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Encyclopedia :
P :
PO :
POL :
Polish language |
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Polish languagePolish (polski, język polski) is the official language of Poland.HistoryPolish has been influenced by contact with foreign languages (foremost Latin, Czech, French, German, Italian, Old Belarusian, Russian and recently it has been virtually bombarded by English, especially American English language elements). A small hint when learning or looking at the language, the English language suffix of '-tion' becomes the suffix '-cja' in Polish, otherwise the word is spelt mostly the same. To make the word plural, -cja becomes -cje. Examples of this include "inauguracja" (inaugeration), dewastacja (devastation), konurbacja (conurbation) and konotacje (conotations). A word of caution though: the suffix has been known to be tacked onto other words that did not originally have the '-tion' suffix, see next example. Another written assimilation into Polish is the letter pairing of 'qu', which becomes "kw" in Polish (for example kwadrant=quadrant and frekwencja=frequency). In Upper Silesia the inimitable regional dialects are influenced by German elements. Many words have been borrowed from German as a result of heavy contact with Germans and the German language, this process has been going on since medieval times. Examples include szlachta (from German Geschlecht=nobility), rachunek (Rechnung=account), ratusz (Rathaus=town hall), burmistrz (Bürgermeister=mayor, however city mayors these days are simply called 'prezydent' (president)), handel (Handel=commerce), kac (Kater=hangover), kartofel (Kartoffel=potato; however this word is dialectual, most Poles use the word 'ziemniak' for potato, but both words are understood anywhere), cukier (Zucker=sugar), kelner (Kellner=waiter) and malarz (Maler=painter; also the word 'malować' has entered Polish as the verb "to paint"). There are also several words of French origin in the language, most likely dating from the Napoleon era, such as ekran (écran=screen), meble (meuble=furniture), fotel (fauteuil=armchair), plaża (plage=beach) and koszmar (cauchemere=nightmare). Some place names have also been adapted from French, such as the two Warsaw boroughs of Żoliborz (joli bord=beautiful riverside) and Mokotów (mon coteau=my cottage), as well as the suburb of Żyrardów (from the name Girard, with the Polish suffix -ów attached to form the town's name). Other words, despite their close relation come to other Slavic languages, for example come from the Czech language with words like "hańba" and "brama". Since 1945, as the result of mass education and mass migrations (which affected several countries after the Second World War, with Poland being an extreme case) standard Polish has become far more homogeneous, although regional dialects persist, particularly in the south and south-west in the hilly areas bordering the Czech and Slovak Republics. In the western and northern territories, resettled in large measure by Poles from the territories annexed by the Soviet Union, the older generation speaks a dialect of Polish characteristic of the former eastern provinces. Classification The Polish language is the most widely-spoken of the Slavic language subgroup of Lekhitic languages which include Kashubian (and its extinct dialect/language Slovincian) and the also-extinct Polabian language. The three languages and one language/dialect, along with Upper and Lower Sorbian, Czech and Slovakian, belong to the West branch of Slavic languages. Geographic distribution Polish is mainly spoken in Poland. In fact, Poland is one of the most homogenous European countries in terms of its mother tongue, as close to 97% of Polish citizens declare Polish as their mother tongue. After the 2nd World War the previously Polish territories annexed by the USSR kept a large amount of Polish population that was unwilling or unable to migrate towards the post-1945 Poland and even today Ethnic Poles in Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine constitute large minorities. There are also significant numbers of Polish speakers in Australia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Brazil, Canada, Czech Republic, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Israel, Kazakhstan, Latvia, New Zealand, Romania, Russia, Slovakia, UAE, the UK and the USA. In the USA the number of people of Polish descent is over 9 million, see: Polish language in the United States but not all of them use Polish in their everyday communications. According to the United States 2000 Census, 667,414 Americans of age 5 years and over reported Polish as language spoken at home, which is about 1.4% of people who speak languages other than English or 0.25% of the U.S. population. DialectsIt has several dialects that correspond in the main to the old tribal divisions; the most significant of these (in terms of numbers of speakers) are Great Polish (spoken in the west), Little Polish (spoken in the south and southeast), Mazovian (Mazur) spoken throughout the centre and east of the country, and Silesian spoken in the southwest. Mazovian shares some features with the Kashubian language, whose remaining speakers (estimates vary from 100,000 to over 200,000) live in and around the city of Gdansk near the Baltic Sea, predominantly to the west of the city. There are also several, now mostly extinct, regional dialects of Polish, including the Warsaw dialect. Small numbers of people in Poland also speak Belarusian, Ukrainian, and German as well as several varieties of Romany. PhoneticsVowels
