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

PIE initial stems morphed into what later became so-called "shifted letters" in Germanic, Romance and even Proto-Slavic, i.e. 'OCS' (Old Church Slovanic).

I did the same when reading an old book about seal hunting and New Foundlanders. Written in 20s-30s of previous century. It was full of Newfie dialogs. It has appendices with NF-English dictionary, proverbs specific to sea and weather, etc. But only after I started reading it aloud I began to understand the speech.

Townsend's Slavic Comparative Morphology has some awesome charts and diagrams to illustrate the above.
-:)

I don't know of any cognates of chwila/hvila in any other Indoeuropean languages (but it does not mean there aren't any) - still I would presume they would look quite different if they were ot come from a common Indoeuropean root because of different sound changes that affected Slavic and Germanic proto-languages (an example is 'hammer' vs 'kamień' - they both come from the same Indoeuropean root (minus different suffixes/endings )(a Greek word of the same origin is 'akmon'))

Be cautious also of 'false-friend' roots; roots which look similar to others, yet may be unrelated. This is particularly tough when two words, say, from two different languages mean the same thing in both, yet are equally 'false cognates': Albanian 'Ju' (you) vs. English 'you', Hungarian 'haz' vs. English 'house' etc...

wow this is impressive - I could 'read' it with ease -

Ńe moge trzytadź po polskó zbyd dopsze.
That's as far as one could go trying to misspell the sentence "Nie mogę czytać po polsku zbyt dobrze" (but would be misspelled and badly pronounced).


You argumentation here is very shady. Venus has its unique diameter, mass, spectral lines and their intensities that made this planet uniquely Venus. Classification of sounds in languages is by default a lot more arbitrary, given the criteria that are assumed. Our discussion wasn't "does Venus exist", but "is Pluto a planet" (is the sound in 'także' a 'g'?), which is arbitrary as some consider it a planet, some don't.


I did none of those things.


I never claimed to hear /k/


I can, but it takes significantly longer to read such text. I can also read all you wrote below and it also takes significantly longer.


It'd be nice to understand light interference before mentioning it as an example.


Our senses work on a logarithmic scale, ie. the background noise is the base of the logarithm, we don't notice anything below its intensity. It's not the experience that makes you not see star light (or similar noise), it's your brain that physiologically shuts off signals to keep you sane (ignoring also the fact that your eyes' lenses change diameters in various light conditions).

Meanwhile, trying to analyze "także", there's nothing that was automatically shut off - in an arbitrarty classification I considered it a different sound, apparently in established classifications it's the same sound.


"Some" being the key word. My sister studied etnolinguistics and had only one semester of logic (if we classify it as part of mathematics and not the reverse), which is laughable!

Seems to me that phonetically-written Polish, begins looking more like CroatianLOL!!

Haha, that's not exactly phonetically written Polish, that's all possible misspellings put together, but no one would pronounce "trzydadź" :)

koala, you've compared the graphic k of także to the g in words like tygrys, the point is to compare it to g before ż or rz.

Simple test,

także

(w) łagrze

are the sequences -akże and -agrze the same or different?

.....no more than are 'trzy' pronounced as 'czy'-:) Incidentally, as I was told, the Czechs and Ukrainians don't devoice medial or tertiary (final) consonants.

This a very good example showing that 'grz' is prounounced identically to 'kż'. It is enough to touch your own throat while saying "w łagrze" after having said "także" to start believing in "udźwięcznienie wsteczne" in Polish!


I don't quite get whether you say they are identical or different?
Obviously they are different. But they used to sound identical in the pronounciation of my teacher who came from the region of Poznań to teach geography at a 'liceum' near Warsaw. I remember thinking it was funny just as a German girl thought it "komisch" when she saw "Kassa" rather than "Kasse" while on her winter holidays in Austria [a shot from the TV language course produced by a German television channel; a 12-year-old German girl exclaims: "Wie komisch!" on hearing this pronounciation supported by such a writing].

This shows yet again that you don't have even an approximate idea about the methods linguists use. You accept spectral analysis used by astronomers but you reject spectral analysis used by linguists? How do you think speech recognition software is possible? Computer's arbitrary decisions?

