What is the plural form of the noun minister? This question is asked by many foreigners attening courses of Polish as a foreign language.
In principle, the plural form in Polish is regular, but... There is a but. There are two forms of plural in the Polish grammar, for non-masculine personal and masculine personal nouns. The former are regular in most cases: koleżanka, but dwie koleżanki, kot but dwa koty, piwo, but dwa piwa, fotel, but dwa fotele etc. The latter cause more problems. Should we say profesorowie or profesory, dziadowie or dziady? Polish people use both forms, which makes things even more complicated. Let’s look into that to answer the questions which of the forms is the correct one.
NEUTRAL AND DEPRECIATIVE FORMS OF NOUNS
Interestingly, in theory, every masculine personal noun in the nominative and vocative case of the plural form may take both above-mentioned forms. However, the ones that take the same form as the non-masculine personal nouns, are of depreciative kind. They are potentially possible, but rarely in use. Several of them, however, are in quite frequent use, e.g. profesory, policjanty, ministry. They express a great deal of negative emotions. Therefore, if we want to emphasise our respect for the ministers, we should say dobrzy ministrowie. We should use the personal masculine form of the adjective in the plural form accordlingly. However, if we want to make sure your listeners or interlocutors understand that you believe the people in question do not deserve to be in the position, you’ll use the form ministry, and the adjective will take the non-masculine personal form.
It’s woth noting that only some nouns take a different ending to distinguish the negative meaning form the neutral one (the above-mentioned ministrowie, but also dziadowie meaning ancestors, and dziady meaning beggars, the poor). In most cases it is the adjective or the verb (you can find the right forms of verbs on websites with conjugations) that „does the trick“, and that’s why we can say both: to byli znani burżuje and to były znane burżuje.
Let’s not forget that these forms are common for the spoken language, and should be avoided in the correct Polish language.
POLISH AND THE SLAVIC LANGUAGES
The plural form of nouns is quite hard for the Slavs, who try to make the plural forms based on the rules of their native languages. For them, the words like Polaki or Francuzy sound neutral, while for the Poles they sound offensive, since the correct forms are Polacy and Francuzi. Therefore, you’d better make sure by asking the teacher or look the form up in a dictionary. If you want to know more about the Polish language, check it out here.
