Life / Regional traits in Poland [27]


Can you give a link to a high-resolution version? The writing on the one you posted is to small to read...

Language / Polish Phonology. [14]

Hi Lyzko, I cannot comment on Albanian but some time ago I discussed with some people (for fun) which languages have the most regular spelling. There are many which are practically perfectly regular, with a one-to-one correspondence between sound and spelling: for example Turkish, Serbo-Croatian, Finnish and Hungarian should all be very very regular.

Language / Not sure if I will be able to speak Polish [53]

I am too a beginner in Polish (one year of non-intense study) and I've too wondered if it is at all possible to learn it without living in Poland for years and years. My conclusion is that it is indeed possible, but it'll take maybe some ~1000 hours of study to be reasonably competent.

There are several features that make Polish difficult for speakers of non-slavic languages.

1) The big, big hurdle is the grammar, and more specifically the noun and adjective declensions with all it's soft/hard, virile/non-virile sub-cases and exceptions. In theory it should just be a matter of learning a big table of endings, but in practice it'll takes a lot of a hell of practice before correctly declining words, adjectives and numbers becomes natural. Verbs are overall a little easier but still a big problem. Conjugation is a bit easier than the labyrinth of noun cases, but correctly choosing between perfective and imperfective aspects is also be a hard nut to crack.

2) The vocabulary is very different from the one of Germanic or Romance languages and takes time to learn. This difficulty is greatly amplified by the case system which forces one to deal with all the declined forms of a word as well it's gender. True, there are regularities, the gender can be usually inferred from the ending etc., but I think the highly-inflected nature of Polish renders learning the vocabulary more difficult.

These are **by far** the reasons why Polish is difficult, IMHO. Many other people seems to focus on spelling/pronunciation aspects, but these seem insignificant to me when compared with the enormous problem of the grammar. Polish spelling is very regular, especially as far as reading a word is concerned (as opposed to writing it down). English is of course much more difficult in this respect.

And for pronunciation and sounds... Polish may sound very difficult and exotic to English speakers, but to me (Italian) all in all Polish sounds very clear and pretty easy to reproduce. This is because its vowel system is very similar to the one of Romance languages, with five cardinal vowels and no vowel reduction in unstressed syllables. Consonant clusters can be difficult at the very beginning but consonants are not so difficult to pick up.

Believe me, understanding spoken English is for me much much much more difficult than Polish (and I'm sure I'm not alone in this).

Language / The Dative Case [62]

I can't tell you from personal experience but I can report what my grammar book and other sources say.
"A concise Polish Grammar" by Ronald F. Feldstein lists the words you mentioned and the following: chłop/chłopu, chłopiec/chłopcu, pan/panu, lew/lwu, kot/kotu, ksiądz/ksiądzu, świat/światu. So yes, kot too belongs to this group of Celownik=-u words.

This agrees with the massive table to be found here
free.of.pl/g/grzegorj/gram/en/deklin_stat.html . They also mention there człek, but the PWN-Oxford dictionary says both forms -u and -owi are possible for this word.

Language / Polish Phonology. [14]

Thank you all for the comments and sorry for the late reply.

Lyzko: yes, Italian spelling is very regular and predictable, overall I'd say a little more than the Polish one. Italian is almost univocal in the passage "oral word"->"written word"; that is to say, if I hear an Italian word there is only one way I could possibly write it down, with the (unique?) exception of the /kw/ sound which could be written down either as "cu" or "qu". This makes dictation exercises easy and confined to the very first years of elementary-school, and the concept of a spelling bee essentially impossible.

On the other hand in Polish it would be at times "possible" to write a word in more than one way, especially playing with the end-of-word devoicing, the rz/ż pair, ę/en (etc) and with the rules that prohibits syllables to contain a mix of voiced and unvoiced consonant.

Things are different in the "written word->sound" where in Italian there are a few areas where minor ambiguities as to how to read a word may arise, namely with the letters s,z,e,o which admit (sometimes and only in some particular word positions) two possible readings.

Polish is in this area very precise, at least when one has learned the voicing/devoicing rules: a Polish written word can be read in only one way... a part from the ziemia/ziemja thing which was the reason for this thread :-)

So, I'll end this digression and go back to my original question. By the way: my concern was not with spelling, but just on the phonetic of softened p,b,f,w,m and l. In effect I wasn't sure about their very existence as opposed to the succession consonant + j. Now I see that they do exist and I would like to know if I can pronounce them reasonably correctly.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words and I think in this case the same applies to a recording... I made a little experiment. I recorded myself saying the following words: pięć, biały, fiołek, pawie, ziemia, lis. In the first series of words I tried to use _my idea_ of soft consonants for p,b,f,w,m,l. In the second series I said them as I would say them normally, with the consonant + j sound.

