The usage and future of the special Polish letters: ą, ć, ę, ł, ń, ó, ś, ż, ź (Polish language)

Not authentic as what? What has writing and your lovely Grandma got to do with pronunciation? What has it all got to do with "także"? This is starting to really amuse me. Please, proceed.


As far as I remember, I said "DON'T take my word for it".


pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fonem

That should explain what you describe as "closest sound".

It's so simple Magdalena: You lost the connection with Poland. I deeply believe so.

I remember when an older man offered us a place to put down our "palta" two years ago and all 8 of us chuckled. We were a mixed group from all parts of Poland.

we're talking about reading

As in to suggest "I'm an expert and I'm not to be questioned".
Again, don't swarm me with links, please.

And I simultaneously forgot everything I ever learnt at university as well? What about the links I posted? All those guys are probably totally wrong as well, only you are right, but cannot present a single valid argument, which is probably due to the fact that you don't really understand what it is that you are opposing.

I thought we were talking on speaking?

Darius, if anyone wants to be an authentic bluegrass musician (or someone at least trying), such person first goes on a trip to the right place in the States with his banjo. Someone trying to give advices how to speak present Polish rather comes to Poland and stays there for significant amount of time. NOW.

Same to Magdalena. Do you know the notion "akademicka dyskusja"? It is about the University.

The further discussion is pointless.

Please go back to that particular post and re-read it very carefully. It might help a bit.


Well, am I supposed to sit down and write you a comprehensive lecture on phonology? It would be really much easier if you did some background reading on the subject and then came back to discuss it.


Show me ONE single instance of me or z_darius "giving advice" on how to speak Polish. Not paraphrasing, quote please.

I'd sort of expect you to present an argument in a compact form that leaves no doubt, quote relevant parts from the sources you're referring to etc. "Go educate yourself, moron" is not an argument.


There's nothing to re-read, that's what you wrote and that's the message you tried to give.

I don't give advice how to speak Polish. I describe how it's spoken. Remember?

So how about that source?

It's not very easy to present an argument in a compact form that leaves not doubt when I have to assume that you are a stranger to the terminology, methodology, and basic premises of phonology. I trust you are intelligent enough to read the info I link to and come to your own conclusions. I know nothing about physics (literally nothing) and would never try to discuss physics with you, but if you provided me with interesting links, I would at least try to read them before dismissing them.


You know as well as I do that I never said that. If you think that was my intention, you are wrong.


That's not advice. That's description pure and simple, taken from an objective source at that.

Imagine if we were discussing the nature of light, and I would only say that light is generally considered a wave, but we do not attribute a wave function to light particles and left you with the following links only,:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave_function

Would you read them?
Answer: you would not read them. And rightfully so.


You never said that (though darius actually did), but swarming with links without a proper commentary is exactly that.

you were given links to the very word in question too.
short ones.
yours are much longer than that

Theory against living language
nk.art.pl/mp3/takze.mp3

Sorry, but you lost me right there, because I would never ever discuss the nature of light with anybody, because (as I said) I am totally hopeless in the physics department.

But if the subject did come up, and I were involved, I would have a look at your links, and if I were interested in the subject of the conversation, and really wanted to learn something about light (which, unfortunately, I quite candidly confess I do not), I would read them and try to understand at least something.


Imagine I said something truly preposterous about light, and it is blindingly obvious that I know nothing about the subject. What sort of proper commentary would you try to provide? You would first try to give me a general overview of the matter (by providing links, I assume). I can't begin to imagine what sort of commentary you would have to provide to me to even get me started. You could type all night and I would still be clueless. The burden on educating myself should lie with me, not you.

The length is irrelevant really. When I see 5 links listed instead of a brief explanation followed by links for references, I won't click any of them.

funny :)
neither version is natural.
People don't stop between k and ż like you did.

You're teaching me how to speak Polish, again? ;-)
People do not stop between "Droga Magdaleno" and "i drogi Dariuszu", either, right?
Gosh, are you still thinking you are God? ;-))))

If people had to SAY "G" in "także", they would have to say it as I did.

As I said before, the discussion is pointless. Come to Poland.

As I said - there is no brief explanation really when you have to start from the very beginning. Additionally, when I enter a discussion on a topic that's new to me, I tend to at least check what Wiki has to say before adding anything. Also, not clicking links that had been provided to you is like cutting off your nose to spite your face.


