We took a different approach: using our biologically and psychologically plausible learning algorithm, we re-examined the input, unconstrained by linguistic tradition. There may not be any exceptions to his rules, but there are nearly as many rules as there are masculine inanimate words! We think Westfal lost hope at some point too, because he concluded his book by saying that the -u ending would be the elegant one, while the -a ending would come with a tinge of vulgarity or roughness. Westfal (1965) is a prototypical example of a splitter and wrote a 365 page book that deals with -a versus -u variation. Other linguists are “splitters” and try to make their categories so small as to avoid there being any exceptions.
But that doesn’t even hold for our small sample: surely, phones are, and have always been, more movable than computers? For example, some have proposed that the ending -a would be used for small, manipulable items, while the ending -u would be reserved for large, immovable objects.
Some linguists are “lumpers” and try to explain the variation with as few categories as possible. Why, we hear you ask in despair? Well, that’s the question linguists have been trying to answer for a long time, and they have proposed many classifications of things that take -a and things that take -u. It should be Nie mam komputera but Nie mam telefonu. If you speak Polish and want to say that you don’t have a computer or phone you face a difficult decision: do you say Nie mam komputera or do you say Nie mam komputeru? And is it Nie mam telefona or Nie mam telefonu? And what about your tablet? And your iPhone? Polish speakers get confused about this too.
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