"Nie kocham tej kobiety."
Translation:I do not love this woman.
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This must be so freaking confusing for you. I'm well aware of it. Some Polish words in singular form depending on case can look like plural form. We use 'tę' in affirmative sentences - 'Kocham tę kobietę' but in negations we use 'tej' - 'Nie kocham tej kobiety'
Thank you so much for your helpful reply. But what case is this and is it the only one in which singulars look plural? Thanks again.
This is accusative (biernik). It happens probably only with feminine. This is different example: Mam Lampę (I have a lamp). Nie mam lampy (I don't have a lamp). Singular form is lampa and plural is Lampy
So you are saying that the negation turns the accusative "tę" into the genitive "tej", right?
Can we just agree that this is ridiculous and that whomever made the Polish language made it unnecessarily complicated and hard? Bad enough that you have most of your words that change endings all the time depending on your sentence structure but to go and use the same endings as plural in another context is unbelievably bonkers.
I say this with love but Polish is insane!
Hardly a specific feature of Polish. Take a look at this Latin declension, for example. Gen Sing = Nom Plural.
Good example!
There are indeed numerous cases of morphological syncretism among the world's languages.
The Sanskrit word for 'bride', for example, seems to have identical forms for the nominative singular and the accusative plural:
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E0%A4%B5%E0%A4%A7%E0%A5%82#Declension
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Dear NishuPL. Thank you for explaining this in a sympathetic and understandable way for English speakers. Very helpful
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To clarify, in the absence of notes on this (at the moment, at least), do the objects of all negative transitive verbs take the genitive, then?
In a negative sentence, the direct object should take the genitive if it was originally accusative.
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So, is this a genitive or a dative? I would assume genitive, but the hover menu for tej says dative.
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Adjectives and words that decline like adjectives have -ej ending in feminine singular in three cases: genitive, dative and locative.
I crashed on this one.... like most of us, we wrote "women" instead of "woman" thinking that the "kobiety is only a plural of kobieta"... I guess practice makes perfect...
Can this also be translated as "I do not like this woman?" Or is kocham always I love?
OK, we recently decided to accept "lady", so added here as well. But you're safer using "woman" in the translations ;)