WHY DO POLES USE ENGLISH WORDS IN CONVERSATION?

When you see Å - you say /o/ actually. Once knowing this it stops being funny. But before that.... I agree ;)

...and when you misspronounce ö it becomes ø, right? LOL

Yep. Pretty much, ha ha. - Or if you come from a province or speak a dialect of some kind;). Skåne being an example - hard to understand and sounds funny everywhere outside Skåne län region.

These are borrowings, mainly lexical. Please educate yourself on this subject as it is too vast to present it here. Every language contains it. The most popular are nowadays from english, as it is the most commonly spoken language nowadays. "Drives me nuts", eh? -Pffft!

Actually there is a word in Polish such as bekon as well. Also manager (manadżer) is functioning for at least 20 years if not longer. That's normal thing to happen - borrowing words from other languages. I think i dont have such problems with taking words from other languages as with changing POLISH words to make them sound more like eg English. The example would be dzięks :S

'Bekon" is not "boczek".
A "happening" is a specific form of artistic expression.
A "kierownik" is not a "menedżer". Different position, different responsibilities.
You can say hit, you can say przebój. It's up to you. Usually, words of one syllable tend to be more popular than polysyllabic words - I wonder why?

Don't worry about the Polish language. It's doing just fine.

Or, if you prefer, please feel free to chastise Poles for using words such as "rower", "radio", "komputer", "geometria", "ratusz", "fartuch", "pomidor", "kościół", "cmentarz", "rezultat"... the list is endless. Good luck.

OK, I will, I will.

And may I ask the court to take these other offences into consideration:
- Makaronizm in the 17/18th centuries (written Polish of the upper classes was a mashup of Polish and Latin);
- wholesale borrowings from Ukrainian (hajduczka) and Turkic (czambuł) eg. in the works of Sienkiewicz;
- scientific vocabulary taken en masse from Latin and Greek roots in the 18th/19th century despite a movement to slavicise these words (eg. drobnowid for microscope, et al);

- French calques entering the language along with the Napoleonic armies (wernisaż, kredens, żaluzje);

What were these people thinking? :)

A

Apparently there weren't any polish equivalents to name these objects. Usually the use of borrowings is well grounded. Only sometimes is caused by snobism, but then those word don't survive.

Nowadays we "borrow" from English, 200 years ago or more (I'm not sure) we would borrow from French.Later from German, etc.
How many people know that 'sport" is a borrowing? Or "dżem"? Or the new usage of word "generalnie"? and many more..

On reflection I was probably joking. Variety is the spice of life - and of language too. People who advocate linguistic monocultures must be crucifyingly boring at dinner parties.

I have to admit I'm quite partial to some of the new formulations coming out of the young London Polish community. Shan't be using any of them myself, it would sound silly in my voice except as parody or imitation, but the sense of invention is fun. Czirs!

Does anyone here think foreign words or phrases used in Polish (jestem happy, jadłem sandwicze z cateringu etc) is undermining Polish/Slavonic culture? Or any other culture come to that? Read "Language In Danger" by Andrew Dalby. He maintains that the loss of local idioms and language is a loss to that particular community, as local knowledge is lost, ie names of healing plants which grow locally. I know I'm not being as articulate here as I should be (limited time on computer), but I'm sure you get the gist.

Many sociolinguists of a more crusading inclination are apt to confuse cause with effect. Why are the names of healing plants forgotten? Because hardly anyone (academic sociolinguists very much included) don't actively engage in that way of life.

In the Polish case you'd have to reverse a LOT of postwar history to rebuild the idea of 'local community' as understood here. In Britain, for example, villagers can often trace their ancestry back centuries. This becomes very difficult when sizeable chunks of your population get forcibly resettled over the other side of the country, and usually in urban centres.

I think, though, as a matter of citizen duty that every Pole should know his sowy from his prawdziwki. I hope that continues or I'm not buying mushrooms from anyone!

I agree, "jestem happy" is just plain stupid. Ponglish at its most brain dead.

But - a "sendwicz" is not a "kanapka" - and the difference is understood in Poland.
"Catering" is also an imported idea, there is NO domestic equivalent, so the word stays, even the original spelling has been retained.

And so it goes on.

