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- Topic: Polish >
- "Mój dziadek szuka lampy."
28 Comments
Well, that's certainly a nicer interpretation than that grandpa simply has Alzheimer's.
This is Genitive Case, correct? So do all feminine nouns' endings change from -a to -y? What happens with masculine and neuter nouns with Genitive?
It is safe to say that rules for "all" anything in Polish language are rare.
Feminine nouns end in singular genitive with -i or -y. That is also true for -a ending masculine nouns.
you can take a look on this table https://pl.wiktionary.org/wiki/Aneks:Język_polski_-_deklinacja.
masculine nouns end with -a, -u, neuter nouns end with -a
Also neuter and feminine nouns often have singular genitive=plural nominative. (Lampy)
You should think of things in terms of declensions not genders. This way you will see that most polish nouns are, in fact, regular https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_morphology#Nouns
The words for 'to buy' and 'to seek' are similar in Polish and Dutch. I'm assuming there's etymology there rather than it just being a coincidence.
buy= kupować according to WSJP.pl comes form protoslavic psł. *kupovati
I cannot find etymology for szukać.
If you look under kupić, though, you can find a derivation from Germanic kaupōn/kaupjan. So it is indeed related to Dutch kopen, German kaufen, and even English "cheap." These in turn come from Latin caupo, "shopkeeper."
Szukać has a less certain etymology, but according to the dictionary, the usual explanation is indeed that it was also borrowed from Germanic: East Germanic (Gothic) suochen.
Probably just coincidence then unless the protoslavic is related to an ancestor common to that and Dutch :/
Proto-Indo-European -> Proto-Germanic -> ... -> Dutch. Proto-Indo-European -> Proto-Balto-Slavic -> Proto-Slavic -> ... -> Polish. Some words in Germanic and Slavic languages definitely have common origins, for example my in English, mein in German and moje in Serbian (also water, wasser, voda; thou, du, ti; bottle, boca; cat, katze, kot; mother, mutter, mater; ...). If you're interested in this topic, look up Indo-European on Google. Langfocus has a good video called "Indo-European connection".
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It is very common, at least in American English, to say that you are "looking for" something,when you are shopping around until you find the one that you had in mind or one that you like, and if you don't find one that you like, you might not buy one at all.
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But of course, he doesn't wear glasses, as we learnt a few sentences ago! He NEEDS glasses to save him searching for everything.
My response of "My grandfather 's looking for a lamp" was not accepted, even though its more natural for me than "is looking for". Is it possible to allow the 's block to refer both to the genitive and to the contracted "is"?
Does Polish have different words for "to seek" and "to look for"? I wrote "my grandfather seeks a lamp" and it was not accepted.
No. Sometimes we forget to add options with 'seek', it's not the first word that comes to a non-native's mind. Added now.
While that is not incorrect, a native speaker of English will think your grandfather is Aladdin if you say he is "seeking" rather than "looking for" a lamp.
