Counting of Polish currency

Can someone please shed some light about counting

na przyklad:

1 zloty / grosz - singular masculine
2, 3, 4 zlote / grosze - plural masculine
5, 6 ... 21 zlotych / groszy - Is this genitive masculine or genitive plural?

I recently had a change of polish teacher, and the two teachers said different things.

Help?? :(

plural for sure

but its funny talking masculine about money hehe

funny indeed.

isn't it masculine then, or is it just funny?

It will be genitive masculine plural.

In English only people are masculine or feminine. All objects are neutral ( it).
In Polish everything, the people and all objects are either masculine, feminine or neutral.

thanx

im not a good teacher though

good u have wroclaw hehe

wroclaw not here right now though.

think i got the answer - just had to confirm it

thanx for help.

have you read alek's response in our word game?

I often wondered, when I was learning French and German at school, why some languages have genders. What use does gender serve? Are there constructions that utilise gender where the English equivalent would be much clumsier? Or is gender essentially an unnecessary complication? If gender is an unnecessary complication, where does it come from? Why make money masculine or a cloud feminine? (The latter is just my guess!)

Any ideas from native speakers of gendered (?) languages are welcome...

zorry cubic - i think the answer is too long and complicated? More to do with history. On the other hand - gender (although complicating - and the different cases going along with it) gives a richness and charm to the languages that use them that English (for one that got rid of gender) does not have any more. It also poses a great challenge to us - the learners of Polish (I'm not a native) - and more satisfaction for every little thing we do get right than were we to study an easier language. Don't you think?

u mean this one:


yeah ur answer was perfect :)

:) ....

to admin:

Although my example was the currency, is the same rule not valid for anything that is counted?

Perhaps it could be asked why some languages dropped gender. English used to have it too. All IndoEuropen languages have (or had) some semblance of grammatical gender, or at least gender bias (ship, car: she).

Having said that, grammatical gender, as well as many other grammatical constructs, are not a logical necessity in a language, and millions of people easily survive and communicate without it (for instance Chinese)

While some arguments could perhaps be made on a deeply philosophical scale (materialistic approach of evolution and opposites in nature would logically induce the need for genders), on a linguistic level a short discussion on the history of grammatical gender can be found here: indoeuro.bizland.com/archive/article11.html

Thanks Mufasa, I can appreciate that it might add richness and charm to the language, though as a schoolkid trying to learn French and German I didn't have quite the same attitude!


Thanks z_darius, that's a very interesting page, which I will read carefully.


That's true, but I wonder whether gender enables a language to express certain common forms more economically and elegantly?

lol ;)) I learnt German at school too, and believe me, it wasn't my attitude then!

That might be considered a sort of "political linguistics". In fact, every language enables its speakers to express everything those speakers have the need to express - both in form and substance.

Even though I consider some concepts to be expressed more elegantly in one language than in another, I tend think linguistic elegance is best thought of within the limits of a given language, in which the same concept can be put across elegantly of crudely.

Where does your interest in languages come from Darius? Did you study it at university?

It started when I was 10. I read a book about Inca culture by Polish writer Zenon Kosidowski, The Empire of Golden Tears("Krolestwo Zlotych Lez"). The book had an annex explaining the meaning of a few hundred Quechua words and I noticed some similarities among Polish, German, English and Russian words (I had some rudimentary knowledge of those at the time). So I started digging. This lead me to some basic classes in Arabic, Spanish, French, Bulgarian and Greek. I took Latin at school. I speak few of those languages fluently, enough to get by and enough to keep on playing with linguistics.

Things just made sense but as a kid I had no direction. It was just a hobby I would cultivate when not playing injuns and cowboys with my friends. So there was this collection of information I had in my head but never tried to systematize. A few years later I took a second degree in the English Department at University of Wroclaw. Linguistics was a big part of it, although for me it remained only a fascinating hobby. My main forte at the time was the history of American literature (mainly the beginnings) and that's what took me across the pond.

To make the long story short I became disillusioned with literature as an object of academic studies and I made a 180 degree turn. I now work with languages again, although these are machine languages. I am a computa fella.

Now you know ;)

I guess that makes sense... unless maybe a society or culture is changing so rapidly that the language cannot evolve fast enough to keep pace? Can that happen, I wonder?


A kind of cultural relativism for languages? ;) I'm not a big fan of cultural relativism, but I think the linguistic version might make more logical sense.


In an academic setting? Or commercially?

