Polish is an inflecting language, meaning that words change their form depending on grammatical case, gender, number, person.
The word 'złoty' is and adjective meaning 'golden'.
- złoty is masculine, nominative case, singular, so it is "1 złoty"
Since
złoty is the masculine form, it must have been followed by some masculine noun in the past, probably
pieniądz.
Pieniądz is an early borrowing from German
Pfennig, and its plural
pieniądze is now the normal Polish word for 'money'.
After numerals 2, 3, and 4, the plural is used:
- złote is nominative case, plural (for all genders), so it is "2, 3, 4 złote"
Slavic languages have the habit that higher numbers (5+) are grammatically treated as nouns, followed by the genitive plural (to be paraphrased as 'a 5-er
of some things'):
- złotych is genitive case, plural (for all genders), so it is "5, 10, 20 złotych"
All Slavic languages show this behaviour apart from
Bulgarian and
Macedonian (which lost most of their nominal inflection in history). Bulgarian has a separate 'count' word form (different from the plural) for masculine words used after all numerals higher than one.
Russian,
Belorussian, and
Ukrainian stand out in that the numerals 2, 3, and 4 are followed by nouns in the genitive singular(!) and adjectives in the nominative or genitive plural following some highly peculiar rules.