Present tense, past tense, past participle in polish

In English of course we have : PRESENT TENSE ; PAST TENSE ; PAST PARTICPLE

EXAMPLES : cut ; cut; cut........................

: run ; ran ; ran..................

: jump ; jumped ; jumped.........

:see ; saw ; seen........................

: swim ; swam ; swum.................

And most of them take different forms.......some are the same word for all 3 and some are only the same for past tense and past particple and some all 3 are different

THEREFORE in polish is there a PRESENT TENSE, PAST TENSE, & PAST PARTICPLE

cheers big ears

Unfortunately the grammatical system concerning verbs is much more complicated in Polish than in English.

Here is a link to an overview of Polish verbs from a grammatical point of view:

en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Polish:Verbs

Why 'unfortunately'???? English doesn't represent any ideal state for languages.

It is true that past tense/past participle is a useless heuristic for learning Polish verbs.

Unfortunately if you want to learn the language.

Fortunately ... unlike English past participles are among the most regular parts of Polish, so making a big effort to learn them (as opposed to the pretty simple rules for forming them) is digging a hole in the wrong area.

I wrote "concerning verbs", that refers to verbs in general (not limited to a certain grammatical tense).

sorry for causing an argument :))

oh and thanks

Im not actually sure that answers my question.

is there or isnt there ..........

present tense, past tense and past particple like in english

like in my examples

Yes, there is.
But it doesn't work exactly in the same way as in English.

Polish works completely differently than English.

First, each and every verb is marked as belonging to one of two aspect classes (it's slightly more complicated but let's stick to basics).

Imperfective - indicate states and ongoing actions

Perfective - indicate finished (in the past or future) actions or changes of states

Imperfective verbs have

a past tense (the past marker is - ł, to which gender, number and person markers can be added

a present tense - simple form of the verb with person/number endings

future tense - formed with an auxiliary (which has person/number endings) and either the infinite or the third person forms of the past tense.

Perfective verbs have

a past tense (like that of imperfective verbs)

a future tense (which looks just like the present tense of imperfective verbs)

There are two participles:

All active verbs have an adjective present participle (ending in -ący) and ad adverbial one (ending in -ąc)

Transitive verbs have a passive participle (ending in -any, -(i)ony))

Technically there is no 'past particple' as such as intransitive verbs don't have one.

And there are no perfect tenses (like 'have gone', 'had done') in Polish.

Right on as usual, Mafketis! Fortune is relative. If a non-Pole, i.e. non-Slavic speaker is learning Polish for the very first time in mature adulthood, one prays for simplified grammar as one does manna from heaven. Conversely of course, for the poor Pole struggling with English tenses when over the age of thirty, the whole thing look rather like a hopeless muddle. I mean, come one folks! Is the average Pan Lech (Polish for 'average Joe') any better at grasping the alleged simplicity of English grammar/tenses than the average German, Brit, Yank, what have you, at plumbing ther depths and coming comfortably to terms with the vagueries of Polish aspects??

Degrees of difficulty cut both ways-:)))))

@mafketis
you forgot to tell us about "czas zaprzeszły" (plusquamperfect), hehe ;P

Does Polish even have a pluperfect or is it subsumed by the simple past/present perfect in one: byłem/-am = I was, have been, had been..

Marek,

from wikipedia

In Polish, it is constructed with an auxiliary verb być 'to be' in a past tense, third person only. It is now old fashioned, used only in the formal register. Example: Powinieneś był to zrobić You should have done it.

:) I saw that one too. Odd, I didn't think of it until just now, but sure, no brainer; the third person singular past tense of 'być + infinitive (bezokolicznik) of the perfective form of the principle or main action verb! "Był zrobić", "był dać" etc..

The past perfect, (pluperfect, plusquamperfect it's all the same thing) is so rarely used that it can be safely ignored.
I'm not even sure if it was ever a real part of the language or created to facilitate literal translation from French and/or as a useless complication to make sentences and ideas seem more complex than they really are.

