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Posts by WhizzKid  

Joined: 4 Jun 2010 / Male ♂
Last Post: 21 Jun 2010
Threads: -
Posts: Total: 9 / In This Archive: 6
From: P(r)oland, Szczecin/Poznań
Speaks Polish?: Native
Interests: Languages? :D

Displayed posts: 6
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WhizzKid   
11 Jun 2010
Language / Nazwy mieszkanców - the names of a city/country residents in Polish [14]

Actually, I would use the term Krakowiak only in regards to a village man in the traditional costume.

Actuall, USJP, a dictionary based on language corpus, says that the primary meaning of "Krakowiak" still remains "an inhabitant of the area surrounding Kraków".

who live in Koło ?

Mieszkaniec Koła :-)
WhizzKid   
4 Jun 2010
Language / Is czarnoskóry acceptable? [21]

It will come with time and wealth...

Not necessarily - this stems from the unique history and social structure of the USA. Afaik they don't have the same problem with calling black people "black" in France.

The media didn't mention he's skin color because it matters for them, but because it used to matter for Americans. So they were just saying: Look, America is changing.
That's all.

One might argue with that. Still, vast amount of Poles, if not majority, consider black people to be slightly inferior, using examples such as Africa or that the highest crime rate is among African Americans. I do not aim at saying whether or not this is true, but this is opinion of a fair share of the population.

Another thing is that as Obama comes from a Muslim family, it changed the relationship between USA and mainly-Christian Europe. There are other social factors implied as well.

But bottom line, "czarnoskóry", "ciemnoskóry" or "Murzyn" are not considered pejorative in a normal context, as has been said previously. However, if you called a white person "Murzyn", it would be rather offensive (implying they are slaves and/or stupid). Still, Poles really don't care about black people, so this is not a major issue.
WhizzKid   
4 Jun 2010
Language / A little Polish grammar. Masculine, animate objects. [64]

The thing with Polish accusative is that we have a kind of a case shift ongoing in the language. "Pies" is by all means animate, but retains "irregular" (for its animacy) features.

A similar thing is English - twelve most often used verbs are irregular:
be, have, do, say, make, go, take, come, see, get, know, give, find

Same goes for broadly used Polish nouns - they tend to evade rules ;-) But don't worry, there is only a couple of words with irregular inflection (well, certainly less than 500) and other nouns should easily succumb to the inflection :-)

As for grammatical descriptions, these are the proper names of genders and their subtypes:

1. Masculine
a) masculine personal (= animate)
b) masculine impersonal (= animate) (this one actually varies from source to source)
c) masculine inanimate

2. Feminine

3. Neuter

4. Masculine-personal

5. Feminine-objective (aka clunky Nonmasculine-personal)

Other than that, z_darius has explained this properly :-)