Word
Bezdomni śpią na dworcu.
Meaning
Homeless people sleep at the station.
Part of speech
sentence
Pronunciation
Course
Breakdown of Bezdomni śpią na dworcu.
spać
to sleep
na
on, at / to (motion toward) / for (a meal) / for (waiting for)
dworzec
train station (m)
bezdomny
homeless (a homeless person)
Questions & Answers about Bezdomni śpią na dworcu.
"Bezdomni" looks like an adjective. Can it just be used as a noun like this?
Yes! Bezdomni is a masculine personal plural adjective meaning "homeless". Just like in English ("the homeless"), Polish frequently uses adjectives as nouns to refer to categories of people. If you were talking about one homeless man, you would use the singular form bezdomny.
What is the infinitive of śpią and why doesn't it look like the present tense?
The infinitive is spać (to sleep). It is an irregular verb. When conjugated in the present tense, the base changes to śpi-, which is why the "they" form becomes śpią.
Why do we say na dworcu instead of w dworcu for "at the station"?
In Polish, certain open public spaces and institutions take the preposition na rather than w. A station (dworzec) belongs to this group. Using w would sound strange here, as if you were emphasizing being physically trapped inside the walls of the structure.
Why did the "e" from dworzec disappear in dworcu?
The word dworzec has what we call a "fleeting e". When you add an ending to change its grammatical case (here, the Locative case triggered by na), that e drops out, making the base dworc-. Since it ends in c, which Polish treats as a "soft" consonant, it takes the ending -u instead of -e.