If there is anything arbitrary here this is your statements about linguistics.


True, it was Anetk. You only chose not to comment on his obvious mistake. So in fact, I am grateful for the example of Swiebodzin jargon that showed him wrong.


You never claimed to /g/ either so either way, for all practical purposes you were ejecting the log establish facts that have been researched by linguists for centuries and confirmed by the more modern tools of the trade.


It'd be nice if you first read my post more carefully before making this comment.


Since you still insist on the use of "arbitrary" when it comes to linguistics, and since yours are clearly statements stemming from your (also self admitted) ignorance in this area of study, the above doesn't need addressing anymore.


First, I made no statements about our sister's curriculum.

Second, various academia offer various subjects, and may are a matter of choice. Much like pretty much any area of study. I met once an English Lit. graduate of a British University. During one of the debates (he was our teacher in Poland) it turned out he never ready Chaucer(!!!), because that was an elective. In an English dept. of a University. In London UK!

Etnolinguistics is just a field of linguistics the fact that someone who studied it had to take few to no math courses proves nothing.

My point about "czy" vs. "trzy" is that perhaps to a non-Pole, both sound alike, to a Pole, probably not, anymore than "vin"/"veingt" sound identical to a non-Frenchman, yet maybe subtely different to a native Frenchman-:)

Well not all speakers are careful about distinguishing cz and trz in all contexts, especially in rapid speech. But almost all speakers can distinguish them (or tell when others don't pronounce them identicially).

Similarly, the Polish pronounciation of tsunami is not the same as if it were written cunami. I can't hear the difference but the Polish speakers I've checked with do.

I think we're back to the issue of interference (unlearning the old is sometimes harder than learning the new) and the degree of attention. Given a few moments to hear the sounds again a foreigner will easily discern between the sounds. Without practice, and equipped only with the native language (non Slavonic) the listener's brain will automatically search for the sound that is closest to sounds already within the listener's experience.

This happens millions of times a day when people say "shit" instead of "sheet", or "ass" instead of "as", "hut" instead of "hat", with the last examples (or in wider sense, vowels) being particularly vicious to Poles learning English.

The phenomenon of interference, or sometimes simple lack of experience in perceiving certain stimuli is true of many other sensory based interactions.

They sound identical, even to native Frenchmen.

There is, however, an identifiable difference between trzy and czy which the basic phonemic alphabet fails to bring out as it's not a minimal pair in English. Don't have IPA font but what it boils down to is this:

czy -> /tsh/
trzy -> /t'sh/ (a slight aspiration of the t before you go into the affricate - you can hear it in slow speech, not so sure about fast, connected speech though)

The difference in English phonetics is the roughly the same as that between catch it (for czy) and cat shit (for trzy).

trzy IPA: [ṭʃɨ], [ṭšy]
czy IPA: [ʧ̑ɨ], [èy]

It is not an uncommon error for native Poles to say "czy" where "trzy" is what they mean.

Star, thanks :)

not biggie.

For the future, pl.wiktionary.org contains IPA for all words it lists.
Copy/paste for all UTF-8 browsers.

Another excellent point, Darek-:))

Language interference is probably one of the most written-about areas in linguistics. And yes, I am a linguist by both training as well as avocationLOL I teach several foreign languages and did my doctoral studies in precisely the historical development of language, i.e. synchronic linguistics!

The 'shit'.'sheet' opposition reinforces the axiom that absolute predictability in language is basically impossible; there'll always remain the filter of sound transference, different for every human including native speakers of the same language.

Agreed, within the human scope there aren't all that many absolute rules, but they seem to be present within various classes of populations that could be classified based on their linguistic heritage. Chomsky's universals and the overall body of his research, incorrectly seen by some to be contrary to the above, deal with what I wold call a higher level of linguistic awareness and aptitude.

Interestingly, "shit" happens not only to Poles. Native speakers of Spanish are known step into it too.

