Life / Do Poles work better when they drink or when they are sober? [7]

A lot of what I do at work could be described as just chatting, having a laugh and taking it easy. A small amount of alcohol could then, be beneficent, especially considering that when some drink has been taken, my Polish language skills increase slightly. Seeing the way my Polish friends drink, a small amount of alcohol is not much of an option. I would therefore choose to say that no alcohol at all would be better than too much alcohol.


The LSD question is a different matter entirely.

Language / Children's TV programs and cartoon names to learn Polish [12]

Kids programmes tend to be dubbed into Polish rather than get the voice-over treatment that almost everything else gets. I have seen a bit of C-Beebies (the BBC channel for young kids) in Polish, so that includes um... Teletubbies. Oh dear! But there are plenty of other kids programmes I've been subjected to, and I don't understand very much even though I can manage a reasonable conversation in Polish (with the help of a bit of waving me arms about, miming and pointing at things).

The Moomins - Opowiadanie Muminków
Lazy Town - Leniuchowo
Teletubbies - Teletubisie
ボボボーボ・ボーボボ - Bobobo-bo Bo-bobo

Life / You know you're Polish when... ? [111]


Is there a shoplifting parliament here as well?


My barometer only gives atmospheric pressure.

Language / Can anyone help with spelling of Grandmother [53]


Americans pronounce O like a long southern English A. That's not like the Polish A which is more like a Scottish A. For an American, you have to realise that the Polish A sound doesn't really occur in American English. Polish A is somewhere between American O and A, but still closer to A. Probably.

If you're calling your grandmother, you might want to say Babciu - "Bap chew", or if you insist, "Bob Chew"... oh don't get me started on American ways of pronouncing U.

Life / nice polish name for a girl [38]


sz in Hungarian sounds like the Polish s
s in Hungarian sounds like the Polish ś

or something like that.

Is this just about nice names for girls in Polish? On an English language forum about Polish stuff, it's quite likely someone looking for a name might want one that could be easily read and pronounced by a Hungari... I mean an English speaker. I'd recommend numbers 1, 2, 7, 11, 12, 13, 15, 18 , 20, 22, 23, 25, 36, 38... just for ease of pronunciation. I wouldn't recommend calling a newborn Barbara in this day and age in an English speaking country.

Language / Popular Polish expressions/proverbs relating to months of the year [10]

There is something that I hear sometimes when I sneeze. I know that to sneeze is kichać and that some sort of glass, the type from which you would drink a shot of vodka is a kieliszek, but somehow there is an expression that links these two things. Like sneezing is a sign that you require a drink of some sort... of an alcoholic sort. Could somebody heolp me out here? (I don't mean I've just sneezed, by the way).

Edit: Just realised that this saying isn't time of year specific - sneezing can be a winter cold thing or a summer pollen thing. Oops. Sorry!


I feel sorry for a month that gets such a kicking.

News / Poland..wake up to a multicultural world [1059]


and there are huge amounts of overlap between different ethnicities and even some between different races.

Food / Where to buy Cheddar in Warsaw? [57]


I never said it was. I said "caves in the Cheddar area". On a national or international scale, a few miles doesn't make much difference really. Look at the size of the universe and such details seem entirely irrelevant.


Good.


Why have the non-cheese posts not been censored?

Language / Iterative and semelfactive verbs [37]

Thanks Gumishu and Marek.

Now it is time for semelfactive verbs. I'd actually like someone else to try to explain these because it seems like a slightly trickier subject. Semelfactive verbs describe something that happens once and once only. I think the infinitives all end in -nąć, although not all -nąć verbs are semelfactive.

kopać - to kick or to dig
kopnąć - to give a kick (semelfactive)

błyszczeć - to shine, to glitter
błysnąć - to flash (semelfactive)

Other semelfactive verbs I have found (please find me more):
jęknąć - to groan
krzyknąć - to cry out

Semelfactive:
Kopnie piłkę - I give the ball a kick
Kopniął piłkę - He gave the ball a kick
Kopnij piłkę! - Kick the ball

Not semelfactive:
Kopię piłkę - I am kicking the ball (not just one kick)
Kopał piłkę - He kicked the ball, he kicked the ball (around)
Kop piłkę - Kick the ball (not necessarily just one single kick)

Światło błysnęło - The light flashed.
but
Światło błyszczał - The light shone, the light was shining.

I'm not very good with -ąć / -nąć verbs, so I could do with a bit of help and a bit more time.

News / Poland..wake up to a multicultural world [1059]


I'll have a good night... because I'm not needlessly angry about a load of codswallop.

News / Poland..wake up to a multicultural world [1059]

A stayed in Africa, but N and M wondered over to the Middle East. Some of them then went east to India, others onwards still to Australia or China or Siberia and on into the Americas.

Small groups of people susceptible to genetic drift, population bottlenecks caused by migrations into uncharted land or natural disasters, coupled with minor adaptations to new climates caused these simple divisions of A, N and M to differenciate into smaller groups which can be given different names even if their paths sometimes were exactly the same as eachother's. These divisions became more and more interwoven and more and more complex. We haven't even reached the historical era yet.

