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Nouns and adjectives

Polish is highly inflected and retains the Old Slavic case system with seven cases for nouns, pronouns, and adjectives: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, instrumental, locative and vocative. There are two numbers, singular and plural.

The Polish gender system is complex, due to its combination of three categories: gender (masculine, feminine, neuter), personhood (personal versus non-personal) and animacy (animate versus inanimate). Personhood and animacy are relevant within the masculine gender but do not affect the feminine or neuter genders. The resulting system can be presented as comprising five gender classes: personal masculine, animate (non-personal) masculine, inanimate masculine, feminine, and neuter. These classes can be identified based on declension patterns, adjective-noun agreement, and pronoun-antecedent agreement.

The gender classes are characterized by the following inflectional properties (with rare exceptions):

1. Personal masculine: accusative = genitive (both singular and plural), distinctive nominative plural ending
2. Animate (non-personal) masculine: nominative singular ending in a consonant (nouns), accusative singular = genitive singular, accusative plural = nominative plural
3. Inanimate masculine: nominative singular ending in a consonant (nouns), accusative = nominative (singular and plural)
4. Neuter: nominative singular in "-o" or "-e", genitive singular in "-a" (nouns), accusative = nominative (singular and plural)
5. Feminine: dative singular = locative singular, accusative plural = nominative plural.

To determine correct adjective-noun agreement, only four genders need to be distinguished in the singular (classes 1 and 2 can be combined), and only two genders are needed in the plural (class 1 contrasting with 2-3-4-5 combined). For correct pronoun selection, the gender system can be further simplified to three classes in the singular, and two in the plural. The following table shows which 3rd person nominative pronoun corresponds to nouns of each gender class:

Verbs

Polish verbs are inflected according to gender as well as person and number, but the tense forms have been simplified through elimination of three old tenses (the aorist, imperfect, and past perfect). The so-called Slavic perfect is the only past tense form used in common speech. In Polish, one distinguishes between three tenses (present, past and future; however, when considering the aspect of the verb, one could detect five tenses, not six, since present perfect forms do not exist in Polish), three moods (indicative, imperative and conditional) and three voices (active, passive and reflexive). Aspect is a grammatical category of the verb, and almost all Polish verbs have two distinct forms, one imperfective and one perfective. A few verbs have two imperfective forms, where the imperfective aspect subdivides into either the indeterminate and determinate aspect (chodzić - iść - pójść (to go)) or the actual and frequentative aspect (pisać - pisywać - napisać (to write)). The perfective verb form is usually an imperfective verb changed with prefixation (robić - zrobić (to make; to do)), suffixation (kichać - kichnąć (to sneeze)) or stem alternation (oddychać - odetchnąć (to breathe)). A few verbs show suppletion in their aspect formation, like brać - wziąć (to take).

The tenses include:

Movable suffixes (those of the past tenses) are usually attached to the verb or to the most accented word of a sentence, like question preposition.

The fifth Polish tense, the future imperfective, is an analytic form, and consists of the simple future form of the auxiliary verb być ‘to be’ (będę, będziesz...), and either infinitive or past participle (imperfective). The choice between będziecie robić and będziecie robili is free, and both forms have the same meaning.

Sometimes the sentence may be emphasised with a particle -że- (-ż).

So what have you done? can be:

• Co zrobiliście?
• Coście zrobili?
• Cóżeście zrobili? (a form that could be derived from Cóż zrobiliście?, which actually sounds archaic and is not used, except for eg. biblical usage)

All the above examples show inflected forms of the verb "zrobić" for the subject "you" informal plural ("wy"). However, it is worthy of notice that none of the above examples includes the subject itself. The inclusion of the subject is not necessary here because Polish is a pro-drop language. This means that with an inflected verb the subject does not need to be mentioned. Instead, the reader or listener can tell, by the ending on the verb, which is different for each person, singular and plural, what is the implied subject. Because the subject can be dropped, using it with an inflected verb signals emphasis. Of the above three examples, a native speaker would not include the subject in the middle sentence and would be unlikely to include the subject in the last one. The examples below show how the subject could be included in such sentences, where possible:

• Co wy zrobiliście?
• Coście zrobili? (a native speaker would not use a subject here)
• Co wyście zrobili? (this example emphasizes the pronoun -- "wy"+ście)
• Co żeście zrobili? (this example emphasizes the że- particle, but it is not correct in a written form)

The past participle depends on number and gender, so the third person, past perfect tense, can be:

• - singular
• zrobił (he made/did)
• zrobiła (she made/did)
• zrobiło (it made/did)
• - plural
• zrobili (they made/did {men, people of both sexes})
• zrobiły (they made/did {women, children})

Word order

Basic word order in Polish is SVO, however, as it is a morpheme rich language, it is possible to move words around in the sentence, and to drop subject, object or even sometimes verb, if they are obvious from context.

These sentences mean more or less the same ("Jack has a dog"), but different shades of meaning are emphasized by selecting different word orders. In increasing order of markedness:

• Jacek ma psa - Jack has a dog
• Jacek psa ma - Jack does have (own) a dog (and has not borrowed it)
• Psa ma Jacek - The/a dog is owned by Jack
• Ma Jacek psa - Jack really does have a dog
• Psa Jacek ma - It is just the dog that Jack really has
• Ma psa Jacek - The relationship of Jack to the dog is one of ownership (and not temporary possession)

However, only the first three examples sound natural in Polish, and others should be used for special emphasis only, if at all.

If a question mark is added to the end of those sentences they will all mean "does Jack have a dog?"; an optional 'czy' could be added to the beginning (but native speakers do not always use it).

If apparent from context, the subject, object or even the verb, can be dropped:

• Ma psa - can be used if it is obvious who is the person talked about
• Ma - short answer for "Czy Jacek ma psa?" (as in "Yes, she does")
• Jacek - answer for "Kto ma psa?" (as in "Jack does")
• Psa - answer for "Co ma Jacek?" (as in "The dog")
• Jacek ma - answer for "Kto z naszych znajomych ma psa?" (as in "Jack does (have one)")

Note the interrogative particle "czy", which is used to start a yes/no question, much like the French "est-ce que". The particle is not obligatory, and sometimes rising intonation is the only signal of the interrogative character of the sentence: "Jacek ma psa?".

There is a tendency in Polish to drop the subject rather than the object as it is uncommon to know the object but not the subject. If the question were "Kto ma psa?" (Who has a/the dog?), the answer should be "Jacek" alone, without a verb.

In particular, "ja" (I) and "ty" (you, singular), and their plural equivalents "my" (we) and "wy" (you, plural), are almost always dropped, much like the respective Spanish pronouns.

Conjugation

Conjugation of "iść" ("to go, walk" in the present tense):

• Ja idę – I am going
• Ty idziesz – You are going (Singular)
• On/ona/ono idzie – He/she/it is going
• My idziemy – We are going
• Wy idziecie – You are going (Plural)
• Oni/one idą – They are going ("Oni" masculine personal, "one" feminine, neuter, masculine animate or masculine inanimate)

In Polish, the use of personal pronouns to mark the subject is not necessary. Therefore, one may omit the personal pronouns as follows, while retaining the same meaning:

• Idę
• Idziesz
• Idzie
• Idziemy
• Idziecie
• Idą