Breakdown of W tej firmie pracuje mało kobiet.
ten
this (m)
kobieta
woman
pracować
to work
w
in / on (a day)
firma
company
mało
little / few
Questions & Answers about W tej firmie pracuje mało kobiet.
Why is the word for "women" written as kobiet here?
Kobiet is the Genitive plural form of kobieta. After quantity words like mało (few/little) or dużo (a lot), you must use the Genitive case. For most feminine nouns ending in -a, you form the Genitive plural by simply dropping the -a, leaving what we call a "zero ending" (kobieta becomes kobiet).
I learned that dropping the -a sometimes adds an -e- inside the word. Why doesn't that happen with kobiet?
You are thinking of the "fleeting e"! That rule applies when dropping the -a leaves a hard-to-pronounce group of consonants at the end of the word (for example, matka becomes matek). The stem of kobieta ends in just one consonant (t). When you drop the -a, kobiet is perfectly easy to pronounce, so no extra e is needed.
Since "few women" means more than one person, why is the verb pracuje in the singular?
In Polish, when the subject is a quantity word like mało (few), dużo (a lot), or a number from five upwards, the verb must be in the third-person singular. Grammatically, it is as if you are saying "A small amount of women works here."
Why does the sentence use tej firmie instead of ta firma?
The preposition w (in) requires the Locative case when describing a location. Both the pronoun ta (this) and the feminine noun firma (company) must change to match this case, becoming tej firmie.
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