nie ma
Polish
[edit]Alternative forms
[edit]Etymology
[edit]Clipping of nie masz.[1] First attested in the first half of the 20th century. Displaced Old Polish nietu.
Pronunciation
[edit]Phrase
[edit]nie ma (past nie było, future nie będzie)
- Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see nie, ma. [with genitive]
- (impersonal, idiomatic) to be gone, to not be present, to not exist, there is no [with genitive]
Usage notes
[edit](1): is entirely regular.
(2): is only irregular in the present tense, all other forms are a combination of nie and być (appropriately conjugated), as follows: there wasn't → nie było; there won't be → nie będzie; there wouldn't be → nie byłoby.
Derived terms
[edit]Trivia
[edit]According to Słownik frekwencyjny polszczyzny współczesnej (1990), nie ma is one of the most used words in Polish, appearing 33 times in scientific texts, 4 times in news, 35 times in essays, 80 times in fiction, and 152 times in plays, each out of a corpus of 100,000 words, totaling 304 times, making it the 166th most common word in a corpus of 500,000 words.[2]
References
[edit]- ^ Bańkowski, Andrzej (2000) “nie ma”, in Etymologiczny słownik języka polskiego [Etymological Dictionary of the Polish Language] (in Polish)
- ^ Ida Kurcz (1990) “nie ma”, in Słownik frekwencyjny polszczyzny współczesnej [Frequency dictionary of the Polish language] (in Polish), volume 1, Kraków, Warszawa: Polska Akademia Nauk. Instytut Języka Polskiego, page 280