Polish case question (Mężczyzna jest zimno? or Dziewczyna jest zimno?)

Rozumienic, you might have misunderstood my post! While we obviously DO have changes, their not on the structural level any longer with Polish, for instance! Old English, yes, Modern English, no:-)

I think that sentence is easy enough to understand, not much space for misunderstanding, is there?
Oh and it's 'they're', not 'their'..
have a nice day y'all.

Just a typo, OBVIOUSLY, rozumieniec:-)!!!

Apropos my linguistic "ignorance", you can't deny that English is an 'analytic', whereas Polish or German are 'synthetic' languages; English merely adds words to sentences to determine meaning, the latter change forms through inflection in order to achieve the same goal.

Pardon, I meant to say, the FORMER change forms, i.e. German and Polish, not English.
Sorry!

YOu cna avoid using the instrumental case by adding "to". Kto to jest Gerda? Gerda to Niemka. A bit less formal but completely correct.

Another term for languages such as English is positional rather than inflected (few endings). In normal (non-poetic) English the position tells the story, in "Man bites dog", we know who got bitten and who did the biting simply by the positon (subejct, predicate, object). Chinese is also the same. "Wo aye nee" (I love you) - "Nee aye wo" (you love me).

In Polish "Psa ugryzł człowiek" it is the ending of pies -- psa and the lack of an ending on człowiek that tells us who did what

Please stop it. Correct order is: Człowiek ugryzł psa. I remember having discussion about that already. I used to annoy my Polish teacher with that kind of staff and she alway marked it as grammatical mistake. Now I have to say that she was right although still bitter *****.

Roundly concur:-) A number of other languages as well, as you mentioned, contain ambiguous word order in which case determines meaning, yet the endings can be read both ways!

Don't be too smart:


The correct translation is: I must know English(by learning it)
You wrote that: Dziewczyna jest piekną. is incorrect and that is true but: Dziewczyna piękną jest. Is actually correct!!! If something is true it should be true every way. Just take it and accept that correct order and that you CAN change the order to accent/highlight first word.

@(smoke)ender,

In fact German has a similar case/word order situation much as Polish:-)

Both are understandable. In the first sentence there is an assumption that the complete sentence would be; Dziewczyna jest piękną....dziewczyną. This guess is acceptable.