Talk:Polish language/Archive 1


 * Talk:Polish language archived by Halibutt on 06:45, 14 October 2005 (UTC)

We can put Polish transcription of words here. As it is on Polish poets, we must insert unicode representations of Polish national characters.

Contrary to what you state, Polish has *five* genders, masculine, feminine, and neuter in the singular number and male-personal and other in the plural number. This is seen in the five forms of the third-person pronoun: _on_, _ona_, _ono_, _oni_, and _one_.

The verbal aspects are perfective (not perfect) and imperfective (not imperfect).

Frank Y. Gladney Universion of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

There are some other mistaken terms: - verbs are conjugated rather than declined - "diacritics" is a more proper term than "accents"

As for Polish genders, according to the traditional Polish approach there are three genders in the singular number and two genders in the plural number (as Mr Gladney put it). Other reasonable approaches would be to claim that there are three genders (m, f, n) or there are five genders - feminine, neuter, masculine-personal, masculine-animate-impersonal and masculine-inanimate. The division into four genders (feminine, neuter, masculine-animate and masculine-inanimate) is valid in singular, but not in plural, so I don't find it correct. I'll change the article in a while.

Boraczek 14:33, 14 Nov 2003 (UTC) The article states: "Since 1945, as the result of mass education and mass migrations (forced by the socialist government on the society to suppress the development of the local communities), standard Polish has become far more homogeneous, although regional dialects persist." I thought these articles are supposed to be from a neutral point of view. Did the socialist goverrnment really force mass education on the society to suppress the development of local communities? Was that their stated objective? I am not a fan of the socialist government but I think this sentence should be changed.

I'll present the approach formulated by the president of the Polish Language Council, hold also by Encyklopedia Języka Polskiego (Encyclopedia of the Polish Language). According to these sources, there are five genders: masculine-personal, masculine-animate, masculine-inanimate, feminine, neuter.

I. ''Widzę jednego dobrego nauczyciela. Widzę i innych dobrych nauczycieli.'' II. Widzę jednego dobrego psa. Widzę i inne dobre psy. III. ''Widzę jeden* dobry dom. Widzę i inne dobre domy.'' IV. ''Widzę jedno dobre drzewo. Widzę i inne dobre drzewa.'' V. ''Widzę jedną dobrą dziewczynę. Widzę i inne dobre dziewczyny.'' All the about nouns (nauczyciel, pies, dom, drzewo, and dziewczyna) are of different grammatical genders (noun classes) because there exists at least one instance of a case and number that distinguishes one from another.--Jeziorko (talk) 02:20, 31 July 2008 (UTC)
 * Polish does have five grammatical genders (noun classes), taking into account all seven cases and both numbers: masculine-personal, masculine-animate-non-personal, masculine-inanimate, neuter, and feminine. There are many overlaps when it comes to grammatical agreement, but consider the following:

Boraczek 14:33, 14 Nov 2003 (UTC)

Total speakers
158.169.9.14 wrote: > Total speakers: 60 Million

This number seems to be very overestimated. Could you please tell us what the source of these data is? Or where those Polish speakers live? Boraczek 10:59, 28 Nov 2003 (UTC)


 * Yesterday the same user changed such data in the German language version of Wikipedia and added wrong figures in the demographic sections of Germany and Poland. Maybe a nationalist? 82.82.120.181 11:02, 28 Nov 2003 (UTC)


 * OTOH, the number of 43 million seems a little low. There are approx. 39 millions speakers in Poland itself and the diaspora is estimated at 15-20 millions. The higher number might be the estimated quota of people speaking the language as opposed to 43 millions of mother-tongue speakers.Halibutt 09:33, 7 Jan 2004 (UTC)


 * Those 15-20 million aborad are just Polish descendants. Many of them can't speak Polish. The current information (46 million) seems to be a quite exact estimation. Do you agree? Boraczek 14:05, 14 Jan 2004 (UTC)
 * Fair with me.Halibutt 14:56, 14 Jan 2004 (UTC)

Żeście
Is co żeście zrobili correct? I've always thought it's not though it seems to be a very common mistake (even more than poszłem). What does ż- mean here anyway? It's neither że ("that") as in:
 * Myślałem, żeście to zrobili. - "I thought that you had done it."

nor an exclamatory suffix -ż(e) as in:


 * Cóżeście (co + -ż --> cóż + ście --> cóżeście) zrobili?