Unlike in other Slavic languages, the Proto-Slavic nasal vowels are preserved in Polish. However, nasality tends to be lost, especially at the end of a word. These vowels are never initial. In script they are marked by a diacritic known as ogonek. Before all stops nasal vowels are now pronounced as vowel + nasal consonant (kąt pronounced as kont, gęba pronounced as gemba). At the end of the word nasal 'e' is pronounced as non-nasal 'e' by almost all native speakers. Practically nasal vowels survived in pronunciation only before fricatives and (nasal ą) at the end of the word. Unlike in French, the nasal vowels in Polish are asynchronous which means that in fact each nasal vowel is pronounced as an oral vowel followed by a nasal semivowel, e.g. ą [ɔɰ̃] rather than [ɔ̃]. For the sake of simplicity these asynchronous nasal vowels will be henceforth represented as ordinary (synchronous) nasal vowels.
The length of a vowel is not phonemic in Polish which means that how long a vowel is pronounced does not change the meaning of a word. However, this was not the case in Proto-Slavic, which distinguished three vowel lengths - short, normal and long. There were two short vowels - hard (ъ) and soft (ь). Eventually, the short vowels either disappeared or turned into a normal e. In the former case two CV syllables became one CVC syllable. Disappearance of a short soft vowel caused the preceding consonant to become "softened" or palatalized. Example: 'Day' in nominative: dьnь --> dzień Meanwhile, long vowels were shortened to normal and simultaneously became higher - apart from the vowels which were already high - i and u. This vowel shift may be presented like this: long a --> normal o Note that the normal u which was once a long o is still distinguished in script as ó. ConsonantsPolish consonant system is more complicated and its characteristic features are series of affricate and palatal consonants. Affricates are often marked by digraphs. Palatal consonants (known to Poles as "soft" consonants) are marked either by an acute accent or followed by an i. Like in English, voicedness is phonemic but aspiration is not.
Within this consonant system one can distinguish three series of fricatives and affricates:
All palatal and alveolo-palatal consonants (i.e. ź ś dź ć ń j) as well as those preceding the vowel i are referred to as "soft" consonants. All the other consonants are "hard". Note that Polish distinguishes between affricates and plosive + fricative consonant clusters, e.g.:
Exceptions include:
Polish orthography also includes seven digraphs:
Note that although the Polish orthography is mostly phonetic, some sounds may be written in more than one way:
GrammarPolish is often said to be one of the most difficult languages for non-native speakers to learn. It has a complex gender system with five genders: neuter, feminine and three masculine genders (personal, animate and inanimate). There are 7 cases and 2 numbers. Nouns, adjectives and verbs are inflected, and both noun declension and verb conjugation are highly irregular. Every verb is either perfective or imperfective. Verbs often come in pairs, one of them imperfective and the other perfective (usually imperfective verb with a prefix), but often there are many perfective verbs with different prefixes for single imperfective words. Tenses are:
Movable suffix is usually attached to verb or to the most accented word of sentence, like question preposition. Sometimes the sentence may be emphasised with a particle -że- (-ż). So what have you done ? can be:
Basic word order in Polish is SVO, however it is possible to move words around in the sentence, and to drop subject, object or even sometimes verb, if they are obvious from context. These sentences mean the same ("Ala has a cat"):
If apparent from context, you can drop the subject, object or even the verb:
There is a tendency in Polish to drop the subject rather than the object and rarely you know the object but not the subject. If the question was "Kto ma kota ?" (who has a cat ?), the answer should be "Ala" alone, without a verb. In particular, "ja" and "ty", and also their plural equivalents "my" and "wy", are almost always dropped. Vocabulary
my - we
drzewo - tree Anglia - England Niemcy - Germany Notes 1</sup> You can hear the voice samples by clicking on the Polish example (ogg format). |
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