czy../trzy.. - Full assimilation in Polish

Is 'full assimilation' considered sub-standard (or slang) in contemporary Polish, or is it just a matter of dialects?

To put it into practice: in words like trzy, potrzebuję, rz is softened to t (so it becomes sz according to the rule of partial assimilation in Polish). As far as I can hear, t doesn't assimilate rz completely: while I go on and say "czy" or "poczebuję", native speakers tend to say "t-szy", "pot-szebuje" etc. Am I being a bum with that? :o)

yes, it is indeed considered sub-standard and laughed at, you hear this kind of pronounciation mostly from "dresy" and other uneducated youths, so you'd be better off avoiding that :)

Bondi, it's roughly the equivalent of 'I gonna', 'I wanna' in US-English, rather than the full phrase. Many languages have this type of sociolect (or is it an idiolect, I really can't remember!); there's apache in Paris, Tuerko-Deutsch in and around Berlin and I'm sure in other language groups as well.

Does this type of assimilation process occur in Hungarian too? My knowledge of the language, while adequate, is still rather rudimentary. I was spoiled, frankly, when I visited there. Everybody seemed to speak excellent German. I just didn't even bother much with Hungarian (much less with English!!).

What you're looking at here is a kind of phonetic continuum. The correct versions (in the examples given) call only for some of the consonants to loose their voiced characteristics rz--> sz when voiced t precedes rz. Changing "trz" into "cz" is one bridge to far.

This is indeed wrong and would sound more like a foreigner trying to speak Polish than polish slang. The Polish trz sounds quite different from the English 'sh' in the word sheep.

obviously, in Moscow they didn't teach you about Polish slang.

Darius, Michał et al.,

Slang is tricky. As is it already deemed "substandard" by the native speakers who use it naturally as their mother tongue, it's rather hard to, so to speak "teach slang", since essentially, it's tantamount to "teaching wrong language"!!

I know German as well as English, in terms of accent/pronounciation, vocab., grammar, register, the whole nine yards, i.e. I'm bilingual. I'm NOT though a native-born German speaker, I would therefore NEVER attempt Turko-German Berlin slang. I'd sound like a moron at worst, at best, as a foreigner trying to sound "cool" and mimic German-Turkish slang, which is obviously foreign to me.

Learning slang, in my opinion, is helpfull for aural/visual recognition, not for common daily usage, whereby as an outsider, you'd immediately be pegged "a foreigner"!!

Yes, but this is not slang but bad polish spoken by non Poles who find it difficult to sound natural with all the sounds of the language. This is understandable as many foreigners find problems with the English 'th' and there are, after all, two variations to make it more complicated still. To any German, the ending ich at the end of a word would never sound like the English 'ch' as in the word church. This is not slang but just a foreigners mistake.

You seem to be already assimilated...

Michał,

Is it possible then that we are seeing the advent of 'Basic Polish', a kind of simplified language a la 'Basic English', or New Speak, whereby this semi-bastardized version in the words aforementioned might become standard e.g. in English 'thru' instead of 'through' or something like this, 'poczebujesz' not 'potrzebujesz' etc.?

If you live in Poznań you can achieve a full assimilation with the local folks, most of them say "czy" (for trzy), "czeba" (for "trzeba") etc.

To sound more local you also have to make voiced consonants at the end of the word before another word beginning with a voiced consonant (for example: jak nie in Poznań is usually pronounce as "jag nie").

And learn the specific intonation in the questions.

Example of Polish slang:

czymta sie - trzymajcie sie

I never heard an English learner of Polish make that mistake. If anything, their "trz
sounds often like "ci"

When I visited Częstochowa, many years ago there was a girl living in the same hostel who came from a small village and she said a lot of strange things such as zeby instead of żeby so that the initial rz sound sounded just like a normal 'z'-very strange indeed.

The mountain regions of Poland as well, the so-called 'Góral'/Tatry area, are said to speak a Polish at tremendous variance from the Warsaw standard. Here though, is more a question of dialect usage rather than pure slang, I should think!

It is more dialectal but the endings and stress are very different

There is a difference between accent, regional dialect and foreign mistakes.

I recently glimpsed through a "Dictionary of Highlander Polish" (Słownik Gwara Góralskiej) and saw that on the pages after pages of listing all the variations between standard and mountain words, Polish 'zegar' is rendered as 'godzinnek' in the Highlander dialect.

How cute, I remember thinking! -:)

not "godzinnik"?

Probably! My error. -:) :) LOL

Well, thank you for all your replies, that’s all I wanted to know! So in a nutshell, according to a Polish “Received Pronounciation” (“literary Polish” or whatever we should call it), it is better to avoid that. Except if I plan to go to Poznań. :)

Marek: yes, it does occur in Hungarian, but the reason is that we do not like “consonant collisions” (sorry, I do not know the linguistical term). One good example is the word klucz – kulcs [key]: ‘u’ and ‘l’ was swapped to ease pronounciation. In conjugation, when a word gets a new ending, pronounciation assimilates the collided consonants into one, wherever possible, or a vowel comes in.

Btw. if I was to speak with a foreign accent, I would just say things like podziebuje. (I.e. ‘t’ would become ‘d’ before the ‘rz’.) In my language, the harder, voiced sonants have a tendency to win.



Mutual relationship that is. I assimilate Poles with my home-made ślivovica. :)

Bondi,

I don't speak Hungarian really, but I'm sure that there are examples of consonant clusters in that language, e.g. spelled 'RakoCZi', but pronounced 'Rakotsi' or the family name 'Czerny', pronounced 'Tserny' etc. As far as standard assimilation, would you consider 'ny', elided as in 'Dohany', spoken as though it were 'dawwhAYn', rather than 'dawhani', etc.?

Yeah, in Czestochowa weird things can happen. It's a city known for a miracle or two.