Kpalion 18:58, 6 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Movable endings are remnants of the complex past tense. In the form closest to archaic Polish it was something like:
 * co je?cie zrobili

Where je?cie was an appropriate form of the word to be.

The complex past evolved into simple past by merging of the auxiliary verb and the participle into one word (zrobili?cie). Historically, words like zrobili are not verbs but adjectival participles.

The auxiliary verb can attach to some other word (it doesn't attach to verbs, as zrobili isn't really a verb), like in wy?cie, co?cie etc. It can also function alone, but the je- changed into ?e- in modern Polish. So the ?e- doesn't mean anything – ?em ?e?, ?e?my and ?e?cie are forms of the verb by? (to be).

It gets confusing, because in the third person there was no ending to move, so zrobi?/zrobili can function as third person words. If one wants to be peculiarly historically correct, one can see zrobi? as a particle and a null verb.

In no case is ?e?my incorrect. Taw 05:38, 11 Jul 2004 (UTC)

New phonetic table
The English equivalents of Polish sounds given in this article are not always accurate. They're close, but not quite the same. Could anyone add X-SAMPA transcription too? Ausir 12:05, 20 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Let's insert a table.

Boraczek 15:54, 20 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Good idea. Ausir 15:56, 20 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Could someone add also X-SAMPA column to the table? Not everyone can see the IPA symbols... Ausir 01:00, 21 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Done. Now it doesn't look so good anymore but, well, let's just hope someday all browsers will be able to read IPA characters. Kpalion 01:49, 21 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Excellent job, Kpalion! :-D I'm really impressed! :-D I'll make a couple of minor changes, if you don't mind. Of course, the changes are subject to discuss.

1. I'll change examples of Polish words with nasal vowels, because there are actually no nasal vowels in kąt and lęk (it's incorrect to pronounce nasal vowels in these words).

2. length, long => length, long (because it doesn't make too much sense to separate "n" and "g" in a digraph "ng", it's like writing mysz.

3. Polish ł and j are usually pronounced as non-syllabic u and i respectively rather than approximants.

4. In the tongue-twister chrząszcz is pronunced as [xSO~ZdZ] rather than [xSO~StS]

5. I'll add some more sounds in the "Other Phonetics Values" column.

I need help with IPA symbols! I can't type them. I'll put "?" instead. Could you please replace my ?'s with the symbols, Kpalion?

Boraczek 10:03, 21 Mar 2004 (UTC)


 * Thanks! You're right about points 1,2,4, and I've already made the changes. As for ł and j, aren't semivowels a class of approximants?


 * I don't think so. There's a great site with animations showing how people pronounce different sounds. It's a pity they only describe English and Spanish. But the site shows the difference between glides and non-syllabic vowels. See http://www.uiowa.edu/~acadtech/phonetics/about.html, click on "Launch Spanish Library" and you'll be able to watch animations for glides ("semi-consonantes" in Spanish) and correspondent non-syllabic vowels ("semi-vocales" in Spanish) :-)


 * BTW I'm editing the Ortography section right now. Please don't touch it! ;-) Boraczek 11:45, 21 Mar 2004 (UTC)


 * Feel free to add sounds in the table, if you think any are missing. As for IPA characters, I can't type them either; I copy-pasted them from SAMPA chart and other related articles. Kpalion 11:15, 21 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Done with the table of Polish letters. We had an editing conflict, but I think everything's all right now (I was careful so as not to overwrite your changes). I didn't manage to insert IPA symbols for [i_^] and [u_^]. Now I'm making an analogous table for Polish digraphs. Boraczek 12:03, 21 Mar 2004 (UTC)


 * I couldn't find fonts with an inverted breve below i and u so I put those letters with an inverted breve above instead. I hope it won't cause too much confusion. Kpalion 17:31, 21 Mar 2004 (UTC)

There's a vowel discrepancy: the IPA [a] sounds like the a in father, but the example listed (cut) would be transcribed with a schwa. I unfortunately know very little Polish, so I don't know which correctly represents the Polish vowel, but I'm going to guess that it can sound like either (perhaps it is normally [a] but becomes a schwa in word-final position?). Regardless, the IPA and English example do not match, and someone should think about changing it.