I guess it could, but I don't think it could happen as a natural process. Otherwise we would be looking at a potential impossibility of communication among the members of the same language group.

On the lexical level though, it is happening pretty fast. See computer terms in various languages. It's mostly English with all kinds of foreign grammatical rules and inflections, linguistic calques etc. Again, my take is that languages develop as fast as they need to, but slow enough to let people continually immersed in it to catch up.


All for money :)

Like parents and children? ;) But seriously, I was thinking not so much of impossibility of communication, more of the language no longer being optimal for the culture. That would be more likely to happen if there were some kind of external agent forcing change in the society.

:)

Little bit of a genius to read inca cultural books at age 10?

Yeah, words are sometimes not enough.


That would assume that language is a driving force of culture, rather than its reflection. The idea could be probably defended, but first well... it would have to be defended. IMO, ideas are born inside our brains, not on the tips of our tongues. On a very fundamental level, spoken/written language is of secondary importance to the human species, although critical to human civilization.


That would take us back to a statement I made before (not my invention, but something that makes sense in my mind); each language always sufficiently serves the group that uses it.

Or perhaps I am meandering around a wrong idea of what you mean. Care to offer examples of "external agent"?

To answer the question, zloty is an adjective and means gold in Polish and in grammar it behaves like any other Polish adjactive and grosz is a noun so one hundred zloties would be 100 zlotych using the genitive plural. As you rightly say, groszy is indeed, as far as I know, the genitive plural of grosz, which is a singular masculine noun.


The Bulgarian Language used to have genders just the same as Russian does to this day but the Bulgarian Language lost its gender endings during the Roman Empire, or at least, so I have been told.


To finish off what the original question was, yes, jeden zloty, dwa zlote, piec zlotych.

I'm thinking of language being a reflection of culture, as you are saying. Then, if the culture changes rapidly, maybe language (which is optimised for the previous culture) will no longer be optimal for reflecting the new culture. I'm not sure that could really happen, I was just speculating!

As well as culture driving language, maybe language can also influence culture? If we accept Chomsky's Universal grammar, there are limits on the forms that human language can take, and hence maybe also limits on human thought and culture. Similarly, maybe specific languages place limits on the cultures they are part of, by making certain ideas difficult or impossible to articulate? And maybe these limits vary from language to language?


I would agree, but language is in our brains, too, so it wouldn't be too surprising if the two influence each other.


Or perhaps I'm just speculating a little too freely! I'm thinking of some of the peoples of the Amazon Rainforest, who are suddenly exposed to modernity. This can produce such rapid and dislocating changes in their society that maybe their language cannot change quickly enough to optimally express all that they now need to express?

I tend to agree. The one cannot exist without the other, but language do catch up. An example would be PC lingo that mostly came from Microsoft in English. My mother tongue (Afrikaans) received and used the English terminology at first, but it's rapidly catching up, and you get Afrikaans terms for basically all the PC jargon. Can't think of an example now, but I am sure the other way round has also happened at some point in history - where language influenced culture?

Oh, what about Halloween - an American holiday. Poland did not have this culture - they got the language first, and yet, on Halloween night, three groups of Polish children came to trick-or-treat at our home. This is a simple example, but I think the point is clear?

How about counting pesetas and céntimos?
I know Spain no longer uses the old currency, but Polish must have a way of counting it.

Peseta - would this be treated as a feminine noun in Polish?
Céntimo - would Polish treat this as neuter like other words ending in -o?

Just an example.

Yes


No. That would be masculine. In Polish it would assume the form centym. Hence "dwa centymy".


OK, I think we've been talking about different scopes here. I meant culture and lanuage on a human scale. You seem to be comparing different cultures with different linguistic assets. In that case, sure, I think in some cases a clash like that may become cataclysmic. Some anthropologists maintain that this is what enabled the Cro-Magnon to hold the upper hand over Neanderthal (specifically physiological defficiencies of speech organs in the Neanderthal. The theory recently suffered a little booboo due to a discovery of some fossilized bone fragments, but still it isn't knocked out of circulation).

It's a very fascinating subject to me, and I will gladly continue the chat, giving proper answers to the other parts of your post. Of course that will depend on your continued interest, and on the admins who may decide we have hijacked this thread.

It's a fascinating subject to me, too, but I'm not sure my speculations are really worth any more consideration than you have already given! I'm very much an interested amateur when it comes to linguistics. Thank you for your thoughtful replies.