Polish words that sound funny?

With pleasure, you f***** American moron. He should kick you out first because it was none of your business to know how those Polish workers talk to themselves in Polish.


Then the manager should kick your wife out as a kind of bonus for you from the house. That would make both of you rather reluctunt to come to the establishment again and complain of the Polish language spoken on the premises in whatever form. That in turn would have solved any the language problem with Polish that anyone might have at that clinic in future: you, your wife, the Polish workers and last, but not least, the manager himself. Problem solved! And remember, you really should consider lobotomy as a very good method of erasing your Polish experience along with the Polish language!


I am for it. It then would be "it who knows where honey is" rather than "it who eats honey". It is interesting that in Russian the starting consonant is "m" (miedwied'), whereas in Polish it is "n" (niedźwiedź). Likewise, we have "Mikołaj", while the Russians have "Nikołaj", but this time it is the other way round!

It's m in every other Slavic language that I've checked except Ukrainian, where they reverse the elements to get vedmid'

I try not to think about Mikołaj because it took me an embarrassingly long time to realize that it was in fact the Polish equivalent of Nicholas... even after seeing the fricking Święty Mikołaj guys in early December - I thought that maybe Mikołaj was just a local end of year winter guy like Ded Moroz for Russians... and somehow just blanked out the first name of Kopernik...


You're assuming he hasn't? I thought it was a botched job that left him babbling and typing incoherently while he drools all over himself... maybe that's why he doesn't know anything about his own mother.....

Isn't it smingus? Although swingus would definitely be better...

Yeah you are probably right but I have been working on my own new language "ponglish" and its coming on jollly dobry how about kurwa F**k I invented that too, all seems to be going down well here where i live.

Actually it's Śmigus-dyngus, often abbreviated to śmigus (or rephrased as 'lany poniedziałek')

Humor is all relative anyhow, folks!

I certainly was not wrong once upon a time in finding "niedzwiedz" comical any more than my Polish buddy was in feeling the same for "water closet".

It's about how individual auditory canals process particular sounds in their inner ear. There are also purely private associations one has with any particular word, perhaps reminding them of a word in their native language:-)

@dolno, the English word "bear" isn't funny to me.

Agreed,but for me,as someone with English as my first language,"Niedzwiedz" just sounds normal.
But "Water Closet" is funny....

Social conventions, agreed! That was in fact my point.

This is from the Polish Consulate website. It's almost funny.

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This is not a language. It's a form of torture and it should be illegal.
BTW, what happened to Pan? Now, I am ty? Don't we have to get seriously drunk first for "ty"? I feel insulted and disrespected with that ty instead of Pan.

Any more tortuous than a Pole who's learned English and in the US for several years getting involved with:

"The party of the first part, hereinafter known as the party of the first part,
while not in any wise related to the second party of the first part, herein-
after referred to as related, either by marriage, blood, or non-connubial
consent......." ??!

Your ethnocentrism is showing again, Rich ol' boy! It's all relative in the end:-)

@Lyzko

Nice post....... :-)

If your brain operates as well as that quoted sentence reads, it's not hard to figure out why we are unable to communicate. Is English your primary language?

Secondly, what you quoted is from a legal contract, written by lawyers for lawyers. What I quoted is meant for the Polish cleaning ladies. I would bet even you don't understand that crap.

Hey, what happened to "Pan"? I thought that "ty" is very offensive. Or so I was told when I brought up the idiocy of "Prosze Pana".

Educated Poles however, would certainly understand your previously posted sentence, therein lies the difference!
Technical Polish, legalese English, where's the dichotomy?

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Hell vs heaven.

They would, of course. And not only "educated" Poles. These sentences, albeit long, are written in simple Polish which readily comprehensible to everyone genuinly Polish.


Non-Polish trolls, however, may perceive them as a form of torture, I agree.

I would bet that the English version is a lot easier to read and understand to any bilingual person.

Have you given up all pretense that you were ever a fluent speaker of Polish? Cause only a monolingual person would write something so monumentally silly....

No way dude... English is a far harder language to learn due to all the strange rules and exceptions. German, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Russian, Polish etc all have pretty simple grammar rules and generally words are written exactly as they're pronounced. That's not the case in English. Some say English is harder to learn than Chinese.

Well, as a native English speaker myself, and having studied three languages before I encountered Polish, it's much harder than either German, French or Irish, although I suppose I can't be that objective about Irish as I was only four when I started learning and we had a lot talking before we touched any grammar. Mind you I still don't really undersand the fine nuances of Irish grammar, I just know how something should sound but often couldn't explain the rules of why!


I rarely agree with Rich Mazur but I would have to say that frequently I feel tired just looking at a Polish sentence before I ever begin reading it. I usually precede it with 'God Almighty' and actually take a deep breath before I start, then plough my way wearily through it, muttering plenty of good old Anglo-Saxon oaths under my breath as I go along. German is just as bad though in a different way because of all the bloody clauses. French is lovely, very pleasant to look at and read, for an English speaker.

However, to a native Polish speaker the above example given by Rich looks perfectly normal. Mr Atch wouldn't bat an eyelid at it.

Indeed. It tortures them because they can't even begin to read it. And well, Polish existing is also a form of torture who would prefer a different language being used in Poland, perhaps one spoken on the northern border.


So you have to bet now? Good to know that you aren't actually Polish. Now, can you drop the silly pretence?


Yeah, especially with all the non-natives using it for communication too in their own way. Something like Polish is much easier, because the accent in Chełm isn't radically different to the one in Jelenia Góra. English? Forget about it.

My only issue with Polish is the alphabet, but that's a cultural thing and isn't going to change.

Here is a real jewel for you, Ms Atch. Something about the Irish language in ...Polish. A book I would have never expected to be written in Poland by a Polish author. The book tells about the revival of the Irish "ethnic" book after the year 1922. "Ethnic" meaning here books written in the genuine Irish language.

Odrodzenie irlandzkiej książki etnicznej i jej rola w kształtowaniu kultury nowego państwa; Anna Cisło; Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Wrocławskiego 2018.

Wow! That's lovely. Thank you.

Japanese find a Polish word 'papieros' beautiful.

Lithuanian?


What would you prefer, a professor (Polish academic title) who would know once told me that in the 1950s there was serious thought given to reform (in the direction of Czech) but that it was finally decided to leave it alone.

Just changing some consonants and leaving the vowels alone, how does this look?

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Slightly to the left a bit. Or maybe to the right (I was there a couple of months ago and didn't hear a word of Belarusian, though the Russian spoken in Brest is actually very pleasant to the ear - well worth a trip now that there's an easy visa-free way of getting in).


I'd rather it used Cyrillic to avoid the diacritical mess - there's actually a well thought out example here: steen.free.fr/cyrpol/index.html

I'm particularly fond of "щ". But yes, it's interesting how Czech orthography ended up winning the "Slavic alphabet race" and not Polish in the 19th century. Your example of Czech looks neater, but it's still plagued with the diacritical marks and the horror that is ř.

English "broad beans" translate to "bób" in Polish, which is pronounced very similar to Eng. "boob"

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

To me an old Polish local dialect words sound funny:

kociuba

wątpia

gęśla

Świnoujście, Zakopane, bzdury, pierdole, chalupa.

"La chalupa" though, with the absence of the Polish l-sound, is a word in Mexican Spanish, believe it or not:-)

Fintifluszka, faramuszka