Most of you are busy doing Christmas things and enjoying time off work. Time off for me means I end up spending more time doing geekish things such as posting on this blog. So here is my next post for you language geeks about a few strange things about the Polish language. Read them for your own interest (in case you are as much of a geek as me) or impress your friends with them (in case your friends are geeks instead). If you win a pub quiz based on any of this info feel free to send me a cheque :-)
1. Polish doesn’t have a word for “years”. Now a Polish person will argue with you that they do, namely “lata” and that “rok” is the singular (i.e. “year”). But lata is in fact the plural form of “summer” – “lato”. Therefore if you want to say “3 years ago” the Polish is “3 lata temu”, and if you want to say “3 summers ago” the Polish is also “3 lata temu”. As you can see there is no distinction.
2. Polish doesn’t have a word for “sleet”. It strikes me as very odd given that Polish winters can be very cold and snowy that they don’t have a word for “sleet”. Instead they call it either “rain with snow” or “snow with rain”. So when the TV weather presenter says “there will be rain, sleet and snow tonight” she has to use the awkward looking phrase “będzie deszcz, deszcz z śniegiem i śnieg wieczorem”.
3. Polish doesn’t really have a word for “outdoors”. There are two ways for saying outdoors in Polish and both are a bit odd. One way (as spoken in southern Poland) is to use the expression “on the field”. For example “I am outside” would be “Jestem na polu – I am on the field”. That sounds odd both to foreigners and to some Poles. The other way is to use the word “dwór”. Using this construction a Pole would say “Jestem na dworze” which literally means “I am on the court(yard)” because dwór literally means a court or manor. In my opinion very odd.
4. Numbers 1 to 4 are adjectives. 5 and up aren’t. Have you noticed that something wierd happens to Polish sentences when you have 5 or more of something? This is because numbers below 5 are treated like regular adjectives. For example in the sentence “są dwie ładne kobiety – there are two beautiful women” the word ‘two’ behaves like the word ‘beautiful’ in that it tells us something about the women. Polish language students will notice that the number has declined also. Now compare that with the following: “jest pieć ładnych kobiet – there are five beautiful women”. You can see that either the word endings or words themselves have changed. ‘Five’ doesn’t behaves like an adjective. The grammatical reason for this is because the numbers 5 and above put ‘beautiful women’ into the genitive case. Literally you are now saying “there is 5 of women”. The logical reason for this? Who knows. It is probably related to the fact that anything to do with quantities of something in Polish requires the genitive case. But why switch at 5? Why not 4 or 10? I guess you have to switch somewhere. In any csae, very odd…
5. Instrumental Identity Statements. OK this one is a bit technical so I apologise in advance. Plus this one is more of a peculiarity than just outright wierd so a bit of an anti-climax for the last one I know. Still nevermind, I’ll get on with it. In statements of identity such as “I am a Pilot” or “Eric is a fireman” the Polish language uses the instrumental case. Language students will know that the instrumental case is usually used to indicate the means by which something is done. This leads to the following strange scenario – if somebody offers you an alcoholic drink but you don’t want one because you are driving you say “Jestem samochodem” which literally means “I am by car”. The sentence is constructed of “Jestem – I am” and the instrumental form of car – samochodem. But as I already said, this is how identity statements are constructed. Therefore “Jestem samochodem” could also mean “I am a car”. So is your guest tee-total when driving or having an identity crisis?
