Language / What should I end my last name with? [16]

Hi, "Head" :) !

A tad archaic, I suppose, much as "Panna" for "Pani", to indicate an unmarried woman.
I've never used "Panna" by the way, even though we learned it in school.
Marek

Language / What should I end my last name with? [16]

Just my two-cents worth, but I learned that male and females names, e.g. "Nowak, i.e. "Pan Nowak vs. "Pani Nowakowa" vary if the family name is of an unmarried woman, for example "Nowakowa" = "Mrs. Nowak", whereas "Nowakówna" would be then "Miss Nowak" (but not "Miss Nowakowa").

Is this correct? I ask because the above is not identical in every Slavic language, such as Czech or Russian.
Marek

Language / The Polish language - it's bloody hard! [210]

PLG,

The first, I'm frankly unsure about how to translate. The second is, "Rome wasn't built in a day.", The third, " What Jack never learned as a boy, he won''t learn as a grown up either." :)

Marek

Language / The Polish language - it's bloody hard! [210]

Michal,

As far as the relative transparency of Polish, to reiterate, it most definitely is far "easier" from the point of view of pronunciation than English or French, even German with its "voiceless" dipthongs (e.g. "wie" =how. pronounced as a single phoneme vs. Polish "wie" = she/she knows, pronounced as TWO separate letters, only the "w" as English "v"-sound, taking some getting used to!).

Its constant irregularities (typical of pan-Slavic nothwithstanding) however, can pose serious problems for the average English-speaking learner (as opposed to Spanish or italian, phonetically speaking, of course), who have to contend with a seemingly capricious case system (as with all inflected languages:)) and occasional discrepancies in verb classes, not mention aspectual issues as well as word order.

Having grown up with German as a second first language and having many years of Latin under my belt, Polish was not a problem to learn.

I am, though, a notable exception among my colleagues who have also studied Polish.

Marek

Language / Polish or any Slavic language key to any other Slavic languages? [126]

OOOPS again!!:)
Thanks Michal. I posted too soon, I later realized. That says more about my somewhat limited Russian than it does about my Polish (which I honestly consider fluent, albeit not always accurate.)

I'd neglected to mention the "byly" form for feminine plurals. Right again.
Why "Ja robotal odako."? Perhaps because in Russian, the speaker's gender is clear by the very lack of a verbal ending. The latter though, is pure guesswork on my part. In Polish: "Pracowalem...", without the compulsory pronoun compared to Russian!

Marek

Language / Polish or any Slavic language key to any other Slavic languages? [126]

Michal!

The issue of accent, i.e. pronunciation, is different from that of morphology or inflectional structure. Granted, Russian's lack of fixed syllabic stress makes it resemble more English than, say, Polish or Czech.

However, the Polish numeric system after "five", coupled with the addition of the (often optional) vocative case to pan-slavic six cases, the repetition of endings between accusative vs. genitive, are often quite confusing for a foreigner. In addition, Polish has " byl", "byla" "bylo" depending upon the gender of the speaker or the object described. Russian has "Anna byl", "Wiktor byl", with no difference in past tense gender!

Marek

Language / Polish/Ukrainian words similarities [209]

Bill,

A Russian native speaker told me recently that Bulgarian is "closer" for her to Russian than the other Slavic languages.

Don't know if this means anything or not :)
Marek

Language / Polish or any Slavic language key to any other Slavic languages? [126]

Spell of Bliss,

a famous emphatic quote by the late Pope Jan Pawel when asked a similar question regarding Polish and Russian: "All Poles understand Russian, but nobody speaks it!"

Undoubtedly, such remarks reflect the troublesome history between Poland and its neighbors:)

Speaking for me personally, I can understand the numbers in all Slavic languages, having already studied Polish, much as in the Romance tongues having learned French or in, say, Dutch, after having learned German etc.

Marek

Language / Polish/Ukrainian words similarities [209]

ALIENBILL!
As a native English speaker myself, raised though bilingual English-German in the States, Polish might seem superficially less complex than Russian (or for that matter Ukrainian) solely by virtue of their alphabetic similarities, save for several different letters which I'm not able to reporoduce on my keyboard in the office.

However, morphologically, i.e. phonologically, Polish has one extra case from the Russian's six (the vocative, though rarely used), a tongue-twistingly difficult pronounciation ("Chrzasz brzmi w trzecinie"= The beetle buzzes in the reeds) and numerous irregularities in both declension as well as the counting system.

This alone, having studied both, makes Polish harder for Americans than Russian!
Marek