The bumping, swaying motion of the bus was, as usual, rocking me to sleep. I was returning from Nowy Targ, the nearest Polish town, fighting sleep as I usually do on busses in Poland.
Ironically, a town in Slovakia is about fifteen kilometers closer, but not as accessible by bus.
In front of me sat a mother and her child, who looked to be two years old. About halfway home, I glanced down to notice one of the child’s mittens had fallen on the floor. I reached down to pick it up, then leaned a little over the seat and was going to address the child. “You lost something, didn’t you?” And then the mild panic struck: is this a boy or a girl? Wrapped up tight for winter, the child was androgynous, with only a face visible. So I said nothing, and simply gave the mitten back to the mother. Rather, she noticed I was holding it and literally jerked it out of my hand. Odd experience.
I didn’t say anything to the child because I didn’t know the child’s gender, and that is essential if you’re speaking to someone in Polish in the past tense. Polish verbs are curious because their past tense forms are gender specific. “I took” for a man (wziałem) is different than “I took” for a woman (wziałam). Not terribly different, but different nonetheless.
If I were to say to a little boy, “You lost something, didn’t you?” the “lost” would be “straciłeÅ›,” whereas for a little girl it would be “straciłaÅ›.”
The verb endings for males are:
| -łem | -liśmy |
| -łeś | -liście |
| -ł | -l |
For females, however, they are:
| -łam | -łyśmy |
| -łaś | -łyście |
| -ła | -ły |
My father-in-law always does this when he asked Kinga and I where we went, if we’d disappeared for a few hours one Sunday afternoon. “GdzieÅ›cie byli?” he’d ask, taking the “Å›cie” ending from the verb and throwing it on “gdzie,” or “where.”
Update:
Vivi asked “So, when you are talking about mixed company (ie a man and a woman), does it default to masculine, like French?” Short answer: yes.
Will the madness never end?!
Returning to the androgynous mittens’ story, my wife informs me that people make such mistakes all the time, with the mother usually correcting them. So I could have just chosen a gender and let fly.
So, when you are talking about mixed company (ie a man and a woman), does it default to masculine, like French?
Hardly a madness. Simply an archaism. Polish past tenses are historically speaking, present perfect tenses. Made from a participle, which like any adjective in a slavic language is inflected for gender and number, and a form of to be. The auxillary was not always tightly welded to the participle.
The gender of small children is not always obvious. Mistakes happen all the time. (If it weren’t for the pink/blue traditions for babies it would happen even more often.) Mothers early on learn not to be offended and will correct you tactfully. I hadn’t considered how much more obvious the langauage factor makes it though.