Re: masculine place name endings, for example, into which paradigm does "Przemyśł" fit?? Obviously it follows a declension pattern!
I must say when I put together my list I didn't make any effort in trying to take into account proper names (cities and countries). Wikisłownik says that the town you mention, Przemyśl (65238 citizens according to wikipedia) is, surprisingly, of MASCULINE gender! Looking at the Polish wikipedia article about it I inferred the following (regular) declension pattern:
NOM Przemyśl GEN Przemyśla DAT Przemyślowi ACC Przemyśl INST Przemyślem LOC Przemyślu
I was wondering if Polish people not accustomed with the city could use the wrong gender... googling "w Przemyślu", the correct form, returns 263,000 hits while "w Przemyśli" 1,540, a ratio of 1:170 (not much). "do Przemyśla" vs "do Przemyśli" yields 22,600 vs 9... then no, they don't get it wrong :-)
Side note: Przemyśl has a final l and not ł; I think there exist a phonotactic rule which in some contexts (word final seems to be one of these) forces consonants in the same syllable to be all soft or all hard (=> śł isn't an allowed cluster in Polish).
-l: /faul, disel/ and -cz: /tucz/ are masculine, so these are mistakes.
Przemyśl (65238 citizens according to wikipedia) is, surprisingly, of MASCULINE gender!
Is it surprising because "myśl" is feminine and so should be "Prze-myśl"? Another proper name which is a tricky one is Ostrów. Do you vote for it being of masculine or feminine gender?
-l: /faul, disel/ and -cz: /tucz/ are masculine, so these are mistakes.
Thank you for your corrections Ziemowit. As I said I based my list on the PWN-Oxford dictionary which isn't as accurate as one may wish. I guess some feminine words may be missing from my list because they are listed as masculine in the dictionary!
Is it surprising because "myśl" is feminine and so should be "Prze-myśl"?
Well, yes :-) Given that myśleć=to think, przemyśleć=to think over, myśl=thought then surely przemyśl has got to mean reflection and be the same gender as myśl... but neither supposition is true :-)
Another proper name which is a tricky one is Ostrów. Do you vote for it being of masculine or feminine gender?
Well, Kraków and Rzeszów are masculine are masculine so that's what I'd guess at first. Also, in my list above all feminine words in -ew and not in -ów... so I'd again guess Ostrów to be masculine.
I then turned to Święty Google i Święta Wikipedia... The latter says there are more then 40 cities/towns/hamlets/islands called Ostrów... do they all have the same gender?
A brutal search effort gives: "do Ostrowa" vs "do Ostrowi" vs "do Ostrowii" 12,900 vs 9,110 vs 4,040 mmmm! Let's try something more unambiguous "jechać do Ostrowa" vs "jechać do Ostrowi" vs "jechać do Ostrowii" 29,100 vs 8 vs 3 ... that's more decisive but the numbers don't add up with the previous search!
One more go: "z Ostrowem" vs "z Ostrową" vs "z Ostrowią" 53,100 vs 0 ??? vs 11,500 mmmmmm again! google seems to consider ą=a at least at times, which is very bad for this. However many hits do correspond to "z Ostrowią" !
Okay, that's enough, let me look at this huge pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miasta_w_Polsce_(statystyki) Wikipedia page in detail... Ooh, I get it now! Some Ostrow's are masculine and some feminine! There are 3 Ostrów's which make it be be miasta: Ostrów Wielkopolski (72,368), Ostrów Mazowiecka (22,517) and Ostrów Lubelski (2,224). As the accompanying adjective testifies Ostrów Mazowiecka is unmistakably FEMININE! That also explains the random results with Google.
Wikipedia again says pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historia_Ostrowi_Mazowieckiej
Zaczynając od wieku XV kiedy to nazwa brzmiała Ostrowo, w akcie lokacyjnym Ostrowya 1434, poprzez Ostrowia, wieku XIX miasto zwano Ostrów Mazowiecki, Ostrów £omżyński lub Ostrów w ziemi łomżyńskiej, w okresie międzywojennym używano dwóch nazw mianowicie: Ostrowia Mazowiecka i Ostrów Mazowiecki. W grudniu 1926 Ministerstwo Spraw Wewnętrznych przyjęło nazwę zaproponowaną przez językoznawcę - profesora doktora Kazimierza Nitscha - Ostrów Mazowiecka.
Posterity is left wondering how much beer the excellent professor had had before taking the historic decision...
That was an evil tricky question Ziemowit :-)
Hi, I re-wrote the list of feminine zero-ending nouns adding a translation and grouping words in categories. I put some words which seem to me to stand out for importance in bold. Of course, there's some abritrariety in this. I hope it helps.