Stress
 the word akurat ('exactly') - stress on the last syllable - that part seems to be incorrect. Perhaps it is so in some regional dialects, but I've neverd heard it stressed that way. Could anyone provide some more info?Halibutt 23:35, 21 Mar 2004 (UTC)


 * This pronunciation ("akuRAT") is old-fashioned but still correct (together with a more modern altenrative - "aKUrat"). For example, it is still used by poets when they need a word stressed on the last syllable for a masculine rhyme. I mentioned it because it is probably the only Polish word (excluding one-syllable and compound words) which may be correctly stressed on the last syllable. Kpalion 00:34, 22 Mar 2004 (UTC)


 * I can confirm what Kpalion said. "akuRAT" is correct even though it sounds strange. "aKUrat" is correct too. (source: "Nowy słownik poprawnej polszczyzny PWN" ed. by A. Markowski). BTW I'd have translated "akurat" as "just" rather than "exactly". But I agree that in some sentences "akurat" can be translated as "exactly", so the current translation isn't incorrect.
 * Thanks for the corrections, Kpalion! My browser doesn't display IPA fonts, so I can't see my possible mistakes in IPA script. I hope you checked that too. Boraczek 10:51, 22 Mar 2004 (UTC)

akuRAT is not correct in any reasonably modern Polish. Neither is RzeczposPOlita. MateMAtyka, FIzyka etc. can be considered correct, but are rarely heard nowadays, with matemaTYka etc. being much more common. Taw 05:38, 11 Jul 2004 (UTC)
 * You are likely true, but still when I was studying not so much time ago, everybody was stressing FIzyka. Then again, it was physics department, so it was a natural way to stress it, as this word was used quite often. I mean that if someone is within FIzyka or mateMAtyka professionally, she/he is almost always using the older (less common) stress. Przepla 11:52, 11 Jul 2004 (UTC)


 * RzeczpospoLIta. MatemaTYka and fiZYka are common mistakes, but are far from being a norm. My friends are somehow obsessed with correct Polish and I barely hear the incorrect forms. However, it is probable that in some time both forms will become equally correct. Halibutt 17:07, Jul 11, 2004 (UTC)

akuRAT, RzeczpospoLIta, matemaTYka, fiZYka are correct. My source: Nowy s³ownik poprawnej polszczyzny PWN, red. Andrzej Markowski, PWN, Warszawa 2000. If you want to argue, please cite an alternative source. Boraczek 13:06, 13 Jul 2004 (UTC)


 * Good Lord, you're right. It's time to die. Halibutt 13:20, Jul 13, 2004 (UTC)
 * I would argue that akuRAT is correct not only due to the reference stated above by Boraczek but also because it is heard; when I lived and studied in Poland I heard and thus learnt akuRAT as well as Akurat. --Geordieant (talk) 00:18, 18 March 2009 (UTC)

Well, forms like FIzyka, mateMAtyka, rzeczposPOlita, akuRAT, cannot be (IMHO) considered obsolete or unnatural as long as there are persons who speak so naturally (i.e. without forcing themselves to pronounce words the correct way, but rather just because it was pronounced so at their home). I can prove that such persons exist (and I am one of them). 82.210.159.30 00:57, 6 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Lithuania and Wilno
Ok, could someone explain to me what is the exact status of the Polish language in Lithuanian Vilnius County? AFAIK it is an official language there. However, RickK erased this piece of info. What's the fuzz then? [[User:Halibutt|Halibutt]] 05:35, Aug 20, 2004 (UTC)

What is the source of your information, Halibutt? As far as I know, the Polish minority is trying to make Lithuanian authorities respect rights of the Polish language as a local minority language. So Polish is even endangered in its position of a minority language, thus far from being an official language. Please confer these links (text in Polish): Ustawa Republiki Litewskiej o j?zyku pa?stwowym 10-lecie polsko-litewskiego Traktatu


