Life / Polish maid very flirtatious? [36]


Knowing your taste for the Enlightment, she tries to bring this age closer to you. People were very flirtatious in the Age of Enlightment, Casanova and all this. Didn't you know that? On the other hand, wives were not particularly jealous of their husbands, so your wife doesn't seem to be an Enlightment type at all. Your wife must be a kind of a nuisance for you, maybe she is with you only for your Lexus and 44 ares of land ...

History / Age of Enlightenment in Poland? [80]


I'd say now that "not_polish" is German rather than American. Or could he enlighten us perhaps more on this subject?
Mehr Licht, mehr Licht, mein Herr!

History / Age of Enlightenment in Poland? [80]


It's difficult to say what problems he has. The most serious of his problems seems to be the one with the Age of Enlightment in Poland. The other ones are simply trivial. My impression is that he is just in need of talking to someone ...

History / Age of Enlightenment in Poland? [80]


I think he is not. He reminds me of a certain guest poster who was saying how they resent the Polish people down there in his country of Slovakia and how much they love the Russians in Slovakia until the mods revealed he was posting from Brazil.

History / Age of Enlightenment in Poland? [80]


Definitely leave it and never return.

Food / Food hygiene in Poland [60]


To be honest, I think it is both.

News / Poland's PIS go back to their old ways [194]


Indeed, I'm a bit sceptical about PiS. All I remeber from the period of these people in power was constant quarelling with everyone and among the coalition they formed with Samoobrona and that other party of Roman Giertych, LPR, during 2005-2007. There was this filming in the Mariott hotel in Warsaw after which the PiS government collapsed. On the other hand, PiS is not quite what the liberal media portray them (and they portray them as evil only). But it is true, PiS have a lot of people among their rank who simply annoy a typical Polish voter who doesn't take part in the discussions on the PolishForum (and a typical Polish voter doesn't). One latest example was a certain Hoffman, the party spokesperson, if I remember correctly, recently fired from PiS, who was an absolutely disgusting figure. Also, Antoni Macierewicz has been put in the attic for a time being so as not to annoy the voter of the center who may eventually vote for PiS. A cartoon on the cover page of a certain weekly showed a cleaning lady opening the door to a cellar and saying: Panie Antoni, you may go out now, the presidential election is over! Even the chairman of the party, Jarosław Kaczyński himself has been shut down somewhere so as not to appear and annoy the potential voter of PiS.

News / Poland's PIS go back to their old ways [194]


Why should he as the date for the general election is set for the end of October. The next Government may give him 1,000 zł/month or 2,000 zł/month or 2,500 zł/month or whatever you want ...

Classifieds / Private English Lessons by Experienced Professional Teacher in Poland (Warsaw) [107]

As I said many times before on the PF: why not try to learn English with the BBC? They're experienced, reliable, native-level teachers of English. And they don't charge you ZL80 per hour!

UK, Ireland / Polish striking due to anti-Polish UK feeling [58]


You've been for too short a time here to know how some of the British people attacked Wulkan (and Polish people in general)...

News / Poland's PIS go back to their old ways [194]


Instead of smiling, you should give some polling stats on that claim really ...

News / Poland's PIS go back to their old ways [194]

"The reason is obvious: he wants to conflict new president and the party PiS with the European establishment"

I didn't check that, but it sounds possible. Tusk and his gang were very apt in antagonising PiS at the same time telling people that it was PiS who was antagonising The Civic Platform. Tusk is a very shrewd politician who was able to control the political scene in Poland for years simply by pointing out to PiS as a source for all evil things. Now that he is gone, the PO seems to be falling apart like a house of cards. And I'm not saying that PiS were saints. But Tusk eagerness to kill other prominent politicians within PO like Schetyna to promote his own gang among them that boyish clown Sławomir Nowak turns agains the party now. Prime Minister Kopacz seems to be much more honest than Tusk, even if she was quite incompetent as the Minister of Health. Nothing seems to save PO in the next general election as there are so many former PO voters dissatisfied so much with them. Ryszard Petru and his nowoczesna.pl seems to be a valid alternative for those who do not want to vote nether PO nor PiS, but they are a too recent and unexperienced movement to gain much of the vote..