I've only heard it a time or two (once on TV by an old author who hadn't lived in Poland for decades).

Basically it's just like the regular past tense you just add an extra by-ł/ła/ło/-li/-ły (which agrees with the subject in number and gender.

making up some (not very good) examples:

Kupił był bilet do Argentyny dom zanim zniknął. He had bought the ticket to Argentina before he disappeared.

Essentially since Poland doesn't have sequence of tenses it's useless and redundant.

"Powinieneś był to zrobić"

Is not pluperfect.

Basically powinien is a weird construction, unlike anything else in Polish.

Basically it's the adjective powinien (roughly, something like 'obliged') plus the verb 'to be'. But in the present tense in the first and second person the 'jest' part of the verb is omitted and the endings are added to the adjective.

Technically from a historical point of view, the present tense of the verb być in the first and second person was two words fused into one (or more accurately the first and second person forms were reduced to almost nothing and attached to whatever was convenient. Then people got the bright idea of attaching them to third person singular jest.

Basically powinien is a weird construction.....

....technically, therefore a "defective" verb because of its 'missing' infinitive form-))))

Though etymologically powinien is a plain vanilla adjective....

On the other hand, synchronically, it's probably the only real modal verb in modern Polish. The verbs that correspond semantically with modals in English móc, musieć are just plain verbs in Polish (i'm from the school that says you can't establish categories by semantics alone you need a structural reason too). The impersonal modal particles (trzeba, wolno, można) aren't really verbs.

Fascinating, Mafketis! Boy, you too have really made a study out of this:) I guess "defective" was a poor word choice here. There are of course languages such as Albanian (at least the Tosk dialect, I believe) which have no verbal infinitives.

Marek

I've just gathered a little collection of questions.

What is an active verb?
What is a transitive verb?
Are verbs either active or transitive or are some neither?
What is an adjective present participle?
What is an adverbial present participle?
What is a passive participle?
Can anyone give me two of three examples of each of these, in sentence form rather than single words?

An active verb in which the subject does something (as opposed to experiences something or is in a state). Now that I look it at a second time I realize I made a stupid, stupid mistake. That should be 'all imperfective verbs'.


A verb which can have an object. The difference between transitive and intransitive verbs in English has largely disappeared but it's important in Polish.

In English the verb 'to exist' is intransitive because it has a subject but no object.
The verb 'to create' however is transitive becuase it has a subject and an object
Tom (subject) created (verb) a new kind of bagel (object).


My point was that the criteria for verbs having active or passive participles is different

imperfective verbs have active pariciples (perfective verbs don't)

transitive verbs have passive participles (intransitive verbs don't)


The woman standing on the street corner is my aunt.

here 'standing' would be translated as stojąca, it's an adjective that modifies a noun (woman).


Seeing my aunt sell herself on the street, I almost had a heart attack.

here 'seeing' is an adverbial participle, it doesn't modify a noun but it's part of subordinate clause.


My aunt was arrested for selling herself on the street.

here 'arrested' is a passive participle desribing the subject of a passive sentence.

In Polish this is more widely used as a normal adjective than it is in English. Often passive participles that act as adjectives are placed after the noun in English.

The book written by Edgar Allan Poe. (written here is a passive participle).

Does that help any?

Thanks SO much for all that, Mr. Mafketis. It will take me a little while to digest all of that.

The problem I have is that the book I've been using seems to run out before it mentions any of this stuff. There are a few other important things it doesn't cover. But what this book does have, is a good way of explaining grammatical things chapter-by-chapter, with a reference section at the end, so you know where to find various words or grammatical constructions where they are introduced in the main body of the book.

