Breakdown of Ogromny tłum turystów czekał wczoraj przed muzeum.
turysta
tourist
wczoraj
yesterday
muzeum
the museum
czekać
to wait
przed
in front of (+ Instrumental)
tłum
crowd
ogromny
huge
Questions & Answers about Ogromny tłum turystów czekał wczoraj przed muzeum.
This lesson is about the emphatic particle aż. How could I use it in this sentence to emphasize the size of the crowd or the wait time?
The particle aż needs to go directly before a numeral or a quantifier. Since tłum (crowd) is a noun, you cannot put aż directly before it. However, if you specify the wait time or the exact number of people, you can use it! For example: Ogromny tłum turystów czekał wczoraj aż trzy godziny przed muzeum (A huge crowd of tourists waited as much as three hours in front of the museum).
Why is the verb czekał in the singular masculine form when there were obviously many tourists?
The grammatical subject of the sentence is the singular masculine inanimate noun tłum (crowd). Polish verbs agree strictly with the head noun in the subject phrase. Even though the crowd consists of plural turystów (tourists), the verb must agree with the singular noun tłum.
The preposition przed requires the instrumental case for expressing location. Why hasn't the ending of muzeum changed?
Polish nouns of foreign origin that end in -um (like muzeum, centrum, forum) are indeclinable in the singular. This means they keep their dictionary form in all singular cases. They only take case endings in the plural (for example, the instrumental plural would be przed muzeami).
The word for tourist is turysta, which ends in -a. Why is its genitive plural form turystów instead of having no ending, like most nouns ending in -a?
Although turysta ends in -a, it is a masculine personal noun, not feminine. Because of its masculine gender, it adopts standard masculine plural endings in several cases. Therefore, in the genitive plural, it takes the typical masculine -ów suffix, resulting in turystów.
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