Why Polish people use so many words to describe a situation?

ennui

Biscuit (arguably)

German

beef for sure

did you see those posts on this forum in a form of long essays? and most of the people who post them aren't even Polish...

Tulip from Dutch, amongst MANY others from this language

Oi!

From Spanish, or Polish or maybe some other language

Maybe not Polish, maybe Vietnamese

Virtuoso from Italian

Bint

Arabic in origin

I could win this.

Yesterday's Telegraph had a list of borrowings etc.

Taekwondo from Korean

Dyke

Dutch origin - and still employed in it's original form in my neck of the woods.

Portugese. First time I went to Brazil I was convinced they were all being disrespectful. Oi this Oi that.

Suomi (Finnish) gave us the word 'sauna'

courage; mercy; passion / compassion; amorous; honour; guard; cavalry; damsel; isle; mortal; regret; orange; Eskimo; page (a knight's young assistant); valour; coast; distress; martial; cream...

and that's just the tip of the tip of the iceberg...

Panties,perfume.
Oh,la la.

Biro from Hungarian

Yes, now I know why it takes to up to 15 minutes to find out it we are going in the right direction, there is so much debate upon which is the "correct linguistic response", now even I am confused!

Nevermind ,I still love Krakow, even if it takes me 40 mins in the wrong direction!. The only poster I really understood was Mafketis, I thought that his theory was very interesting and probably answered my question , taking into account many avenues which I had not considered. Thank you Mafketis.

However this theory would probably not hold out so well with a Polish taxi driver, but I shall try and let you know.

Shall we have the next debate about where the comma should be in a sentance? It could prove very very interesting, and could turn the" linguistic world upside down"!

Serendipity.

A very unwordy response.

How many words can you use to say "I am lost", where is Krakow?

Zgubiłam (em) się.
Jak dostać się do Krakowa?
Jak dojechać do Krakowa?
Czy mógłby (mogłaby) Pan (Pani) wytłumaczyć mi jak dojechać (dostać się) do...
and many more...
;)

or zabłądziłem się?

without 'się'.... just 'zabłądziłem/łam'

Zabłądziłem w lesie. = I got lost in the woods.
Jestem stracony! - I'm a lost soul!
Zgubiłem mój portefel. = I lost my wallet.

Cf. English lost is lost is lost......-:)

Bro, seriously? I would dare to say that a huge amount of english is borrowed french or influenced hugely by french. The grammar also. All the -tion words i.e

condition
position
reflection.....that could go on forever.

And french words like Dent in english is tooth/teet hence Dentist.
Effect - En afait
Perfect - Parfait
Mountain - montagne
Garden - Gardin
This list could be endless.......

Direct words such as Restaurant, entrepreneur, magazine, battery, press, comprehend....

I'm pretty sure the contribution of french to the english language is immense. I would assume that french would be up there with one of the most detailed languages in the world also.

Exactly. And look at your sentence: 'sure' → 'sûr', 'contribution' → 'contribution', 'language' → 'langage', 'immense' → 'immense'...
It's said that between 1/3 and 2/3 of the English vocabulary comes from French (mostly Old French and Latin).
Just give a look at the article in Wikipedia, it has no end ^^ Simply huge.

Fiancé / fiancée and divorcé / divorcée

What about Greek words?

Direct Latin influence + Latin filtered through French - sometimes it's hard to decide which route a borrowing took. But most "big" polysyllabic English words are Latin / Greek.

Not everyone knows that many European languages, incl. Polish and Czech, absorbed cliches of meaning rather than the actual Latin words, hence e.g.:

wpływ = influx = influence
(something which literally "flows" onto something else, engulfing it like water)
podwładny = subordinatus = subordinate
stolica = sedes = seat / position of authority
(the Old Polish stolica meant a seat, as in chair or throne)
podpisywać = subscribere = sign
(write underneath)
Rzeczpospolita = Res Publica = republic
(the common / public thing)

etc. etc.

They could and they do. This applies to most other languages.


Yes, that would be interesting, but also biased. We'd need to have a thread like that for many languages, and then compare the results. My guess is that English would prove to be a "dealer" of new words that sipped to other languages too.


About 80% of them :)


biszkopt


common IE root


Tulipan


vurtuoz


Not a girl, but also from Arabic:
alkohol, alkaliczny,chemia,algebra


Same in Polish


This isn't really a borrowing. The word has protogermanic origin (dīc in OE)


pantalony, perfumy


Not this particular one, but many others:

dobosz, giermek,hajduk, katana, kontusz, orszak, szyszak


dół, mosiądz, marmur, mak and a whole lot of liturgical terms.


Huge in Polish too.

So what do we see here?
Languages influence one another.

.....plus calques or loan translations abound in nearly every language, i.e German words translated directly from the Latin e.g. AUSDRUCK = EX + PRESSERE (aus-ex, druck - pressere) etc....

Prove It.