- Forum >
- Topic: Polish >
- "Zamknęłyśmy walizkę."
32 Comments
again regular...
"Verbs with infinitives in "-ąć" change "ą" to "ę" in all forms except the masculine singular."
Swan, Oscar (2008-10-12). Polish Verbs & Essentials of Grammar, Second Edition (Verbs and Essentials of Grammar Series) (Kindle Locations 1342-1344). McGraw-Hill Education. Kindle Edition.
We is feminine in this sentence? What would the sentence have been if we were masculine?
I understand you got this as a Polish sentence that you have to translate to English? Because that's how I see it opening this topic. If so, that is just the authors' choice.
For masculine group (or a mixed group) it will be "Zamknęliśmy walizkę".
580
So it must be harder for women to say such a sentence but they must always check out if there is a man in their group or not :D
How big of a group is needed to close a suitcase? ;) Yeah, theoretically they do.
- 580
I didn't really refer to this sentence, I meant all those sentences with a first person plural verb in past tense.
- 312
It's the same issue in French and Spanish, but I don't know if Italian deals with the same issue of looking out for that one man in the group that throws the grammatical gender apart. :D Luckily, the difference seems to be of detail rather than of significance in terms of pronunciation. Or at least this is how it looks, comparing the endings in my notes.
Yes, and both are accepted here. Are you saying one of them should not? Because I don't see a problem with any of them.
I talked to Immery about this today. The category of this lesson is called Past Perfect. In English, "we have closed," is present perfect. Past perfect is "we had closed." They should've named this category Past Perfective. English doesn't have this. It is just simple past tense with a verb specific to the action. If that's the case though, then past perfect and present perfect in English are analogous to imperfective in Polish (and Russian, for that matter).
Yeah, I saw your conversation about that some time later. True, the name is unfortunate then.
Is it a fault of the TTS, or you do have to pronounce the 'ę' like 'e' in "zamknęłyśmy"?
Yes, pronouncing ęł would be really too much, eł will sound a lot more natural. Or you can nasalize it just a bit.
"bag" is very unspecific, but we decided to accept it for "walizka" somewhere else, so let's add it here as well.
- 312
Wasn't “bag” translated as “torba”? Or do I misunderstand something here? Because I see a big difference between a suitcase and a bag, leading towards miscomprehensions in conversations.
Yes, its basic meaning is "torba" (mostly a woman's handbag, a laptop bag, or a plastic bag), but the way in which English uses this word is so wide, that we decided to make it an acceptable translation for some other things - I believe for a suitcase and a backpack.
At least it's not the hat situation, in which we feel the division of meaning between "kapelusz" and "czapka" is around 50/50 and therefore those translations are equal...
- 312
Handbag and backpack/rucksack were the words I would have placed beneath the word “bag”, but not a suitcase. Suitcases are usually built from a hard shell, while bags of any kind consist of leather or any tight textile, but without a fixed shape. On the other hand, I never consulted a native English speaker, either from the BrE or AmE universe, to hear what they would throw in the “bag pot” of prototypes.
I think that kapelusz and czapka should be distinguished in a stricter sense than those two aforementioned means of “flexible containers”. (verbatim OED)