I'm not sure you understand what "arbitrary" means. Even if you have numerical data, in order to classify it you still need some arbitrary criteria. Electromagnetic spectrum of a particular atom is always the same (in the same temperature), the /g/ sound is never the same, even if pronounced by the same person. Stating that Venus is Venus is not arbitrary though, as it's one unique object that remains fairly unchanged.

And yes, computer software has to make such arbitrary decisions, how much the registered sound differs from the database ideal sample and choose the closest one, then group them into words and so on. Is there even 100% (or 99%) reliable voice recognition software?


You had already done so.


I'm not rejecting "long established facts", I'm questioning one statement for which I haven't seen empirical proof.


Yes, I did. You said that you can't see Venus because of interference which is an incorrect statement.


You know that I was right and you don't want to admit it. Recognizing/discerning individual sounds in a language is a matter of experience, hearing them is not. Seeing stars is not a matter of experience (knowledge), knowing what they are is. The fact that inhabitants of big cities do not see stars is not a matter of experience!


So you're my long lost brother! :D


It proves that math courses aren't standard in linguistics.

I surely do, but I wouldn't bet a rotten banana that you know the terms has a few meanings. Now I'm sure you'll check them.


Same difference when it comes to voiced consonants. Vocal cords vibrate. In voiceless they don't. The intensity and frequency of the vibration may and will vary even for the same person. An atom's characteristics will not be identical either, even if the temperature is constant and the electromagnetic spectrum is identical.


>98% is the best and I'd say that, considering the huge range of issues faced by software developers when it comes to voice recognition, it's a great feat. Commercial software is at around 96%. Not even human voice transcription accuracy rate is at 100%. Various studies show a range of 95% to 99.8%. That is a little higher than understanding e person during a phone conversation.


You're not interested in seeing empirical proof. Otherwise you would have found plenty of info on the subject. I won't be doing your homework.


It is a perfectly correct statement.
Example:

One of the reasons Palomar Mountain was selected as the site for the 200-inch telescope was its dark skies that would allow observation of the faintest galaxies without theinterference of city lights. Since 1934, rapid urbanization of southern California has resulted in a significant increase in the amount of sky glow. If such light pollution continues to increase, it will seriously reduce the effectiveness of the Palomar Observatory for many types of research.

astro.caltech.edu/palomar/lp.html

I used both terms in the post you try to prove wrong.
If it's good for astronomers from California Institute of Technology it should be good for you and me.


Why should I admit something contrary to science and to experience shown on this very forum. This dialog started with a person with very limited experience, Lyzko, who pronounced a Polish word perfectly well (in regards to /g/), and as predicted by the rules of Polish phonology. The person who listened to him heard a /g/ too. My take is, and this is just a guess, that sometimes native speakers of any language will fall in the trap of hypercorrectness and offer correction when one is not needed.


Neither is the fact that vocal cords vibrate when voiced sounds are pronounced.


It also proves they are offered to those who research path will require such knowledge. If you think that a much larger load of math courses would beneficial to linguists then, by all means, suggest it to the those who can effect the changes. But I guess they might ask you why.

Nothing in nature remains the same and there are always ongoing processes (even in vacuum with no real, material particles), but the general characteristics of an atom never change. Discussing atoms internal characteristics makes sense only when they're experimentally distinguishable.


Who wrote and edited that text?

Anyway, it's incorrect. You have a picture right there explaining what happens. City light does not interfere with starlight. If you want to, I can explain both claim in greater detail. The use of interference in that sentence is unfortunate, the word noise (szum) would probably be better.

You OTOH put the word interference in brackets as if the physical phenomenom would explain why you see fewer or no stars in urban environments, which is flat out wrong.


Which is fine and I already conceded that the sound in także might as well be /g/. You were wrong on the particular matter of comparing speech sounds recognition with the way our senses work.


I believe efficient work with various databases would be useful pretty much anywhere. I'm sure if I knew specifics of one's I could point out how it'd be useful.

And for the sake of God, affect.

This seems to me a very good comparison. But I would go on to say that the difference trz/cz can even be heard in fast speech. As 'trz' can be met in some other frequent words like 'trzeba', I'm pretty sure that a native speaker would quickly realize the difference if another native speaker started to pronounce it as 'czeba' in a regular way in a fast speech even.

