"Jestem dziadkiem!"
Translation:I am a grandfather!
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I can't help but notice that 'dziadek' takes the neuter ending in the Instrumental case. I'm assuming that the word is masculine. Does it take the neuter ending because of the ending part of the word, '-dek'? Or is it something entirely different?
"em" or "iem" are the endings for both masc. and neut. Instr.
you use "em" except when the stem ends in a velar (g or k), when you use "iem". There's a spelling rule in Polish that you should try and avoid "e" after velars...
"The letter e is usually separated from a preceding k or g by i,"
Swan, Oscar (2008-10-12). Polish Verbs & Essentials of Grammar, Second Edition (Verbs and Essentials of Grammar Series) (Kindle Location 201). McGraw-Hill Education. Kindle Edition.
The notes about the instrumental case back in those exercise were a bit sketchy a while back but they've tightened them up a bit since...
man I'm so glad I'm from Ukraine and I understand 70% of endings and how to write them subconsciously
Człowiek takes the neuter ending also and it's masculine, maybe they are exceptions?
According to this wikipedia article, it is an irregular noun (scroll down passed 'Neuter Nouns'), but possibly only in the plural sense. As far as I can tell, it doesn't explicitly tell what gender the word is, or how it declines. I think it may be because of hard/soft sounds, but I am not entirely sure. Article: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_morphology#Nouns
I read somewhere in the comments that the words ending in 'k' or 'g' take 'iem' in the instrumental. It is because of 'e' in 'dek' but I don't know why exactly :)
It is not because of the 'e' in '-dek' but because of 'k' and 'g'. If they are the last consonants of a word then they are never followed by a single 'e' or 'y'. If the suffix normally begins with 'e' it becomes 'ie' and if it normally begins with 'y' it becomes 'i'.
Would it be possible to record male voices when it comes to masculine and female voice when it comes to feminine? That's so confusing
Unless some bug causes it to not work, nowadays every sentence should be read with the appropriate voice, e.g. this sentence is tagged as "male", therefore no one should hear it said with a female voice. Are you saying you heard it said by a woman?
We are now aware that the tag only works for the exercises involving the animated characters, so a 'type what you hear' exercise can use the female voice because there's no character.
However, I just changed something else and I think this should be solved now and only the male voice is used.
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So is the root word for 'male' dzi? We have dziecko and dziadkiem for boy and grandfather respectively.
They seem to share that syllable. Is that an accurate deduction or am I looking for patterns when there aren't any?
Yeah, I'm afraid that's an overinterpretation :)
First of all, the letter 'i' is part of a spelling convention to indicate the softening (palatalisation) of the preceding consonant, so in this particular case it's not the end of the syllable. The first syllable here is /dzia/, which is different from /dziec/.
Secondly, dziecko only means child, not specifically a boy, as that would be chłopiec/chłopczyk.
If we go back to Proto-Slavic, we see that both words appear to be unrelated, although there is of course no way to be 100% sure, as those are all reconstructions:
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Slavic/d%C4%9Bd%D1%8A
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Slavic/d%C4%9Bt%D1%8C
Well, grandpas often live in households.
Also, it's actually a sentence from the "Family" skill. Sometimes Duo tests your knowledge from the previous skills by randomly giving you an older sentence.