Burrito West Blog

In my continuing half-hearted efforts to learn some Polish, today I taught Peter something.

I was going through a grammar lesson on my software and it was teaching me something about conjugation relative to numbers. (Remember that in Polish you conjugate nouns.)  So it was: 20 kubkow (cups) and 24 kubki (cups).  I asked Peter how you know when to conjugate with which numbers and he was all 'you don't' and then the ran through it in his head and said 'holy cr*p, you do sometimes'. Then he apologized on behalf of Poland, because, wtf?  Why do they conjugate a noun when there are 20 of a thing?  No reason at all. None. Just because.

!!!!!
And in my previous post, I lamented because they conjugate nouns so you have to learn 7 versions of each noun - making vocabulary building tough and the odds of saying anything correctly ~ zero.  I was wrong, actually. Because in Polish they have special additional words for nouns to make diminutive versions, to small-ify things (not size wise necessarily, more like cute, adorable, loved).  You can small-ify 'dog' or  'house' or a person's name - every noun has a small version (children are always called by the smallified version of their names).  These smallified versions also get conjugated.  So - in my previous example, pies (dog) has 7 conjugations and piesek (small/beloved/cute dog) has 7 conjugations also.  So 14 potential conjugations for every noun, in effect.  Awesome. No wonder I never understand anything anyone says!

Unrelated photo of a barn cat.

The reason I'm so frustrated by the conjugations of nouns - aside from the fact that it largely prevents me from recognizing words I know the root form of when I listen to people speak - is that it adds no information. It makes the language more complex for no reason at all.  Peter says it's occasionally useful for clarity in verb-noun relationships in complex sentences, but mostly it doesn't add any information to a sentence at all. You are perfectly understandable if you do not conjugate nouns, you just sound weird because all native-speakers are used to conjugating everything all the time.

I protest this. It feels suspiciously like the Polish people made their language unnecessarily complex just to prevent us foreigners from ever having any hope of learning it.  I don't like to buy into conspiracy theories normally, but this is pretty obvious, right?  Why else would a language conjugate things unnecessarily?