nie ma

See also: niema and niemą

Polish edit

Alternative forms edit

Etymology edit

Clipping of nie masz.^[1] First attested in the first half of the 20th century.

Pronunciation edit

IPA^(key): /ˈɲɛ.ma/
Audio (file)
Rhymes: -ɛma
Homophone: niema

Phrase edit

nie ma

Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see nie,‎ ma. [+genitive]
On nie ma czasu. ― He doesn't have time.
(idiomatic) there is no, there are no [+genitive]
Nie ma chleba. ― There is no bread.

Nie ma mowy! ― No way! (literally, “There is no speech!”)

Nigdy nikogo nie ma w domu. ― Never is there anyone home.

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

phrase

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]‎^[1] (in Polish), volume 1, Kraków, Warszawa: Polska Akademia Nauk. Instytut Języka Polskiego, page 280