 * That's why I asked for more info. Thanks. [[User:Halibutt|Halibutt]] 14:44, Aug 20, 2004 (UTC)

Phonetics and voice samples
Some time ago I prepared voice samples for most of the Polish cities and some famous personalities. Perhaps I could prepare some voice samples with phonetics or some basic texts for the Polish language page? Any ideas? [[User:Halibutt|Halibutt]] 05:42, Aug 20, 2004 (UTC)

I added those samples anyway. Any comments? [[User:Halibutt|Halibutt]] 15:15, Sep 10, 2004 (UTC)


 * Boraczek recently sugested we removed two of the samples. Indeed, the final consonants in those examples are voiceless, but this does not mean that they make no sound. [[User:Halibutt|Halibutt]] 18:34, Dec 3, 2004 (UTC)


 * ??? I think this is an obvious misunderstanding. You can't give a word which does not contain any voiced velar plosive consonant as an example of a voiced velar plosive consonant. The word bóg does not contain any voiced velar plosive consonant, it only contains a letter g. Therefore, I remove these examples. BTW thank you for adding soundclips! Boraczek 08:37, 4 Dec 2004 (UTC)

German Influence
Someone also erased the list of Polish words that originated from German. What is wrong with that? It is perfectly legitimate, and I'll be damned if s/he deleted it because s/he thought it was politically motivated or some other equally foolish reason.


 * Thank you to the person who put it back in!

Word order
I have some remark on this fragment of the article:

These sentences mean the same ("Ala has a cat"):

* Ala ma kota * Ala kota ma   * Kota ma Ala * Ma Ala kota * Kota Ala ma   * Ma kota Ala

Yet only the first of these sounds natural in Polish, and others should be used for emphasis only, if at all.

In fact, all these sentences sound natural, and all of them are in daily usage; nevertheless this strongly depends on context. Only the first one is completely neutral from the point of view of grammar (and handbooks):


 * Ala ma kota - Ala has a cat.

The remaining sentences depend on context and also imply something:


 * Ala kota ma, (ale go nie karmi)       - Ala does have a cat (but f.e. she doesn't feed it)
 * Kota ma Ala, (a psa ma Ola)           - Ala has the cat (but f.e. the dog belongs to Ola)
 * Ma Ala kota, (ale nie ma psa)         - Ala does have a cat (but f.e. she doesn't have a dog)
 * Kota Ala ma, (ale nie ma nic poza tym) - Ala has a cat (but f.e. she doesn't have anything else)
 * Ma kota Ala, (ale nie ma kota Ola)    - Ala has a cat (but f.e. Ola doesn't have a cat)

82.210.159.30 01:24, 6 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Number of speakers
I think the information on number of speakers in respective countries is quite informative. I believe it should stay as it does no harm. 14:37, 10 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Russian
Is pure Russian mutually intelligible with Polish.? Please see Mutually intelligible languages--Jondel 04:40, 10 Jun 2005 (UTC)


 * For an average speaker of either language - no. As far as the basic language abilities of an average six pack Joe goes, Russian and Polish have too few in common.


 * However, it only takes a week in Moscow for a decently-intelligent Pole to learn decent level of everyday Russian. The same goes for the other way around. Also, I noticed that if a person speaks any two Slavic languages (in my case Polish and Russian were the starting point), it is not a problem to understand written Slavic, be it Russian, Czech or Croat. Bulgarian seems to be the only exception to that rule, but you know... Bulgaria is different :)


 * Finally, yet another factor is that more or less all Poles aged 25+ were forced to learn some Russian at school, so (at least in theory), most of us should speak a tad of Russian. However, there was no reciprocity and Russians were never forced to learn Polish. Halibutt June 29, 2005 08:22 (UTC)
 * Well... where to begin with this one. I speak Polish, have never learnt a single word of Russian in my life (except das wadania and I don't even know how it is spelt) and I can understand some Russian; I know native speakers, who also have never learnt Russian (because they grew up outside of Poland) and are able to follow Russian conversations HOWEVER they cannot contribute. With regards to Bulgarian, it's not different - a know a Russian Studies professor, who is Polish and lived and studied in Russia, who can understand 80% of Bulgarian and has never learnt Bulgarian before (if need be a I can go into further details on that). I don't want to make the point that you're wrong, because you're not, I want to highlight that all of this is subjective to the individual, different people get different things quicker than others. --Geordieant (talk) 00:29, 18 March 2009 (UTC)

Pure ASCII alphabet
In the early days of the Internet, when ASCII was all you could use, Poles using IRC (Internet Relay Chat) and, indeed, email, developed a convention for the representation of accented characters -- especially the awkward ones such as ą ę ł ś ź ż. With the spread of Unicode these dialects are no longer used and have been forgotten.