Yes, it is pointless, because you do not read what your opponents have written and are not interested in facts. You are only interested in listening to the sound of your own voice.

Not at all. I only describe how you spoke.

you said two phrases:

tak że
tag że

We're talking about także

Light is bit of an abstract subject, let's say that you (or *sigh* someone else) would say that he doesn't believe satellite photos and he sees no curvatures, how can he therefore assume the Earth is spherical. It doesn't mean he's an uneducated idiot (people believed the Earth was flat for a thousand years), only that he wants to see more convincing proofs. I could either swarm him with links to general mechanics textbooks and say 'figure it out yourself' or give him two precise and brief examples with further references.

Now guess what you did in post #62?

Time to go to bed :)


You gave no reason why the links are relevant to the discussion. Why should I click them?

The earth is flat. I saw it in Manitoba where they hit a dog with a rock and you can see it running away for three days.

I did give a reason. I said that we had to start at the very beginning (as it became obvious you and Antek do not have, or pretend to not have, the relevant knowledge). And I said that reading those links would give you something to think about. I apologise for not summarising them in my own words for your reading pleasure. Also please bear in mind that I provided those links only after a prolonged and fruitless "discussion" in which Antek kept insisting that since I don't live in Poland, I cannot speak about Polish phonological rules. The Wiki entries were not mine and I hoped they might be taken more seriously than I was.

Magdalena, they don't care about links.
I gave them a direct quote from Silesian University, and a link just to show that I didn't pull the quote out of my hat.

A side note, and to you rather than to living Polish specialists; have you noticed that sometimes a great way of showing how sounds influence one another is through observing common misspellings?

To use the very word we have been discussing, I googled "tagże" and there are lots of people using this common error. The reason is obvious - they write what they hear.

The better half says it like tagże, but spells it także. She says it is slightly more complicated to annunciate the k, the g just flows better.

So how would the anchor on the nightly news annunciate it?

Hard to believe there are 4 pages of fighting over this...

tagże



But Antek imparting a divine pearls of wisdom like that one is mildly entertaining.

definitely with 'g'.

It's not a question of opinion but of the mechanics of the speech organs. And Lyzko is a proof that this is a linguistic law in action, which linguists observed and described. Linguistics is not just a bunch of wishy washy rules but a true science will laws and rules observed by its students. In fact, some of its branches have had a huge impact on other disciplines, including mathematics.

The only way to keep 'k' before 'ż' is to pause between the two and that is not natural, unless we say 'tak że" (two separate words).

There is only one situation in which there will be 'k' sound in 'także'. When we whisper. But then 'ż' will change to 'sz' (using Polish spelling)


Linguistics can be a very passionate subject.
Heck, Stalin was a linguist too ;)

Chapeau bas !! You are so right.

I'm so glad I missed most of this.

Anyway, this is pretty common phenomenon. Highly literate native speakers without a grounding in linguistics tend to believe things that are clearly at odds with the observable facts.

Many Spanish speakers are convinced there is (or should be) a difference between b and v while linguists note that not a single native speaker can maintain such a difference in spontaneous speech. Some Americans believe they distinguish latter and ladder when they don't.

Voicing assimilation in Polish works the same way. When sounds with both voiced and unvoiced equivalents come together in a word all the preceding such consonants assimilate to the final one (unless the first consonant is unvoiced and the second is w or rz in which case the process is reversed).

Therefore the medial clusters in także and pogrzeb are identical (także pogżep). There is no controversy in phonetics or regional variation about this. Individuals might at times adopt spelling pronunciations for particular purposes (usually for words in isolation) but this has no effect on basic usage. There is some variation in whether clusters like sm an zm are pronounced identically or differently (I forget the details but it's a major regional distinction).

If Antek really thinks there a distinction emerging between the clusters gż and kż then he should contact the Polish and/or linguistic departments of his local university. This would be a major, major innovation in Polish speaking norms and would probably represent the further anglicization of Polish (since English is very unusual in the way it allows mixed voicing clusters such as obtain or even blackguard with a very unusual /kg/ cluster

At least I gave some thinking to z_dariusz, who admitted that softly spoken "także" is pronounced as "taksze". He has probably listened to my recording where "tagże" was pronounced loudly, distinctively and unnaturally (because "g" there is not pronounced he same way as in "tygrys"); then he heard my softer "taksze". I wonder how linguistics handles different pronunciation depending on the speech volume.