# What is the origin, history of the Polish feminine plural Dative ending -om?



## Encolpius

Dear Members, I am a little bit perplexed by the *ending -om in Polish words like kobietom, ulicom, nogom*. It reminds me of masculine nouns. Is it just simple nothing to mention and talk about it or is there a story or soemthing? I know Czech and Russian, they use -ám, just like in instrumental or locative (ách, ami). What is your impession? Thank you in advance and have a productive evening. Enco.


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## ahvalj

The _a_-containing endings originate from the _a_-stems. _O_-stems previously had _-omъ, -y, -ěхъ _(more or less continued in modern Czech). Polish generalized _-om_ from the _o_-stems but _-ami_ and _-ach_ from the _a_-stems.

Update. Czech alone retains the old distinctions between stem types: all the other Slavic languages have more or less merged the types in the plural (or used the resulting doublets for different semantic groups of words).


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## Encolpius

I have no idea what a-stems & o-stems means. Do you mean nouns were classified according the stems and not the gender?


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## ahvalj

Yes, nouns were not classified according to the gender.
In Russian, for example, the words _мужчина_ “man” and _женщина_ “woman” are still declined absolutely identically, and so was the previous state of affairs in all Slavic languages. In Ukrainian, _людина_ “man” even is grammatically feminine and takes the pronoun _вона_ “she”.​Roughly speaking, words ending now in _-a_ are (former) _a_-stems, while masculine words now ending in consonants and most neuters are (former) _o_-stems. They belonged historically to different declension types with their particular endings.

In various Slavic languages over the course of the last 10+ centuries there was a strong tendency towards diminishing this diversity and creating more unified endings. In literary Czech, it developed the least (other than some rearrangement according to gender, so that words like _hrdina_ now have non-_a_-stem endings in the dative-locative singular and in the plural: historically, _hrdinovi, hrdinové, hrdinů_ and _hrdinech_ are former _u_-stem endings, _hrdinům_ and instrumental _hrdiny,_ former _o_-stem endings, and the accusative _hrdiny_ goes back to both _u_-, _o_- and _a_-stem endings; the singular _hrdina, hrdiny, hrdinu, hrdinou_ and _hrdino _retain their original _a_-stem endings; such a mess).


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## Encolpius

Interesting information. But still, the Polish declension looks like this in plural:
kobiety
kobiet
*kobietom*
kobiety
kobietach
kobietami
So, for me, dilettante totale, the kobietom is the black sheep of the family, why is the whole declension feminine, only Dative is masculine, is that a common phenomen in Slavic languages or do you see it in a different way?


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## ahvalj

Because you look at this from the Czech viewpoint, where there are separate_ žena — ženám, ženami, ženách_ and _pán — pánům, pány, pánech_ (which reflects the original Slavic distinction): in Polish there is only one combined type, where in the plural _żona — żonom, żonami, żonach_ and _pan — panom, panami, panach_ decline absolutely identically, with the ending _-om_ taken historically from the _o_-stems (original masculines in your terminology) and _-ami, -ach_ historically from the _a_-stems (original feminines in your terminology), so there is no masculine/feminine distinction in Polish or Russian nowadays in these grammatical cases in the plural, it's all the same now.


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## Encolpius

ahvalj said:


> Because you look at this from the Czech viewpoint....
> ....so there is no masculine/feminine distinction in Polish or Russian nowadays in these grammatical cases in the plural, it's all the same now.



Yes, of course. The only Slavic languages I know well.  
But Russian has very similar forms to Czech, no? Can you write any example for "mixed" declension, I cannot remember now, in Russian?


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## ahvalj

Russian has generalized this _a_ for all declensions in the plural (that is all nouns now have _-am,_ without variants), so for a Czech speaker the _a_ for masculines and neuters should look as weird, isn't it? Consider Slovak, where masculines retain _o,_ but neuters (_mestám, mestami, mestách_) and former _i_-stems, now consonant-ending feminines (_kostiam, kosťami, kostiach_) have also acquired _a,_ thus midway between Czech and Russian.