Some went from the Middle East and into Europe whilst a few even went back to Africa.

That kind of diversity is huge in the Middle East because it's where those who left Africa first went and had a key place in the history of civilisation and was repeatedly a centre for both emigration and immigration. Europe looks diverse because it has been so well studied and characterised, often with data from people who merely claimed European ancestry yet resided in North America. Africa is even more diverse, but mostly due to how ancient are the lineages there.

Races are like items on a menu. Everything has got meat and vegetables, herbs and spices, just different amounts of each. Declare a hatred of starch? Want your dinner fat free? No salt at all? If only we could resolve this with a food fight. Mashed potato poised and ready to be launched from the spoon of truth.

News / Poland..wake up to a multicultural world [1059]

Castanea - a tree of Turkish origin (chestnut, kasztan)... talking about bread by the looks of things.
Or am I confusing white pride with Mother's Pride and white flour?

I feel neither pride nor guilt, unless I achieved or I did wrong. I'm too lazy either to achieve or do wrong.

Food / Why do Poles just not "understand" healthy eating ?? [82]

Chicken in breadcrumbs and mashed potato served with a salad that's 50% mayonnaise.
Chicken in breadcrumbs and mashed potato served with beetroot.
Chicken in breadcrumbs and mashed potato served with gherkins.
Chicken in breadcrumbs and mashed potato served with mayonnaisey salad again.
Fish in breadcrumbs (hey, it's piątek) served with mash...

I had a go at cooking barszcz. That's quite healthy. But all those breadcrumb coatings on everything, it does soak up a lot of fat, and they don't exactly go for olive oil in a big way. I like a bit of lardy food on my plate, but I do enjoy a salad and I do like diversity. There's some really nice food from Poland, but let's not kid ourselves into thinking it's good stuff every time. People do just shovel a load of unhealthy stuff down their necks day after day.

I'm British and skinny, by the way. 70kg and 180cm. Unlikely for a donkey, eh?

Life / 800 thousand Polish women are victims of domestic abuse yearly [180]


A woman once beat me up with a funny cigarette.

Travel / Sailing by ferry to and from Poland. Ferries between Poland and Sweden [7]


I've been through it twice. They put you in a box and you end up in France. I suppose you can pay more money, get a seat and end up somewhere a bit nicer than some converted wasteground outside Calais, but I prefer to feel the roll of the sea and have a deck to stretch my legs. That's for a couple of minutes at least. Ferry = floating bar.

Travel / Sailing by ferry to and from Poland. Ferries between Poland and Sweden [7]

Copenhagen might be quite nice, but Karlskrona's got a big square (I assume that's a good thing and hopefully not the only good thing). Another thing - Gdynia's named after a river. Świnoujście looks like it's named after pigs.

I know it requires a different thread, but I don't know much about cycling in Poland. From some of the roads I've been on, I might be better off catching a couple of trains instead. It would be good to arrive in £odź by boat though, not that it's a particular destination I've chosen. I may have to stick a rubber dinghy in one of my panniers.

Genealogy / How Can I Find My Relatives' Phone Book? [8]

Has it not worked yet? Does clicking in this link [Polish facebook] work?

Language / Polish etymology [8]

Etymology of apple / jabłko

A direct descendant of Indo-European. Originally may have simply meant fruit rather than specifically the apple. Similarly, the Latin word pomum, meaning apple, originally meant fruit, yet it's meaning was said to have changed with the arrival of Christianity and the story of Adam and Eve which is nearly always associated with the apple rather than any other kind of fruit. This process has been documented (as things like this often are with Latin) and a similar change may have occurred with "apple" words across the rest of Europe.

Apple trees (Malus domestica) actually originated in the Altai mountains (over there in Central Asia). Native European apples (Malus sylvestris) are those little crab apples that look more like wild cherries than eating or cooking apples. They have certainly been present in Europe since the years BC, and were probably the first domesticated fruit tree.

Celtic - Proto-Celtic: *aballo / Welsh: afal / Irish Gaelic: ubhall
Germanic - Old English: æppel / German: Apfel / Dutch: appel / Swedish: äpple / Icelandic: epli
Baltic - Lithuanian: óbuolas
Slavic - Russian: яблоко (jabloko) / Polish: jabłko

It looks as though the Polish word is actually some sort of diminutive, rather like the word jajko which is a standardised diminutive of jaje.

The names of the days of the week are all of Slavic origin, except Saturday.

niedziela - no work
poniedziałek - after Sunday
wtorek - second day
środa - middle day
czwartek - fourth day
piątek - fifth day
sobota - Hebrew: shabbāth (meaning "day of rest") > Greek: sábbaton > Latin: sabbatum

Likewise, the English names are all of Germanic origin, with the exception of Saturday, which comes from Latin and is named after Saturnus, the Roman god of harvest.

