Breakdown of Zło nie ma moralności i nie dba o nikogo.
i
and
mieć
to have
nie
no / not
o
about
nikt
nobody
dbać
to take care
zło
evil
moralność
morality
Questions & Answers about Zło nie ma moralności i nie dba o nikogo.
If I wanted to add wszak to mean "After all, evil has no morality...", where would it naturally fit in this sentence?
The verb phrase is negative (nie dba). Why doesn't the case after the preposition o change to the genitive?
The "genitive of negation" rule only applies to direct objects. When a verb is followed by a preposition (like dbać o), the preposition stubbornly demands its usual case, regardless of whether the verb is negated. Here, the preposition o always takes the accusative when talking about caring for someone.
If o takes the accusative here, why is the word nikogo used? Isn't that the genitive form of nikt?
It is both! For animate pronouns like nikt (nobody) or kto (who), the accusative form is identical to the genitive form. So nikogo is grammatically in the accusative case here because it follows the preposition o, even though it looks exactly like the genitive.
In English, we say "does not care about anyone". Why do we use nikogo (nobody) instead of a word for "anyone"?
Polish strictly requires a double negative. Whenever you have a negated verb like nie dba, any indefinite pronouns associated with it must also be in their negative forms (like nikt, nigdy, or nic). A literal translation of the Polish structure is "does not care about nobody".
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