Ten goleń czy ta goleń? : grammatical gender in Polish

Autor podpisany na publikacji: Wiesław Tomasz Stefańczyk. Recenzowane materiały z konferencji: "Przeszłość w języku zamknięta. In memoriam Andrae Bańkowski", dn. 25-26 października 2016 r., Częstochowa

Present-day Polish is dominated by the preponderance of two grammatical genders, masculine and feminine, witch cover ca 90% nouns. At present, the neuter gender is represented by the remaining 10%, a considerable part of them being verbal derivatives with a varying degree of lexicalisations. The masculine gender is mainly represented by nouns ending in the nominative singular with the ending -ø, less often -a and in a few rare cases -o, e.g. dom ‘home’, mężczyzna ‘man’, dziadzio ‘grandpa’. The largest group of nouns in the feminine gender feature the nominative singular ending -a. Additionally, although much less frequently, it includes lexemes ending in -(o)ść and -i (mainly derivatives with the suffixe -ini//-yni), e.g. książka ‘book’, miłość ‘love’, bogini ‘goddes’. The feminine gender also includes a small group of nouns ending in a consonant, such as podróż ‘journey’, śmierć ‘death’, dłoń ‘palm’, krew ‘blood’. The neuter gender mainly comprises nouns ending in -o or -e, and in a limited number of cases in -um or -ę, np.: okno window’, śniadanie ‘breakfast’, imię ‘name’, muzeum ‘museum’. Research shows that feminine nouns ending in a consonant, atypical in modern Polish, are subject to constant qualitative changes. Another significant trend is the steadily decreasing number of neuter nouns.