Agreed, Magdalena, though if in the past, Poles created new words intrinsically Polish, such as samochód (that which goes by itself - a horseless carriage), and samolot (that which flies by itself - originally aeroplen, in Polish), then why not create new words now? A Polish friend in London made me cringe when he said "jestem bardzo tired po long dayu". Oh Gawd!

OK - your Polish equivalent of "catering" please :-)
I won't try because I know any Polish version would be a mile long and twice as clumsy.


I fully agree with you on that one. I really feel like slapping some people who do that! But this is IMO a separate phenomenon. Some people seem genetically predisposed to "shedding their language" as soon as they find themselves immersed in a different culture. I do believe that some of them honestly forget their mother tongue and it's horrible to see them struggling for the right phrase or mangling the pronunciation.

What is most shocking is the fact that some of them are very young, straight out of school, and after 6 months in London they are unable to string a coherent sentence together in Polish. But neither in English. And they stay that way for good. I think a good linguist could take this on as a research project, it's fascinating and repulsive at the same time.

Isn't it "menedźer", though?


add "w nursing homie" to that sentence, and that could have been my ex. lmao :)

What annoys me is if someone from Poland corrects me on an incorrect pronunciation... of an English word adopted into Polish! That's even worse than Americans who correct British people because they can't spell U.S. English words like "tires" or "color" lol.

Or Polish people who throw all these English words into Polish speech all the time, but if you ask them a question in English, they say "sorry I don't speak English" lol :D

No, it's "menedżer".


Maybe you can give some example? and as u said it's ADOPTED so the pronounciation of adoped word in Polish doesnt need to be the same as original pronounciation or i misunderstood? But the correcting thing is annoying, i agree (you are very touchy btw).

You know what I meant. Stupid Google :p

:)

You googled the word or u didnt have the font? I thought you can write in Polish well. Well, it seems u do from your posts in Polish (i had to check the spelling myself though, i only knew it cant be dź lol )

Now that's a bit over the top, innit (Polish translation: 'odjebało mu?')


Because they happen to be awkwardly lengthy, and they sound somehow ridiculous, now. Possibly it's easier to accept a completely new sound for a new thing, than to bend yourself backwards to derive it from 'purely' Polish material.

Now I look at my first sentence here, and I see it works both ways. It's perfectly legit to say in Polish 'no to już wygląda na lekką przesadę, nieprawdaż?', but my original translation is like more handy, and much more to the point, huh? :)

Edit: didn't refresh the page, my bad. Magdalena answered it much better.

Obviously, but I wanted to make sure that I was right and it was "menedzer" not "manadzer", because I would have looked pretty stupid if you had been right, and not me.

Still, I can see that you have a problem with me, whatever I write, but I can live with that, lol.

But I'm going to keep on saying "kartofle" even if you do think it makes me common :p

Poland is English dominion. That`s why

I dont have any problem with u really; it's just if we agreed on everything we would have nothing to talk about ;)

And i corrected the word only coz it seemed funny :P I did google it too lol


lol
I like zupa kartoflana but i havent had it for ages. And with kartofle - u were right about using some words in normal speach and different ones when giving a talk at the conference for instance. It doesnt make anyone common, it's just normal.

I thought we're USA's 51st state! We're America's poodle and America is Israel's poodle.


Kartofle is more German and ziemniaki (earthies) is more Polish.

Is it? People from the eastern past of Poland use it frequently so I would not be so sure of that. Anyway, the proper word for potatoe is pyra! :)

That's more a word from the Poznań region.

I'd never heard this word until I saw it a few years ago on this forum. For quite some time, I thought it was a word invented by JustysiaS lol :)

Here's another phrase I heard in Ponglish: Moje dzieci na streecie playują. Time to write a new 'słownik-ary', it seems.

I rage anytime I hear or read such phrases.

recently i read "streetartysta"

and this one, which i have to assume is taken from English, "harde slowa" which from context translated to "harsh words".

i still laugh at this t-shirt circulating around recently.....written in big white letters on a black t-shirt: "Jestem Hardcorem"

I doubt it's from English (if it is, it's not a present-day borrowing as it is a quite old-fashioned word) - in Polish there is a word "hardy", for example: "hardy człowiek" (a haughty man).

sjp.pl/co/hardy