Speaking with wrong Polish case endings?

Polish, like many other European languages, still tends to "go by the book" in terms of generally correct usage, again, especially on television and/or radio. American English nowadays in particular is all over the place, so to speak, regarding both style, grammar AND usage! Frankly, except in perhaps the hallowed halls of Harvard or some such places, most Yanks here at home wouldn't know a conditional (subjunctive) from a bloody hole in the ground, nor would they care!

it's true. conditionals, or just past participle usage in general is pretty bad in the states.


part of that is because of the case system. english doesn't have to follow a pattern like polish, nor do we have to deal with gender. we can take a word, make it into whatever we want, and regardless of what preposition we put in front of it, the gender of the person, the tense, none of it matters. you just cut and paste and make your silly sentence and it all works out. Polish simply doesn't give you that freedom, it's too structured.

i always wondered how rap music in polish worked out.....it seems terribly complicated. if you want the words to rhyme, you always have to consider how the word is going to conjugate before you say it, otherwise, you don't have a rhyme. in english, the word is the word. use it however you want, it's still going to rhyme because case endings, or gender for that matter, don't exist. way more freedom.

Talking about "speaking with wrong Polish case endings", there comes to my mind a very recent case of the former Polish finance minister and deputy PM Jacek Rostowski, a native speaker of Polish, born and educated in London (London School of Economics and Political Science), however, who happened to use the town name "Bydgoszcz" as if it was a masculine noun, whereas in reality it has always been a feminine one. Thus, he said he had never been to Bydgoszcz ("w Bydgoszczu") or he was "zainteresowany Bydgoszczem". This mistake of his attracted enormous attention in every information programme on TV broacast on that particular evening which shows how important and how vital the case system in Polish still is.

I have no idea why he should have made such a mistake since nothing in his Polish could ever reveal any foreign educational linguistic background, neither did he ever show a slightest trace of English influence while speaking in Polish. He himself explained the mistake by his fatigue at the time of talking which seems plausible to me. I myself remember occasionally confusing the gender or a case when I happened to be mentally exhausted, but still, I have never been consistent in repeating such a mistake as Mr. Rostowski was!

A common mistake among native speakers of Polish is to assign the masculine gender to the town of Ostrów of Mazovia whose proper gender is feminine though. This is in contrast to the name of Ostrów in Greater Poland whose gender is masculine. This way, we have Ostrów Wielkopolski (masculine), but then it is Ostrów Mazowiecka (feminine).

Like this:

teksty.org/kaliber-44,garbaty-aniol,tekst-piosenki

one of my favorite songs ever :-)