The Flexion of Possessive Adjectives of the Type Piotrów and Annin in the Warsaw Court Records of the 15th and 16th Centuries

Abstract

The problem of the transference of Old Polish adjectives from nominal declination (simple and oblique) to nominal-pronominal (complex) is discussed generally in the historical grammars of the Polish language. We do not find there any individual stages which that change undoubtedly went through. Nor do we find any details in the works devoted exclusively to the history of Polish adjectives. In my paper I show those details, using as an example the possessive adjectives formed from personal nouns, most often proper nouns, by means of suffixes -ow and -in. Formerly they were declined as nouns. They are most numerous in court records. I have chosen the records from the invaluable book written by W. Kuraszkiewicz and A. Wolff (Zapiski i roty polskie z ksiąg sądowych ziemi warszawskiej, Kraków 1950). The records, accurately dated, occur one by one almost throughout the whole of the 15th century until the middle of the 16th century (1421-1553). We learn from them that the nominal suffixes of the oblique cases in the adjectives with -ow and -in did not change at the same time, but in a certain sequence. The paper seeks to show this sequence.