Page:A simplified grammar of the Polish language.djvu/21

 uliczka, ‘a little street;’ brat, ‘a brother,’ braciszek, ‘a little brother.’ Diminutives derived from monosyllables end for the most part in ik, as kon, ‘a horse,’ konik; ‘stoł, ‘a table,’ stolik; sometimes in yk, as stolarczyk, ‘a journeyman carpenter,’ szewczyk, ‘a journeyman shoemaker.’ Sometimes the vowels are changed, as ręka, ‘a hand,’ rączka, ‘a little hand.’ Another diminutive form is yna or ina, as psina, ‘poor little dog,’ expressing ‘amoris quandum fatuitatem,’ as the old grammarians used to say. Here also may be mentioned the termination -arnia, to express the place at which a trade is carried on, as drukarnia, ‘a printing-office;’ kawiarnia, ‘a coffe-house.’

The Polish adjective has the same number of cases as the noun, and its inflections vary according to the three genders. In the nominative masculine it ends in y or i, in the feminine in a, in the neuter in e.