English to Polish

Morphology

Nouns

Polish is a highly inflected language; verbs (and adjectives describing them) are declined according to gender, number, and case. Traditionally, Polish is considered to have 3 genders (masculine, feminine, and neuter), but the more modern view is that is contains 5: masculine person (m1 in Apertium), masculine animate (m2), masculine inanimate (m3), feminine, and neuter. The masculine genders can be thought of as steps: in the absence of a particular rule for that case, the rule beneath applies -- a rule for m3 applies to m2 and m1, a rule for m2 applies to m1.

The cases are: nominative (subject), accusative (object), dative (indirect object), genitive (possessive, negative object, quantities), locative (used only with prepositions), instrumental (by means of something), and vocative (addressing something).

Verbs

Polish has typically two forms for each verb, the perfective and the imperfective aspect. These usually come with a change in stem, for example:

Imperfective	Perfective	Gloss
widzieć	zobaczyć	to see
stawiać	postawić	to set up

The perfective denotes a completed action. According to Wikipedia, "The aspectual distinctions exist on the lexical level — there is no unique method to form a perfective verb from a given imperfective one."

The imperfective is used for the present tense ('Co robisz?': 'What are you doing?') and for negative commands ('Nie rób tego': 'don't (ever) do that', or to use Hiberno English 'don't be doing that'); the perfective for the simple future ('Czy zrobisz to?': 'Will you do it?') and for positive commands ('Zrób to szybciej': 'Do it faster')

[I]n some verbs the perfective form (for example, napisać) is formed out of an underlying imperfective form (pisać), via a prefixisation process that many linguists would argue is a clear example of derivational morphology. On the other hand, in some verbs the imperfective form (for example, kupować) is formed out of an underlying perfective form (kupić), via a ‘suffixisational’ process that many linguists would argue is a clear example of inflectional morphology. Furthermore, in yet other verbs (namely verbs in suppletive pairs such as brać/wziąć) all linguists (as far as we are aware) would agree that there is no morphological link whatsoever between the two verbs.

Apertium notes

As this is lexicalised, there is only one way to deal with it, and that is in the dictionaries, each verb will have two entries in the bilingual dictionary, one for perfective and one for imperfective.

For example:

    <e><p><l>read<s n="vblex"/></l><r>czytać<s n="vblex"/><s n="imperf"/></r></p></e>
    <e><p><l>read<s n="vblex"/></l><r>przeczytać<s n="vblex"/><s n="perf"/></r></p></e>

Further complications

As well as perfective/imperfective pairs, there are also habitual verbs (czytywałem - I used to read from time to time), and there are pairs which distinguish between non-determined and determined motion (chodzić - to go, with no particular destination in mind vs. iść - to go, with a destination in mind).

Młynarczyk argues that Polish aspect can be further divided, based on the addition of "empty" prefixes, the prefix po, the infix ną, or with a morphonological change, and provides this table:

	ep	po-	-ną-	mpc
class1	yes
class2		yes
class3	yes	yes
class4	yes	yes	yes
class5				yes

Labenz further refines this:

Class	Aspect and formant	Aktionsart	Example
1s	impfv	state	wierzyć 'to be believing'
1s	pfv, ep	inception of an ongoing state	uwierzyć 'to have started believing'
1t	impfv	transition	grubnąć 'to be growing fat(ter)'
1t	pfv, ep	completed transition	zgrubnąć 'to have grown fat'
2	impfv	activity	siedzieć 'to be sitting'
2	pfv, po-	terminated activity	posiedzieć 'to have been sitting a bit'
3	impfv	ongoing accomplishment	czytać 'to be reading'
3	pfv, ep	accomplishment	przeczytać 'to have read'
3	pfv, po-	terminated accomplishment	poczytać 'to have been reading a bit'
4	impfv	semelfactive activity	pukać 'to be knocking'
4	pfv, ep	completed semelfactive	zapukać 'to have knocked'
4	pfv, po-	non-minimal semelfactive	popukać 'to have been knocking a bit'
4	pfv, -ną-	minimal semelfactive	puknąć 'to have knocked once'
5	pfv, mp	achievement	kupić 'to have bought'
5	impfv	ongoing achievement	kupować 'to be buying'

In Apertium, these aspect differences can be handled in the Polish monodix.

Syntax

Articles

Polish doesn't have articles, so translating English→Polish, we'll need to remove them, translating Polish→English, we'll need to add them.

   Mam               zegar
   mieć+p1.sg.pres 
   have+I            clock+nom
`I have a clock'

Apertium notes

There aren't really any rules to this, so the fallback will be "if we can't tell for sure, leave them out".

Word order

Basic English and Polish word order are the same, SVO; however, as Polish morphology details the part of speech, Polish word order can vary to provide emphasis.

"Ja kocham Ciebie" = "I love you"

"Ciebie ja kocham" = "I love you"

Object dropping

In answering questions, it is common in Polish to omit the object ("Czy kupiłeś piwo? - Kupiłem": "Did you buy beer? - I bought"). However, as Polish speakers of English commonly drop the object in English, perhaps it's acceptable for us to do so too.