{"id":35,"date":"2008-07-04T00:47:48","date_gmt":"2008-07-04T04:47:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/polish\/?p=35"},"modified":"2008-07-04T00:47:48","modified_gmt":"2008-07-04T04:47:48","slug":"plural-or-singular-or-something-in-between","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/polish\/plural-or-singular-or-something-in-between\/","title":{"rendered":"Plural, Singular or Something In-Between?"},"content":{"rendered":"

This last post about wakacje<\/a><\/strong> (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 \u201cwakacje<\/strong>\u201d, and a random selection of my countrymen to whom I posed that question just looked at me with utter bewilderment.
\n\u201cYou mean it has a gender?<\/em>\u201d and \u201cI\u2019m sure it\u2019s not masculine<\/em>\u201d were two of the most sensible answers. And mind you, we\u2019re Poles discussing Polish grammar.<\/p>\n

The \u201cwakacje<\/strong>\u201d question eventually turned into an even bigger problem when we discovered just how inconsistent Polish grammar books are. And boy! Are they ever!<\/p>\n

We finally determined that the grammatical gender of \u201cwakacje<\/strong>\u201d is not quite neuter in the strict neuter sense, but can be called neuter for all intents and purposes here. It\u2019s also an uncountable noun, which exists only in the plural form. And guess what? It\u2019s not the only one. There\u2019s more.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Here are some other examples:<\/p>\n

pomyje<\/a><\/strong> = dirty dishwater, hogwash, slop, general yuck after washing something filthy
\nurodziny<\/a><\/strong> = birthday
\ngraffiti<\/strong> = mercifully, the meaning is the same, and get this \u2013 because it\u2019s a foreign loan word \u2013 it does not decline! Woohoo!<\/p>\n

All of these are neuter uncountable nouns that exist only in their plural forms. You know what surprised me here? \u201cUrodziny<\/strong>\u201d. I always thought that we could count them just fine. And yes, we actually can, but not in a way you\u2019d expect, and since it\u2019s more complicated than it looks, we\u2019ll leave it alone for now.
\nOk, back to our nouns\u2026<\/p>\n

Then we have neuter nouns, again \u2013 plural only, that are perfectly countable such as:<\/p>\n

usta<\/a><\/strong> = lips
\nwrota<\/a><\/strong> = gates
\ndrzwi<\/a><\/strong> \u2013 doors
\nskrzypce<\/a><\/strong> = violin<\/p>\n

Again, remember that these guys don\u2019t have singular forms.<\/p>\n

And finally, we have a couple of nouns that are not really countable and not really uncountable, but again, they\u2019re more or less genderless:<\/p>\n

no\u017cyczki<\/a><\/strong> = scissors
\nspodnie<\/a><\/strong> = trousers<\/p>\n

I\u2019m sure there\u2019s more but let\u2019s stick to these for the time being.<\/p>\n

All of this made me realize just how difficult and complicated determining plural grammatical gender in Polish can be. And why is that? The history of the language is partly to blame. If you can imagine, once upon a time, Polish was even more complex. What we have now is a language that has been simplifying itself for quite some time. But unfortunately, some vestiges of those ancient long-defunct forms are still sticking around. And because they just won\u2019t die fast enough, we\u2019re stuck with those (totally unfun, if I may add) complications for a little while longer.<\/p>\n

Now of course, you may ask if there are nouns that exist only as singular. You betcha!
\nCheck these guys out:<\/p>\n

z\u0142o<\/a><\/strong> (neuter, singular only) = evil (as a noun)
\npowietrze<\/a><\/strong> (neuter, singular only) = air
\nbyd\u0142o<\/a><\/strong> (neuter, singular only) = cattle<\/p>\n

The last one is funny, because grammatically, it\u2019s singular, but of course it describes not one, but a bunch of cows, just like in English.<\/p>\n

See? We finally found something in Polish that is just like in English! Not bad, wouldn\u2019t you say?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 \u201cwakacje\u201d, and a random selection of my countrymen to whom I posed that question just looked at me with utter bewilderment. \u201cYou mean it…<\/p>\n

Continue Reading<\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":37,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"content-type":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[74,306825,110,3349,3404],"class_list":["post-35","post","type-post","status-publish","hentry","category-grammar","tag-gender","tag-grammar","tag-nouns","tag-plural","tag-singular"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/polish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/polish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/polish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/polish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/37"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/polish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/polish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/polish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/polish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.transparent.com\/polish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}