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- Topic: Polish >
- "I love dogs."
"I love dogs."
Translation:Kocham psy.
15 Comments
I'm unsure of why the answer isn't "Kocham psów." The word "pies" is masculine, right? So the animacy should matter, and dogs are certainly more animate than other nouns requiring the genitive in this case (e.g., tomatoes).
In the plural, it's not masculine animate nouns which have the same accusative and genitive, but masculine personal nouns.
That doesn't increase my confusion. I already speak Russian and I understand why the genitive is required in negative constructions. What's confusing me is that the accusative does not merge with the genitive in cases like "Kocham psy," which uses a noun that I consider "animate", whereas the accusative is the same as the genitive for inanimate nouns like "tomato."
600
You wouldn't use the genitive form for tomatoes either.
Polish distinguishes between masculine inanimate (A=N), masculine animate non-personal (A=G in singular, A=N in plural) and masculine personal (A=G). Pies belongs to the second category.
But one of the exercises in this course asked me to translate "The boy likes the tomato" or something and I typed "Chłopiec lubi pomidor," and it was marked incorrect because it should say "pomidora", and that is a genitive form for "tomato," right?
Yes, pomidor is one of the "exceptions" that is classified as an animate noun.
psów is the genitive form, psy is the accusative form. I guess it's an exception, but I can be wrong.
Isnt uwielbiem psy better? Always told kochac is like things used for families, romantic involvements, etc.
I would say that with pets it's better to use „kocham” rather than „uwielbiam”, or else it might sound to some like you love eating dogs.
Seems a bit too much to me :D Anyway, "uwielbiam" works. But it hasn't been taught in this course, so all sentences about loving use "kochać". Which for some Polish people is perfectly fine, but some will indeed complain.
Why is it Psy. It seems to me that it is a accusative case, so that means dogs = animate masculine plural. Which would mean that it is Nominative plural. Nominative plural says that when the stem ends in -s then the word gets + i. So psi.
In plural there are only two genders: masculine personal and "everything else" (sometimes inaccurately referred to as "masculine" and "feminine"). If it is masculine but not a person, it belongs to the latter, even if it is animated. Anyway, nouns of this gender have identical nominative and accusative cases (and vocative, too).