Life / Best area to live in Lower Silesia, Poland? Property in a countryside. [33]

In Lower Silesia I once visited a very nice town of Nowogrodziec (near Bolesławiec). We thought we might buy a house there when we retire ...

UK, Ireland / Polish striking due to anti-Polish UK feeling [58]

It seems Oxon is gaining momentum in telling his stories ...

UK, Ireland / Polish striking due to anti-Polish UK feeling [58]

I have. But it seems to me that Oxon has only picked it up from Alison's comment to add more venom to his own post on the PF.

Alison's comment on theindependent's website: Even today, it's difficult getting into anything other than a superficial conversation with Poles as they have been taught since birth not to speak to the shopkeeper, doctor, priest etc for fear of being informed upon and a visit from the Sluzba which was their KGB or Stassi.

It is quite odd to write such a bizzare stuff about Poles being taught not to speak to the shopkeeper, doctor etc. The young generation who goes to the UK for work do not remember the days of communism. Besides, it may be true for the Soviet Union much more than for Poland or for Poland of the 1950s when you could get a prison sentence of three years for telling a joke about comrade Stalin (just today I was reading about such a case in "Gazeta Wyborcza" in the article by Krystyna Kofta on her late father). Both Oxon and Alison are very far from the reality of Poland.

UK, Ireland / Polish striking due to anti-Polish UK feeling [58]


Who is Alison and why do you say that "oxon" is Alison?


It has always been entertaining to read oxon bragging about British superiority and I think this is exactly the point he tries to make. At least he is fair and honest in doing so, unlike most of other British people on the PF who are deeply convinced about British superiority, but pretend otherwise.

History / When will you Poles give back German land and the cities which you robbed? [557]

Upper Silesians in Poland (Oppeln region) claiming to be German is a kind of mystery really. And I do not want to say they are in true fact Slavic people disguising themselves as Germans. Let them be what they like to be. I remember I bought a Silesian newspaper at the Warsaw Central Station in the 1990s, the "Schlesiche Nachrichten" in German, issued in Opole/Oppeln, and the only bit I could fully understand was the column entitled something like "Let's talk in our Heimat language now" which was in a language which is supposed to be called "Silesian language" these days, but which was fully comprehensible to an inhabitant of Warsaw like myself who had never ever been to Upper Silesia until then.

History / When will you Poles give back German land and the cities which you robbed? [557]


Romek, "Bohumii" is neither a Slavic name, nor is it Czech (both would be synonymous in fact). "Bohumii" was a name of a Celtic tribe who lived where now the Czech Republic is hence the name of their land "Bohemia" was passed onto the land of the Czechs in the Middle Ages. So Bohumii is a purely Celtic name (with the Latin ending, however)


This is very interesting. I wonder if any linguists researched the German dialects in Silesia to find out influences of Polish in it. I know of three: "Kaluppe" formed after "chałupa" (house of a peasant), "schiskojenne" which is so strikingly Polish for anyone who knows the language ("wszystko jedno") and "Nusche" for knife ("nóż" in Polish). Surfing one day on the net, I discovered films on youtube about the German people living in Lower Silesia since the end of the WW2. In the films they spoke perfect Polish, but I wondered if they still could speak a Silesian Mundart. In one article I once found on the net, a German team of reserchers went to Wrocław to interview members of the German minority (about 2,000 of them still in Wrocław). The interviewing took place during a meeting of the German cultural association in Wrocław and the team came up to a group of men speaking in Polish between themselves. They turned to German talking to the interviewers whose last questions for them was what they think of today's Wrocław. They said they were very well accomodated to life in the city, but they would like to see Wrocław becoming a German city again. When the interviewers finally said good-bye to them and went off a little, they heard the men returning back to Polish in talking between themselves! The researchers said they were shocked by this - their wish for Wrocław to become German again against the preference for Polish in their conversation!

News / Are Poland's politicians able to speak foreign languages? [29]


You should look at this criticism through the Brit Bullies being back again for bullying PiS and President Duda. And indeed, why speaking the petty language such as English of which French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau said it is "just badly pronounced French" should be a must for any president?

