II.

Phonetics and Grammar

Contemporary Polish has 7 vowel sounds and 35 consonant sounds, depicted by a modified Latin alphabet. Sounds that are not represented by the alphabet are indicated by digraphs such as sz and cz (resembling English sh and ch) and by diacritics such as ż and ś (resembling zh and a soft sh), derived from Czech. Unique to Polish is the ł (resembling English w). In the course of its evolution, Polish lost the distinction between long and short vowels, and word accent became fixed on the next-to-last syllable. Polish is the only Slavic language with nasal vowels (a and e), which are derived from Old Slavic nasal vowels. Of the original singular, dual, and plural, the dual has disappeared (as in most Slavic languages). The singular has three genders, masculine, feminine, and neuter; the plural developed a new category, personal masculine gender (for human males), which is distinguished from a common plural gender for all other categories. Polish is highly inflected and retains the Old Slavic case system: six cases for nouns, pronouns, and adjectives, plus a seventh case, the vocative (for direct address) for nouns and pronouns. Verbs are inflected according to gender as well as person and number, but the tense forms have been simplified through elimination of three old tenses (the aorist, imperfect, and past perfect). The so-called Slavic perfect is the only past tense form used in common speech. Word order remains highly flexible.