StringerBell wrote:Awhile back I mentioned having great difficulty in determining whether a noun was singular or plural. I finally reached the part of the Preston book that explains this mystery and all I can say is: what a confusing system for pluralizing nouns! I started taking notes on how to pluralize on one page thinking that I could fit everything on the 2/3 of a page that was left...but then ran out of room and needed a whole other page (and this is not even everything!)
I have some questions:
1) The book explains that there are "2 groups" in terms of how things get pluralized:
[1] Masculine Personal Plurals (men, or a group containing at least 1 man), and
[2] Non-Masculine Personal Plurals (women, and ALL other nouns including objects and animals)
The book keeps referring to masculine or non-masculine "personal plurals" but for the life of me, I can't understand what they mean by "personal plurals".
The real question is this: from the examples I can find in the book, it seems that when you make a noun plural, it is the same in Mianownik (Nominative) and Biernik (Accusative). Is this true?
Mianownik singular: kawa
Mianownik plural: kawy
Biernik plural: kawy - Mam trzy duże kawy.
Some languages have asymmetric systems when it comes to inflection. Old (12th century) French distinguished two cases in masculine words but did not distinguish them in most feminine words. German distinguishes three word subtypes in the singular (masculine, feminine, neuter) but only has one plural type. Polish, similarly, has three subtypes in the singular (masculine, feminine, neuter) and two in the plural (masculine personal, non-masculine-personal i.e. everything else), although within the masculine singular it's worth to distinguish inanimate/object nouns from human/divine/animal nouns (see below).
"Personal" here refers to "person"/"people", so, "human". Examples of masculine "personal" nouns would be mężczyzna 'man', sprzedawca 'salesman', kapitalista 'male capitalist', sędzia 'judge (when referring to a man, the feminine can be optionally specified as sędzina)', poeta 'male poet'. Note that the word bóg 'male god' is included too.
Masculine non-personal nouns come from two categories: "animate" nouns comprised mostly of animals (e.g. pawian 'baboon', plus some miscellaneous words like duch 'ghost, spirit') and "inanimate" nouns comprised mostly of objects (e.g. stół 'table').
This means that as far as masculine-gender words are concerned, you must correctly identify whether they are "personal"(/human), "animate"(/animal) or "inanimate"(/object), because it affects declension.
- Masculine personal nouns distinguish all four of mianownik singular, biernik singular, mianownik plural and biernik plural, e.g. mężczyzna mężczyznę, plural mężczyźni mężczyzn 'man'; bóg boga, plural bogowie bogów 'god'.
- Masculine animate nouns distinguish mianownik singular and biernik singular, but have only one plural form that covers both cases, e.g. pies psa, plural psy 'dog'; duch ducha, plural duchy 'ghost, spirit'.
- Masculine inanimate nouns do not distinguish the mianownik and biernik cases, just like neuter-gender nouns, e.g. stół, plural stoły 'table'; pazur, plural pazury 'claw'.
Note that a word may belong to more than one pattern due to metaphorical usage. For example, pies 'dog' is an animate/animal noun and so has only one mianownik/biernik plural form (psy), but when referring to people as "dogs" (something particularly done to policemen in Polish usage), the word may receive the distinct biernik plural "psów" (while the mianownik plural must remain psy).
You don't need to care about any of this for feminine and neuter nouns, as all feminine nouns decline in the same pattern, and so do neuter nouns.
It's English that's weird for being able to do that positively in the expression "top dog", as in "those guys are the top dogs of robotics" (that is, they're the best).