History / When will you Poles give back German land and the cities which you robbed? [557]

Is there a library of recordings of the German dialects spoken east of the Oder-Neisse line before 1945 available on-line?

There is a good book on the German East entitled: "Deutscher Osten. Vorstellungen - Mission - Erbe" (Auswahl, Einleitung und Bearbeitung: Christoph Kleßmann, 422 Seiten), but I guess it is available in Polish only (!?).

Here's an article about it in German:
sdpz.org/aktuelles/-deutscher-osten-vorstellungen-mission-erbe-unter-der-redaktion-von-christoph-klessmann-p80KsW

History / When will you Poles give back German land and the cities which you robbed? [557]


What double-language signs would you expect in Belfast?


I am not a Brit, have never been and do not intend to become one in the future.


There are many more which is why I preceded those names with the phrase "for example".


Why the hell you are implying again that I am British? If there are not double signs in Northern Ireland, I agree with you: this issue should be raised and you should definitely tell those British what you think of that, Romek.

History / When will you Poles give back German land and the cities which you robbed? [557]


With this I can fully agree. Few people (if any at all) in Poland do realize that. It was very well said on this Sorbian TV (7th March 2015, at the end of the program) you gave the link to in your other thread by an inhabitant of a Sorbian village who said that before the war all area was purely Sorbian and now he says he is the last one Sorb there. It so strikingly reminds the inhabitant of the Wendland west of the Elbe in the 17th century who deplored that after he dies nobody in the village would know how "dog" was named in the Polabian language. Today we have at least the means of recording to save the sound of languages which are bound to die.

Speaking more generally on the German-Polish relations, it is striking that they were usually on two levels: "front-offfice" and "back-office". In the back office there was a lot of mixing and interchanging between the two nations: people moved places, married and were good neighbours. In the "front-office", there should always be a sharp division between who is German and who is Polish. The Prussian state might have been some hope in the past for a Germano-Slavic country that could resemble Switzerland in a way. Frederick the Great issued official document for Silesia in Polish (not even a slightest mention of "the Silesian language" at that time), too, as Polish was widely spoken even in certain areas of Lower Silesia as well. Yet history took a different course. Contemporary Silesians may perhaps be a good example of an identity that tries to combine the Slavic roots and language with the German cultural inheritance.

As far as Silesia is concerned, shortly after Germany lost the First World War there existed a political project promoted by the (German) Silesian to create a state (all of Silesia were to be included in it) independent from Germany. As far as I know, the project was turned down by the British or by the French. Shade, wirklich Schade! The original Silesian culture could perhaps have been saved and people wouldn't have to be moved away behind the Oder-Neisse line after the Second World War. I say "perhaps" because no one knows what Herr Hitler would have said to that in the 1930s. Or perhaps he would have to face serious difficulty in signing the Munich treaty with Britain and France against Czechoslovakia in 1938 given that Czechoslovakia wouldn't have been surrounded from the three sides by the Third Reich which was was originally planned to thrive for the next one thousand years!

History / When will you Poles give back German land and the cities which you robbed? [557]


You shouldn't. It's hard to image a number of languages jumping out all of a sudden from nowhere at once. By the way, by saying "Slavic" I did not mean a language, but a language family, just like "Germanic" describes a language family. In that sense, an Obodrite name such as Mechlin is a Slavic name (as opposed to a German or Germanic name) because the Obodrite language was Slavic, just as Warszawa in Polish is a Slavic name also becuse Polish is a Slavic language. JollyRomek didn't get that and thought that a Slavic term is a term in the Slavic language while it is in fact a term in a language belonging to the Slavic family of languages.

History / When will you Poles give back German land and the cities which you robbed? [557]



Before you start your trolling, you should read a message more carefully. "Slavic names" mean Slavic names and not a "unified Slavic language".


And I am not sure what issue you are trying to raise.


