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

Stop using this p-a-t-r-o-n-i-s-i-n-g tone of yours towards other people on the forum! Everyone knows that your English is excellent and it would be an uneven fight to challenge it. Also, stop telling other people that their English is very good; they just know that it is worse than yours.

I wish you wrote a similar text a few pages before when I was being patronized about my Polish skills.

As the "second-in-command" here in charge of all patronizing tones, I find this interchange rather refreshing. Makes me feel less 'different':))))))

LOL

(Baaaaack..) on topic, I'm interested in the phonological evolution of earlier, i.e. 'frozen', Polish forms of the above letters ą,ć,ł,ż and how they developed into their present application. For instance, Polish de-voicing with certain letters was apparently not always so, on the contrary, certain sounds once common in everyday Polish (standard, presumably!) I've read are no longer known. When did they cease to be used? Why? Did compensatory lengthening of certain vowels occur in Proto-Slavic as was the case in Germanic?

Perhaps beyond the entire scope of the present thread, these questions intrigue me-:)

This is not my field of expertise, but I came across of a paper or two that might help you in your quest.

FrederiK Kortlandt, "West Slavic Accentuation", 18 pages, pdf file. He seems to be a Dutch scholar, although I have no clue whether or not he is any authority in this field.

there was a moment in the developement of proto-slavic that there were long and short vowels (the short vowels were the yers AFAIK - I think you can look up 'yer' in wikipedia - yers developed so that there were no closed syllables in Proto-Slavic (words looked like CVCV(CV) like in some Polynesian languages or Japanese) - the era is long gone - I don't know what was the situation before the appearence of yers (whether there were differences in vowel length) - anyway now in Polish all vowels are the same length (vowel length is not phonological?) but many Slavic languages retained vowel lenght differences (like the Czech language)

Thanks for last post, gumishu! For that matter, I might also have asked the question in reverse, namely, was there compensatory SHORTENING in Polish, after all, we've established that Polish, like Russian, has little distinction between open vs. closed vowels-:) Czech however does, as does Slovene.

@bedankt ook, Boletus-:) Ik wil heel graag deze tekst lezen!

Boletus, much appreciate once again your recommendation. Am presently purusing the Kortlandt article. Most enlightening, I must say, and indeed, so far quite on point, particularly the part on palatalization-:) Will have to read further, of course.

Wonder if the article's a translation. No errors in English up to this point, so am guessing it's been heavily edited lol

You are welcome. I am glad you like it.


Well, if you look at Frederik Kortlandt bibliography, you should notice very impressive range of his interests: ranging from Afro-Asiatic to Thracian and Tocharian. A man with such a broad language interests does not need any translator, I guess. :-)

Maybe he is another Heinrich Schliemann?

Well it would be nice if you clearly stated why you wrote that what you wrote in the brackets and a) if you knew what wave interference was at the time of writing, b) you knew that it was not wave interference that actually caused the invisibility (or weaker visibility) of stars in urban areas.

So far everything looks like you look for sketchy and far-fetched sources just not to admit that you were wrong.


There are Caltech sources and there are Caltech sources. I know Feynman's as well as the textbook's editors' contributions to physics, additionally the textbook is worldwide recommended and used tool for education on the first year of physics(-related) studies. OTOH the website you posted could be made by a freshman student.


That's hilarious. You make a lot of spelling mistakes and when I pointed that out, you spin it that I shouldn't judge your English skills. The second excuse is even more amusing, since a) you should review your text before submitting (should take ~15 seconds), b) pretty much every piece of software checks spelling and underlines unknown vocabulary, which makes correcting even easier.


Of course. But earlier on you stated you had no interest in scientific point of view.

OK, I'm out of this discussion and won't reply anymore, since it's pointless.

You know, Boletus, I've finally come to the not so silly conclusion that to be sure, it appears certain Northern Europeans, e.g. Dutch, Germans and Scandinavians, have this almost natural predisposition to language acquisition, not only English. It almost definitely has to do with their diet, since as we know, lack of balanced and regular nourishment does affect the brain's ability to process the information it absorbs.

Somehow, I don't think I'm too off the mark:)

Koala, leave us pray not judge a fellow poster on his or her orthographic glitches in order to use such as some sort of litmus test to evaluate language competence. I too often make plenty of typos, so judge me by the same yardstick while you're at it!

I didn't judge his competence though, simply stated that he does an awful lot of spelling mistakes.


