stress on the antepenultimate (third-last) syllable. For example, fizyka () ('physics') is stressed on the first syllable. That may lead to a rare phenomenon of minimal pairs differing only in stress placement: muzyka 'music' vs. muzyka – genitive singular of muzyk 'musician'. When further syllables are added at the end of such words through suffixation, the stress normally becomes regular: uniwersytet (, 'university') has irregular stress on the third (or antepenultimate) syllable, but the genitive uniwersytetu () and derived adjective uniwersytecki () have regular stress on the penultimate syllables. Over time, loanwords become nativized to have a penultimate stress. Another class of exceptions is verbs with the conditional endings -by, -bym, -byśmy etc. Those endings are not counted in determining the position of the stress: zrobiłbym ('I would do') is stressed on the first syllable and zrobilibyśmy ('we would do') on the second. According to prescriptive grammars, the same applies to the first and second person plural past tense endings -śmy, -ście although this rule is often ignored in colloquial speech (so zrobiliśmy 'we did' is said to be correctly stressed on the second syllable, although in practice it is commonly stressed on the third as zrobiliśmy). The irregular stress patterns are explained by the fact that these endings are detachable clitics rather than true verbal inflections: for example, instead of kogo zobaczyliście? ('whom did you see?') it is possible to say kogoście zobaczyli? – here kogo retains its usual stress (first syllable) in spite of the attachment of the clitic. Reanalysis of the endings as inflections when attached to verbs causes the different colloquial stress patterns. Some common word combinations are stressed as if they were a single word. That applies in particular to many combinations of preposition plus a personal pronoun, such as do niej ('to her'), na nas ('on us'), przeze mnie ('because of me'), all stressed on the bolded syllable of the preposition. See also Evolution of the Polish language Polish alphabet Polish orthography Help:IPA/Polish (a guide to pronunciation of Polish words as represented in Wikipedia articles) References Bibliography Historical phonology Further reading phonology Slavic phonologies