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- "I am a man."
"I am a man."
Translation:Ja jestem mężczyzną.
68 Comments
330
I try to remember that the he/she/it form (je) sounds like "yay," as in "yay, I am eating!" Haha.
501
Fun etymology fact:
Mężczyzna literally means 'a manliness', or a collective (-ina) of męski (manly, mennish), from mąż (husband, man).
It's not too dissimilar to what happened to the word 'village' in English. A 'wick' or 'wich' derives from Latin vicus, a small settlement, but its diminutive (i.e. a single house) is vicula > villa. Eventually in Late Latin and French, vicus was no longer used, and they had to invent an entirely new collective form - villaticus > village.
Unlike the other Slavic languages, Polish retains nasal vowels, so mąż feels more familiar than Czech mež, both from Proto-Slavic mǫžь, from Proto-Balto-Slavic mangjás, from Indo-European monn-, the same root as English 'man' via Proto-Germanic mannaz.
But it's not Nominative. A sentence like this takes Instrumental.
You may read more about it here: https://forum.duolingo.com/comment/16373167
Well, as I see a chromebook is a type of laptop, I guess you just need to go into settings and find the Polish keyboard. If your native language is English, you can just use it instead of the English keyboard, as it has the same buttons in the same places, plus more.
Then you click either left ctrl + left alt + the basic letter or right alt + the basic letter.
425
I'm coming back to these after having ventured a few lessons on, to the instrumental case. On my first day I asked no questions, but now I want to know ... why are these 'I am an X, she is an X' sentences not instrumental?
425
Ah, OK :) But my answer wasn't, and it was marked right ... (Not in a type-what-you-hear exercise, either).
425
Actually yes, I've noticed that elsewhere too. It always slaps my wrist when I mix up the diacritical z's, though :)