I saw several German people making attempts at learning Polish and let me say they weren't natural born geniuses LOL. Even their English is usually very wonky.

As to one of your earlier questions, 'ą' used to be nasal 'a', but transformed into nasal 'o' when the long vowels disappeared in Polish. Maybe you already know that, though.

Thanks in some measure to Boletus' recommendation of the text by Prof. Kortlandt, I now know a little more, yes-:) Among the numerous areas of personal linguistic research, the most absorbing is the appearance and disappearance of certain lexemes in some Slavic languages, some of which have extant equivalents, others which don't e.g Russ. 'vremya' in Mod. Pol. I know a similar or cognate term existed in Mediaevel Polish, yet seems to have dropped off the radar screen ever since-:))!

Once I met one German guy that had such thick accent that I thought he was speaking German unless I really tried to understand what he said. German pronunciation of 'th' is especially funny.

What does 'vremya' mean?

time, moment - u mienia niet vriemieni - nie mam czasu

w eto wriemia - w tym momencie,

czas means godzina in Russian (w połowinie trietich czasow - w pół do trzeciej, w dwa czasa - o godzinie drugiej, czieriez tri czasa - za trzy godziny)


yes - for me it is even more interesting how much vocabulary we actually lost since the times of Proto-IndoEuropean (and it seems to me we lost tonns) - what I guess much what has been gained was through acquisition (borrowing) from non-IndoEuropean languages

I think most borrowings in Polish was from IndoEuropean in fact (Latin, German, English, French). From non-IE there may be just a few (from Turkish, Tatar, Magyar, Suomi maybe some Hebrew)

Cinek

of course it is true - Polish (and generally slavic) had actually little contact with non-indoeuropean languages in its history

what I mean Indoeuropean languages in general gained a lot of vocabulary through contact with non-IE languages - and some of it sifted into the Polish language through borrowings from other IE languages (Germanic, Romance, Greek)

Is anyone here familiar with "Wzdłużenie zastępcze w języku polskim" by Bogisław Dunaj (1966)?
Critiques from the more knowledgable among us would prove most insightful before I begin my own search-:)

Thanks

Not familiar with the book, just with the process of compensatory lengthening. It happened on other languages too and traces can be seen even in English. From what I remember, the process consisted of lengthening (sometimes refereed to as heightening of vowels due to the change of articulation). Polish "ó", phonetically /u/ is its consequence and it occurred before voiced consonants as yer in Polish vanished. Some modern examples, with "traces" of yer (therms used loosely here) are various noun forms such as róg - rogu, mróz - mrozu.

Compensatory lengthening took place only before voiced and nasal sounds, hence there is no "nós" but "nos" (nose).

Sorry I can't be of more help.
The yers in Slavonic, and especially its evolution in languages such as Polish still bring back some memories of horror. That, and the development of tooth in grade 9 biology :)

Excellent reference site, Dariusz, many, many thanks-:)

Merged:

Polish orthography

I have rejoined the Polish Forum after an absence of a few years. I seem to remember that some years ago there was a Polish keyboard at the bottom of the page so that Polish names etc could be written accurately. I do not speak Polish, except for a few terms, but I do write about Polish matters and I find it difficult to write the Polish words, names etc accurately with the correct accents, diacritical marks etc, as these are not found on my symbols on my computer. Am I right that Polish Forums did used to help with this? Could members please advise how to access Polish symbols. Thanks.

To use Polish letters in Windows 7 or 10, in your Windows Panel find: Languages / Keyboard and from there you can 'Add a language' - add 'Polski = Polish' - then you'll be able to use Polish letters by pressing the Alt key together with the letter, eg. Alt + n = ń, Alt + c = ć , etc.

Reference (old but useful): https://polishforums.com/archives/2005-2009/language/letters-alt-codes-3204/

All this about special Polish lettters is very interesting, but how can we have access to them on the computer? On Word the symbols section seems to be tailor-made for French, German and Spanish but Polish accents and diactrical marks cannot be found.

I realize my earlier query about orthography was answered by Nathans. Thank you. So my query today is obsolete. I am not on Polish Forum every day by any means and I just find it so difficult to navigate around or find my earlier threads. I suppose as the Germans say 'Uebung macht den Meister' or in English 'Practice makes perfect.' Sure there is a Polish proverb that says the same thing.

"Cwiczenie czyni mistrza!", literally "Exercise does/makes master", which sounds odd in English to say the least:-)