In Belarusian, there are dialectally two endings for the dative plural: in some dialects (and in the modern standard language) _-am_ is chosen, in other dialects (and in the anti-Russian standard language), _-om_ is chosen (of course, for all three genders).


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## Encolpius

Very interesting comments, ahvalj.  
That Slovak - Czech - mestám - městům is fascinating, too. 
Do you agree, it might sound chauvinistic, that Czech has the purest (or what to call it) declension? 
Now I recalled the *Croatian plural instrumental, they have ženom*, too, I got confused then, too.


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## ahvalj

Yes, Czech preserves the types the best among modern Slavic languages, though the amount of mutations in vowels is the largest: the old rather straightforward system has become quite complicated.

Croatian _ženom_ is instrumental singular (that's the former masculine/neuter ending), while the dative/instrumental/locative plural is _ženama_ (that's the former dative/instrumental dual), at least in the standard language.


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## Encolpius

ahvalj said:


> though the amount of *mutations in vowels is the largest*: the old rather straightforward system has become quite complicated.



what do you mean by mutation of vowels?


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## ahvalj

The split of originally uniform vowels depending on their new length and on following a hard or soft consonant, e. g. the endings in _ženám, ženami, duším_ and _dušemi_ until the end of the 1st millennium had the same uniform vowel _á _(_*ženámъ, *ženámí, *dúšʲámъ, *dúšʲámí_), which shortened in the instrumental plural and fronted after a palatal consonant, the short and long fronted variant later having diverged in quality.


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## Encolpius

Yes, yes. I see now! Reading some articles about older Czech long ago I had the feeling old Czech was more similar to Slovak or Russian. But I know really little about the history of Slavic languages.


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## Zec

o- and a-stems are, to my knowledge, usually well kept apart in most Western South Slavic dialects, including standard Slovene and BCMS, despite the latter having innovative endings in Dat/Loc/Inst plural. Not in all dialects, though: Kajkavian tends to do the same thing Slovak does, or a compromise between that and the original state of affairs.


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## ahvalj

As a side note, Czech seems to be the only language preserving — in the singular — the consonant declension, compare:
_dětę__ > dítě_​_dětęte > dítěte_​_dětęti > dítěti_​_dětętьmь > dítětem_​_dětęti > dítěti_ (unlike what Wiktionary implies, the _i_-ending did exist in Late Common Slavic along with _e_).​
That has became possible because Czech had developed other subtypes with fronted endings, so the paradigm didn't begin to look as isolated as in other languages, yet formally the present-day singular is the exact phonetic continuation of that old declension type.


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## Encolpius

I found it strange there are mixed paradigms until realizing the Czech declension of "hrdina" seems to be mixed, too. 
hrdina
hrdiny - feminine
hrdinovi - masculine
hrdinou - feminine 
while the Slovak is completely masculine. 
So maybe we could find more exampels of that mixed declensions.


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## Lorenc

The situation in old-Polish was similar to modern Czech, with distinct _-om /-am_ suffixes for masculine/feminine nouns.
For example:
"uczyńmy człowieka ku obliczu a ku podobieństwu naszemu, aby panował *rybam* morskim a _*ptakom*,_ jeżto latają pod stworzeniem niebieskim"
"Let us make  man in our image, after our likeness; and let them have dominion _*over the fish *_of the sea, and _*over the fowl *_of the air"
Bible of Queen Sophia, ca. 1433

A -em ending was also used for (some?) soft-stemmed nouns, in particular in _ludziem _(modern Polish ludziom, to people).
According to S. Westfal in "The Polish language" in the 15th and 16th centuries both _-om_ and _-am_ began being used for nouns of the "wrong" gender (eg _-am_ for masculine and neuter nouns), but by the beginning of the 17th century _-om _prevailed for all genders.


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