I have another book that probably does explain all of this, but has no reference section. In the key to the chapters, it doesn't even mention what grammar is mentioned in each chapter. I just decided to swap books to see if this other book is any good, started from the very last page (the best place to start with many books) and the first thing I saw (the last thing in the entire book) was the word

będąc

I still don't know what it means, but with your explanation, I should be a step closer to finding out. Thanks again.

My favorite Polish textbook is the grammar heavy Teach Yourself Polish by M. Corbridge-Patkaniowska.

This is the original book and not the audio-lingual mish mash which is not related at all.

będąc = being, as in

Being tired, I decided to go to bed.

Będąc zmęczony, postanowiłem pójść spać.

I thought you were quoting me when I saw these words on the latest threads page. This is the exact book I have, published some time in the 1960s. But I haven't seen any reference to adjectival or adverbial participles. Another thing not found within this book is conditionals. Consequently, these are two of the subjects I struggle with.


Having written all that, you would most likely be a bit tired.

I'm sure there are conditionals in the book (maybe labelled as something else) I don't remember if/how participles are covered.

On the other hand she spends time on transposition of endings which is pretty much dead in modern Polish (so you can ignore it! wheeee).

I refuse to ignore it. When people talk about things in language no longer being used, there is always someone still using it. Transposition of endings: this would be like when one of my colleagues asked me "zdrowyś?" I also hear the vocative in use. Do people assume that the only Polish to learn is the Polish of young urban people? Plenty of Poles working in the UK are old and come from small villages in the east of Poland, where I imagine the continuity of Polish habitation is much stronger and longer than in the west of the country.

It's useful to know linguistic features that are no longer in common usage because although they're not in common usage, they are still in some usage, and even if they are not going to feature in the kind of language I attempt to speak, I'd rather not get tripped up by them. In any case, my English is not always up to the minute. I even have quite a good handle on thee, thou, ye and you, older English word endings like -st and -th, and these are normally only found in old texts such as Shakespeare and the Bible, but may still be heard in English dialects, even if this usage is now extremely limited.

In other words, I have a thirst for knowledge and believe that we should all know more than we seem to need to know.


I have read the book from cover to cover. I think the conditional -by- element is mentioned once, but not explained. It deserves at least a chapter, if not more. They are not mentioned in any of the index or in the contents. I almost think there's a missing volume 2.

vocative is used often in Polish - still very lively thing (look at my nick ;)

chciałbym, chciałabym - I would like
przeczytałbyś, przeczytałabyś - you would read

it shows that -by- thing is sort of 'would' counterpart in Polish (I guess there is no exact match though)

I can't remember those conditional moods in English at the moment. Would need some look in the grammar book.

If we had chosen the right turn there we would not be astray now.
Gdybyśmy skręcili tam we właściwą stronę, to byśmy teraz nie błądzili (or to nie błądzilibyśmy teraz).

Gdyby w nocy nie padało, moglibyśmy pójśc dziś do lasu.
If it didn't rain tonigh, we could go to the forest today.

If we had asked somebody the way, we wouldn't have gone 30 miles in vain.
Gdybyśmy kogoś spytali o drogę, nie leźlibyśmy 50 km na darmo/na próżno.

I guess you can figure from these, that three types of English conditional give actually one construction in Polish.

Except that 'types of English conditional(s)' aren't part of the education of English speaking people. Learners of English learn three (or four depending on the model being used) conditionals but it's just not an issue for English speakers (anymore than facultative animacy is an issue for Polish speakers thought learners of Polish have to learn about it).

Jun 28, 09, 11:12 - Thread attached on merging:
Help - Polish Present Tense

Hello Everybody!
I started to learn Polish somedays ago and I want to start to learn the Present tense, but I don't understand the three kinds of verbs there.

Can someone help me with that?

Thx for everyone who helps. :)
Jacob_K.

hi thank you

If the Pluperfect in Polish is rarely used how do people express this nuance:

When I arrived my husband prepared dinner.( he started when i arrived)
When I arrived my husband had prepared dinner.( dinner was ready)

?