I remember this fact - and also that the convention was fixed and widely understood [this being a case where mutual comprehensibility is an overwhelmingly strong selective pressure] - but I do not, sadly, remember the exact details. I'm hoping that someone with a better memory and a sense of history will be able to record them here for posterity. Spontaneous linguistic evolution is rare and therefore hard to observe so it's important to have records of it wherever you can.

Some of the adaptations are obvious: thus ł was l' and ś was s'. More interesting was the re-use of the non-Polish letters q, v, and x to represent single Polish letters. This is where, frustratingly, I can't remember how they were assigned. If, for example, x was chosen to represent ż, one so rapidly learnt to *see* x as ż that and *type* ż as x that one no longer noticed that the "wrong" letters were being used. (But it might have been q or v rather than x - that's where someone with a better memory is needed).

[Of course, much of this went by the board if one was typing fast and didn't need accents for disambiguation].

It's also interesting that the Poles didn't handle the problem by adding digraphs (eg. ż=zh). Spaniards, on the whole, do: when faced with typing ¿cuántos años tienes? ["how old are you?" lit: "how many years to you have?"] on a foreign keyboard they either type 'anos' (anuses) and rely on the context to supply the accent or if they don't want their humorous interlocutor to say ¡uno, por supuesto! ["one, of course!"] then they'll type 'anyos'. For some reason the Poles preferred to re-use unused single letters.


 * I doubt there was a single system used. I remember that some of my friends (back in the good old BBS times...) simply dropped diacritics while others made it up for themselves. Among the most popular system was x for ź (in Polish keybords you type ź by Alt+x combinaion), ñ for ń, and the rest with apostrophes and commas (c' for ć, s' for ś, a, for ą and so on). There was also a system (currently seen mostly in internet blogs by teenagers) to put down Polish with quasi-English transcryption. That is instead of Litwo, ojczyzno moja, ty jesteś jak zdrowie they put Leetvo ojchyzno moya ty yestesh yak zdrovie. However, this has hardly anything to do with technical issues. Halibutt June 29, 2005 08:35 (UTC)


 * In fact the convention of omitting accents when writing Polish was older than the beginnings of the Internet. It all started in the 1980' when first computers had been brought to Poland without localized software and without any means of typing in Polish. Later in the early 1990' several codepages have been developed. However, because they were mostly incompatible (including Microsoft's CP852 for DOS and WINDOWS-1250) and people decided that letters lacking few pixels are less disturbing than when replaced with some ridiculous characters. Stlman (talk) 20:58, 14 March 2010 (UTC)

Konstantynopolitańczykowieneczka
Uh, Konstantynopolitańczykowieneczka isn't the longest word in Polish, is many longer words, for example dziewięćsetosiemdziesiątdwatrylionyczterystasiedemdziesiątosiemmiliardówpięćsetsześćdziesiątpięćmilionówsiedemsetczterdzieścipięćtysięcydwieścieosiemdziesięcioczteroitrzyczwartenanokilogramowy.

The problem with you reasoning is that compound numerals are written separately in Polish. So, the above numberal is in fact 13 separate words (that BTW are usually put down as even more words wor simplicity's sake): dziewięćsetosiemdziesiątdwa tryliony czterystasiedemdziesiątosiem miliardów pięćsetsześćdziesiątpięć milionów siedemsetczterdzieścipięć tysięcy dwieścieosiemdziesiątcztery i trzy czwarte nanokilograma. BTW, it means roughly 282 478 565 745 284.75 x 10-9 kilogrammes. Halibutt 10:51, 17 September 2005 (UTC)