However, in plural, those three genders become two. And they\u2019re no longer so nicely organized into masculine, feminine, and neuter. Oh no! Polish can\u2019t be THAT easy!<\/p>\n

Instead, our plural nouns have two bizarre genders called:<\/p>\n

– personal masculine
\n– everything else.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Of course the second one isn\u2019t really called that, it has a long and useless Polish name, but for all intents and purposes, you just need to remember that it encompasses everything that doesn\u2019t fall into the first group.<\/p>\n

And what does fall into the first group? As the name suggests – \u201cpersons<\/em>\u201d. Personal masculine plural is used to describe either more than one male person, or a mixed male-female group.<\/p>\n

Everything else is non-\u201cpersonal masculine\u201d, be it a group of girls, a herd of cats or a pile of papers. Kind of sexist, wouldn\u2019t you say?<\/p>\n

How does all this work in practice? It\u2019s not as hard as it looks, that\u2019s for sure. The problem is that you need to remember those pesky singular genders, at least when it comes to persons.<\/p>\n

So let\u2019s pick an example.
\n Wspaniali ludzie<\/strong> (great, wonderful people), if I remember correctly was how our Japanese friend Atsuko described the people she met in Poland.
\n Ludzie<\/strong> (people) is a mixture of males and females one would presume, so you can safely state this plural gender is of the personal masculine variety.<\/p>\n

The adjective here \u201cwspania\u0142y<\/strong>\u201d had to agree in gender and number with the noun \u201cludzie<\/strong>\u201d, hence \u201cwspaniali<\/strong>\u201d.<\/p>\n

Now let\u2019s try the same with \u201cgirls\u201d (dziewczyny<\/strong>):<\/p>\n

wspania\u0142e dziewczyny<\/strong> (in singular would be: wspania\u0142a dziewczyna<\/strong>)<\/p>\n

And these are the only two forms that our wspania\u0142e<\/strong> (wonderful) adjectives get when they describe plural nouns.<\/p>\n

See, it wasn\u2019t so bad?<\/p>\n

And remember our little pronouns \u201cten, ta, to<\/a><\/strong>\u201d (this) and how they can help us determine the correct gender? The same is true in plural, except of course, instead of \u201cthis\u201d the word is \u201cthese\u201d.<\/p>\n