The real question is: is this small minority able to survive with their language at all? Even if the present German government doesn't not hinder them in any way to stick to their language and culture, will they have enough power within themselves to carry on? Remember that at a certain point when the young people start to feel intimidated to use the language of parents and home, start to mock it as old and funny, this language is virtually dead. At present there are only certain areas in Germany where you can still hear children speaking Sorbian at play and these areas are only in Upper Lusatia. But I am not sure if it still happens in Budyšin/Bautzen, for example. And yet not so long ago, in the 1950s, in Lower Lusatia, quite near to the German Hauptstadt Berlin, died the last man who spoke German only with great difficulty as the language he used on an every day basis was Lower Sorbian! Double language road signs will not change much in this respect. And you are right, speaking Sorbian pronouncing German "r" sounds somewhat hilarious to the Slavic ear (not that I myself do not like the German "r", I am able to pronounce this sound like a real German :-) ). It is true, however, that some Lower Sorbians have retained their firm Sorbian identity not knowing the Sorbian language at all. In this respect they are like the majority of the Irish whose native language is English, but they still feel Irish.

History / When will you Poles give back German land and the cities which you robbed? [557]


The problem was about reminding Lyzko that German towns have or had Slavic names, too. The last time there was a chance for an independent Sorbian state was shortly after the WWII, but Stalin rejected the Sorbian plea to create one in fear of antagonising the East German communists in the Russian occupation zone.


No, I have not. The Upper Sorbian language seems quite likely to die out, however, but is as yet in a better shape than Lower Sorbian further north.

Did you know that one of the Polabian Slavic languages survived as long as until the 16th (or even 17th century) and it was west of the river ELBE, while other Polabian languages between Elbe and Oder vanished much earlier?

History / When will you Poles give back German land and the cities which you robbed? [557]


Here we can see how he has added more than 200 years to the period of posession of Schlesien by the Germans (Prusians). In fact Schlesien had become part of Prussia in 1741 as a result of a war between Austria and Prussia. Silesian principalities governed by the Piast dynasty members were legitimately taken over one by one by the Czech Crown in the 14th century.


You may not know that, but most German towns and villages in Eastern Germany have names which are germanized Slavic names like Strzałów which became Stralsund or Roztoka which became Rostock or Zwierzyn which became Schwerin. The old capital of the Obodrites Mechlin became Mecklen-burg and subsequently had given the name for the entire province MECKLENBURG. The Slavic prince Niklot had started the Mecklemburgian dynasty which governed the Grand Duchy of Mecklenburg until 1918 when the duchy ceased to exist.

Until now only several Upper and Lower Lusatian towns in East Germany have retained double German/Slavic names among them Bautzen/Budyšin, Cottbus/Chóśebuz or Weißwasser/Běła Woda.

Language / Zmarła czy zdechła? What is proper to say in Polish in a case of an animal death? [12]

It should. Those silly "journalists" are themselves drunk with their "political corectness". What's more to it is that the name of the dog is like the name for a girl, so "zdechła" is needed even more, so as not to confuse a human being with a dog (But to say the truth, in the world of political corectness, does it really matter who is what? If gays can marry and have children, why a dog cannot be taken for a human being?)

History / The story about German- Polish reconciliation [194]


Same with us, Poles. However, time is needed for a true reconciliation. There was too much conspiracy against Poland by Frederic the Great in the 18th century, not even mentioning Hitler and his nazi clique.


J. Gauck, a warmonger or not, the real warmongers on this site are the British Dougpol1 and jon357. Please notice that at the slightest hint of yours about the Neo-Nazis in East Germany, they jumped at once on Kaczyński and his "xenophobes". This is real warmongering and something which is disgusting!

Life / Life in Poland - feeling lonely and don't want to socialize much! (anyone feeling same?) [93]

@ luke84
Getting a job that suits you, be it part time and low-paid, should be a good option for you. You need to work purely for social reasons rather than economic ones. At the moment you are only confined to your family circle and a remote job. That is not good for anyone in the long run. The easiest way to socialize in your case would be to get in contact with other people at work.

Language / The lost literary languages of Poland [54]

Here are some Yiddish words currently used in Polish:
bachor, belfer, hucpa, cymes, kapcan (rare these days), ksywa, rejwach, machlojka, mamona, mecyje (becoming rare), misz-masz, siksa, sitwa.