ANIMALS, PLANTS,FOOD (30 words) sólsalt myszmouse gęśgoose marchewcarrot gałąźbranch (of tree) płećsex (=gender, for people and animals) pleśń mould (fungi) wesz louse smycz leash uwięź tether rzodkiew radish jabłoń apple tree pieczeń roast (food) latorośl vine; offspring winorośl vine paproć fern (plant) zdobycz quarry (prey) uprząż harness (horses) klacz mare spadź honeydew (from flowers etc) barć hollow in a tree where bees live twardziel hardwood (duramen) brukiew swede (cabbage) żagiew firebrand; kind of mushroom trzebież forest thinning, extermination płoć roach (fish) nać top (of carrot or vegetables) odrośl offshoot; sucker (of plant, eg ivy) troć sea trout wić twig
DERIVATIVES OF THE VERB SPRZEDAĆ (5 words) sprzedażsale, selling wyprzedażsales (promocja) przedsprzedaż advance booking odsprzedaż resale rozprzedaż selling
DERIVATIVES OF THE VERB POWIEDZIEĆ ETC (5 words) odpowiedźanswer wypowiedź statement zapowiedź announcement podpowiedź hint spowiedź confession
TEXTILE WORLD (5 words) odzieżpiece of clothing kieszeńpocket (trousers, jacket...) nić thread pilśń felt (hat etc.) kądziel distaff (tool used in the past in the textile industry)
MISCELLANEOUS (14 words) kolejrailway baśńfairy tale pieśń solemn song pieczęć seal (on document) żerdź perch, pole (for birds,drilling tools...) dań gift gładź smooth surface obręcz hoop mać mother (obsolete. Used only in curse words) młodzież young people gawiedź rout (crowd) chuć sexual urge Białoruś Belarus cerkiew the Orthodox Church
I added "boa" as it's supposed to be treated as a male gender word. By the way, if some native Polish speaker could point out which of these words are so rare that one most likely never will encounter them, it would be nice.
It's "myśl", not myśł. It can be a bit confusing seeing as it's "umysł", etc. Yes, "myśl" is female, but Przemyśl is male, as are all the "-mysł"-words.
By the way, if some native Polish speaker could point out which of these words are so rare that one most likely never will encounter them, it would be nice.
The ones in bold are not used very often. You can come across them once in a while, but you may as well do without them. Let's say they're for highly advanced learners.
I have seen and heard the gnu problem neatly circumvented by identifying the animal as anytlopa gnu, declining antylopa as a fem. noun and leaving the gnu intact as a kind of undeclinable qualifier.
I decided to run all words through the Narodowy Korpus Języka Polskiegoand here are the results, sorted from most frequent to least frequent (unsurprisingly "rzecz" on the first place):
10000++: rzecz 87920, odpowiedź 40304, młodzież 30646, stal 28382, sprzedaż 22385, twarz 22258, pogoń 18223, broń 16294, wieś 15253, krew 13904, wypowiedź 13775, straż 13649, łódź 10765
Good job on the whole, Derevon, but it seems a bit tricky at some points - I'd say you are much more likely to use "jabłoń" (apple tree - 124 occurences) than "gardziel" (217); the occurence rate of "paznokieć" (nail) is also suspiciously low - 196, while "dań" has 1103. I don't remember ever seeing "dań" as the Nominative case in any text, so I suppose that this frequency is the result of mixing the word with Accusative plural of the word "danie" meaning a course of a meal. I guess that the program counts only words which appear in the texts in their Nom. sing., therefore it counts "paznokieć" and omits "paznokcie". It would be best to check the meanings and judge for yourself if you are likely to need them or not.
You have a good point. I simply searched for the words in the nominative singular, and some words are of course much more likely to be found in other cases or in the plural. For example paznokcie would of course result in a lot more hits than paznokieć. In the plural it's not all that important to know the gender of a word, though. Also this corpus is made up from written sources and may not reflect everyday speech very well. Nevertheless they should give some kind of idea of which words are the most common and which ones you would hardly ever encounter. (The corpus has something like 450 million words so less than 50 hits there should mean it's not a common word for sure)
Derevon: By the way, what about the word "gnu"? Is it neuter (jedno)? Perhaps I should add "-u" to neuter?
gnu is simply neuter - to gnu, tamtemu gnu (like to okno, tamtemu oknu) the only thing all gramatical cases of this word look (and sound the same) - one can say it is not declined - similar cases are boa, wotum(only in singular) - both are neuter
... and you are right. It is a non-declined masculine noun: Widziałem dzisiaj w puszczy tego samego boa, co wczoraj. Już się szykował aby mnie dopaść, ale znowu zdołałem mu umknąć. Biedaczek, pozostał bez śniadania. Pewnie będzie ponownie próbował jutro, niedobry boa ...
actually, for all of Polish's difficult bits, predicting noun gender is incredibly easy. It's much more predictable than German and French, for example.
Gently depends on what you mean by "predictable", Josh! German, as with a great many inflected languages, has it's quixotic repetition or doubling of case endings, plus the eight or so plural markers for every noun (not to mention those myriad nouns with zero change in the Nominative plural!), this being shared by Icelandic, Hungarian along with quite a few others, including of course Lithuanian:-). Having said all that, as I've observed before repeatedly on PF, there's something almost mathematical (though surely also "irregular" in declension pattern) about the aforementioned languages. The same cannot be said for Polish, the nature of whose mutations in both verbs and nouns is so chaotic as to border on the just plain sadistic!! I scarcely agree with the anology to German or French, the inflectional mutations of the former being rather orderly and exact, all things considered. French compared with Polish is practically living in paradise (at least it was for me)LOL
Polish nouns reveal a great many exceptions, more than German at any rate, and roughly analogous to the vagueries of English spelling, what with it's silent, yet pronounced and written, letters etc.