That reminds me of an unforgetable sketch, a 'telefoniczny szmonces', by Dziewoński and Michnikowski, the subject of which was Polish as spoken by the Jewish people of Poland before 1939. When the caller asks the operator to put him through, he says:

- Proszę mnie połączyć z numerem 33 [czydzieści czy]. (the audience laughs at the use of 'cz' instead of 'trz')
- [operarator says something to him]
- Mój numer, słodziutka? 333 [czysta czydzieści czy]. (the audience laughs again)
- ...Kuba?
- Jaki Kuba?
- Goldberg!
- A jeżeli Kuba, to kto mówi?
- Ale czy to Kuba, bo jak nie Kuba, to moje nazwisko nic Pana nie powie ... (the audience laughs at the wrong use of 'Pan-a' here)

In rare cases the word "effect" can be used as a verb that essentially means "to bring about," or "to accomplish." For example, you could say, "Z-darius hoped to effect changes in koala's arrogant behaviour."

For God's sake, man, he used the word "interference" as "something that hinders, obstructs, or impedes", not as a "variation of wave amplitude that occurs when waves of the same or different frequency come together." And it is perfectly OK to say that the city lights interfere with your star gazing activity. It seems that your ego interferes with the common sense and the topic of this thread.

Please don't. You have already put in question your ability to understand, and even to accept reputable sources. Caltech IS a reputable source and it's nobody's fault but yours that you see the world through the narrow prism of your field, whatever it is, and through the tight constraints of your ego.


How was I wrong? Care to explain?


Yet again you have shown that you do not care for facts, and that your understanding of concepts and words hits some walls once in a while. I think you should refrain yourself from trying to teach me English. That, as already proven, would be an uneven fight. While your English is undoubtedly very good, you still lack the polish and and experience with some of more nuanced and off the beaten track expressions. Even though it has been already explained how you erred, I will point you to one of the more popular databases created by linguists

merriam-webster.com/dictionary/effect?show=1&t=1306239843
Yes, some of those have been around for centuries, and they are very efficient.

You original wording:


The way you put interference in brackets would suggest that interference causes Venus not to visible. People use brackets to give more specific explanations that aren't relevant to the main issue, not to throw even more general and incorrect statements, so instead of admitting that you had no idea what interference is, you start personal insults. How typical. Anyway, if you want a reliable source on the matter, I recommend Caltech's "The Feynman's lectures on physics" vol. 2


You surely do a lot of misspellings for an expert, I thought this was another one of them. I never saw "effect" used as a verb (or saw it only on message boards) and my American friend once told me how their teacher were bashing them for misspelling effect/affect back in middle school.


The original wording clearly suggests the physical phenomenom.

People use brackets for various reasons. Since we have already established that linguistics is not your strong side, I'll leave it to you do research that aspect of the field. In this case you will be dealing with "prescriptive linguistics". It's a minefield, so thread carefully.


Nothing to admit. You accept one Caltech source (I have the book at home) but reject another. Interesting, huh? I tend to agree with another poster when he mentions something about the negative influence of your ego.

Interference is used in many context and light pollution is one of its forms that can cause people to miss what they would have noticed in the absence of the interfering factor. Yes, term noise could be also used, as it is also used in other contexts, including radiation (e.g. noise to signal ratio).


Not trying to be a dick or noth'n' but I'm not sure you are in a position to judge my English skills, especially that you appear to be a one-word-one-meaning kinda guy. Free your mind for chrissake!

I also never claimed mastery in typing so yes, I'll commit a typo here and there. I have a girl who does typing for me, but I can't really ask her to do it for me on PF.


One American's anecdotal story is meaningless to my use of "effect" as the application of either word will depend on the context. He likely used it in a wrong one. As you now know, I used a correct word in a corre3ct context. It';s fine to get some info from various forums, but you always need to verify with reputable sources.


Both light and speech are physical phenomena. From a scientific point of view EVERYTHING around us is physical in nature (including lights), at least for the last 13.7B years.