Here it is, for those of you who'd like to lend an ear to it (300KB):

homepages.ucl.ac.uk/~ucapllo/Soft-Consonants.mp3

Do they sound different to your ears? Which series sounds more correct?

Ziemowit, you asked about Polish words using the spelling with pj, bj, mj, fj. These are the results of a quick search on the PWN-Oxford dictionary:

pj: finds only "maskotka Igrzysk Olimpjskich" which I think is a mistake in the dictionary for Olimpijskich
bj: finds loads but only with word-initial obj- , including objaw, objąć, objazd
mj, fj : none

Thank you, Lorenc

Language / Polish Phonology. [14]

I'll jump on this thread for a related phonological question having to do with consonant softening.
I'm reading the "Concise Polish Grammar" by Ron Feldstein (to be found at seelrc.org/projects/grammars.ptml for free). My question is about the sound of softened (palatalised) /p/,/b/,/f/,/v/ and /m/, which this grammar book writes using a trailing apostrophe, e.g. as /p'/,/b'/ etc.

These sounds occur whenever in the spelling the letters p, b, (etc) are followed by an "i".
My question is: are these sound different, and how much different, from the cluster /pj/, bj/ etc.?
In other words, would there be a difference in sound between these pairs of words (the second of each pair is made up):
pięć - pjęć
biały - bjały
fiołek - fjołek
pawie - pawje
ziemia - ziemja

At pag. 49 of the grammar book there is a discussion of feminine names ending in -ia, where it is said that they can belong to two different classes. The first is constituted by native Polish words, where the ending -ia corresponds phonetically to /'a/ : e.g. ziemia is (I'll use the same transcription as the book) /źem'a/.

On the other hand in words of foreign origin -ia corresponds to /'ja/ : e.g. armia /arm'ja/.
The book also says that native Polish words admit /'ja/ as an alternate variant (I don't know if some speakers systematically do this, if it depends on the word or if it is a random thing).

Does all this make sense to you?
Do ziemia and armia rhyme for you?

As my native language is Italian the opposition between /nj/ and /ń/ or /lj/ and /l'/ is pretty clear to me. With some imagination I can contemplate /m'/ vs /mj/ but I'm not sure about the other pairs. That is, the difference in sound between /p'/ and /pj/ (etc.) seems tiny to to me. I don't have quality recordings or Polish speakers at hand so I turned to the forum :)

What do you think?

Language / Building my Polish vocabulary... [19]

Just one simple tip: marry the girl and you'll kill two birds with one stone... :-P
More seriously, when learning a foreign language I find it useful learning by heart whole passages of books or short stories. I begin reading out a specific text, translating it if necessary, and then reading it out over and over again until I have no problems in pronunciation and I can read it effortlessly. At this point I usually have also learned it (almost) by heart. Of course it'd be sensible to choose a text which contains a useful selection of the vocabulary you're interested in learning.

This exercise is useful to get used to pronouncing the sounds of the language being learned and I also find it easier to learn words and sentences in this way. Unfortunately, it's also a very slow process.

Language / WHY IS @ CALLED MAŁPA IN POLISH? [13]

English wikipedia (sorry, I cannot post the address) reports what @ is called in many languages. "Monkey" or "monkey's tail" is apparently a pretty common name for the at sign and is used (or can be used) a part from Polish also in Bulgarian, Croatian, Dutch, German, Macedonian, Romanian, Serbian, Slovenian.

In Italian (I'm Italian) we most commonly call it "chiocciola" (pron.: KJOCZ-czola) which means "snail". The same meaning is apparently used also in Belarusian, Turkish and Ukrainian. Another image associated with @ is an elephant's trunk (Danish, Swedish, Norwegian) and a cat's or a dog's tail. My personal favourites:

The funniest (Finnish): miukumauku "the miaow sign"
The most disgusting (Hungarian): kukac ("worm, mite, or maggot")
The sexiest (Tagalog): utong ("nipple")

Language / (part 2) Polish Language Pronunciation - Sample Words and Phrases [311]

Merged: Pronunciation of group ni

Hello,
I am a total beginner in Polish and I'd have a simple question about the pronunciation of the group ni. If I understand correctly this is always pronounced the sound of (e.g.) Spanish ñ or Italian/French "gn".

If what I say is correct then in Polish orthography it is impossible to transcribe the sound n-i (expect when it's found across word boundaries). Am I right?

Lorenzo