I want to know why two months have names of Latin origin (marzec and maj), whereas the rest are all Slavic. If you want to know a little bit more about this, you could submit yourself to en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_months

Food / Where to buy Cheddar in Warsaw? [57]


The Somerset town of Cheddar is blessed with a geological feature, commonly known as caves. Some caves in the Cheddar area are used for storing cheese while it matures. Star Wars fans may like to take note that the most famous of these caves is called Wookey Hole. Let's have a look at the old 'paedia of Wiki...



The other product of Somerset that the Scots seem to love is Buckfast.

The best cheddars (in my humble cheesy opinion):
Montgomery (I think it's actually from Gloucestershire)
Keen's Cheddar (from Wincanton)

If it says on the label that it was made in Somerset and has been matured in caves, even if it's a supermarket brand, you're probably onto a winner. However, considering that one of my favourite cheddars isn't even local to Cheddar, where it is from is not the most important thing. As with all cheese, it is whether it has been made by people who care and have a passion for cheesemaking or not that is important. Any good cheesemaking caves in Poland?

Food / Where to buy Cheddar in Warsaw? [57]

I don't easily associate Poland with cheese, but then neither do I associate some of the stuff that gets called Cheddar with cheese either.

I once asked a question about high quality, luxury cheese in Warsaw, but I don't remember getting much of an answer.

Genealogy / How Can I Find My Relatives' Phone Book? [8]

There's always world wide web dot nasza-klasa dot pl for finding people in Poland (and even Poles outside of Poland). It's a bit like myspace or facebook in many repsects, but it's based on the idea of keeping in touch with old classmates. It is very popular. If you have names to go by, particularly younger people will probably show up on a search.

Life / Controversy about funshops with recreational drugs in Poland [50]


They tested penicillin on rats rather than guinea pigs. Had they used guinea pigs, we would never have had penicillin. It can kill guinea pigs and probably hamsters as well.

Lots of things are dangerous, some are stupid and dangerous, not even all of these should have laws against them. I've never seen a travel agent being indicted for pushing skiing holidays.

USA, Canada / american girl and a polish boy, how to stay in Poland legally? [14]

If she's in Poland unbeknownst to the powers that be, why can't she leave and then apply in the correct manner from outside of Poland?

Or is it not possible to get married and for you to go to the US as the husband of a US citizen?
Or how about you both go to Bolivia, continue to rob banks, then go out in a blaze of glory surrounded by Bolivian troops?

News / Some Poles burning American flag [299]

It's not a very good pole if it burns the flag.
Neither is it a very good flag if it burns the pole.

Life / Warsaw - most boring capital in Europe, after Brussels - comments? [78]

The most boring capital cities are probably the ones that were specifically built to be capital cities and therefore have little history and very little of any interest other than being capital cities.

I actually googled "most boring capital city", and in the first page, two of the results I found were in Australia. Okay, so only one can really be considered to be a true capital city, and that is Canberra, a city that was made to be boring. The two I found on that search page that were in Europe were Brussels and Helsinki, neither of which I have visited, so I wouldn't know. I have only ever been to four true capital cities: London, Paris, Amsterdam and Warsaw. I spent very little time in Paris, not enough time to actually see or do anything, and my stay there was actually quite boring, but not an honest reflection of the place itself.

Does it really matter if Poland's capital is not one of the world's great cities? Poland has other cities that are more interesting.

German friends of mine say that Bonn is a particularly dull place, and that was the capital of West Germany for how many years?

Life / Is drinking water in Poland good? [96]


To balance the amount of American stuff that falls in Poland.

I'm not allowed to drink Slough tapwater. They insist I drink bottled stuff instead. I know the geology and hydrology of the area quite well, and I'm reasonably satisfied by this country's safety standards, so why pay extra for such a basic commodity which is so easily available from a tap. Putting water in land-fill fodder and shipping it around the world by burning petroleum just seems like a waste.

I had been warned about the varying levels of quality of tapwater in Poland, but only after I had visited a couple of times and drunk tapwater (although I drank a lot more beer and vodka, tea and coffee).

Food / where does Wodka originate from ? Poland or Russia or somewhere else??? [17]

Distillation had been performed by Arabs (yes, Islamic ones) to produce medicines and perfumes.
Ancestors of vodka were produced in Europe before superior Arabic distillation technology arrived. But what really sets vodka as we know it apart from other spirits is that Arabic technology which is used to produce almost pure alcohol, which is then watered down. Proto-vodka was merely distilled using more primitive technology, from rye grain.

Food / History of the Polish potato (what did Polish people eat before?) [17]

Family: Solanaceae.

Not only nightshade, tomato, tobacco, but also aubergine (eggplant), capsicum (peppers), mandrake and the attractive flowering climbing garden plant Solanum.

Modern potatoes are sensibly shaped, quite large and uniformly yellowy white. The original Andean potatoes looked like big guinea pig turds. Potatoes took a long time to catch on in France, Russia and various other places.

There is a wide variety of native European root vegetables that were consumed in the years BP (before potato).