Can you BE Polish without SPEAKING Polish in the US?

" No one accuses American Poles of being Polish nationals!"
American Poles? Really? You sure you want to use that terminology for people who have Polish sounding names? Would you say Warsaw was destroyed by a German Pole? You'd be wrong if you did!

She is compromised too - you've clearly missed the point. And she may well be of Vietnamese roots, but she sure as hell isn't Vietnamese any more than someone half way across the world who randomly happens to have Polish grandparents iisn't Polish. Unless they can communicate with the majority of the nation they can never be fully part of it.

Only "plastic", sorry.


According to my observation the US too "confused" about these matters. There're no such a thing as "Russian Americans". They are either Russians or Americans. That depends on which cultural environment they were raised in. You would probably be surprised but speaking Russian is oftentimes doesn't make a Russian out of you too. I've got a friend of Russian ethnicity in the US who speaks and understands Russian (was raised bilingual) but he can be called "Russian" only by a stretch of imagination and he himself never do so. Plastic Russian? Perhaps. Not Russian for sure. He can't imagine living here, he knows nothing about the Russians who live in Russia, he speaks funny Russian as if trying to project American habits, expressions, gestures onto a Russian turn of mind. I'm not saying it's bad, but that inevitably reveals him a non-Russian.

Once one leaves their country of origin they immediately mutate. If you replant something in a different environment it may be the same species but will grow differently, and dilute the pure form in comparison to the original plant in its original environment.

this entire busia argument thing is getting more ridiculous by the day

who cares if it is not a word used in Poland now

It is becoming an obsession for some of you and it is a real bore

would you go to Australia and start correction Australians by saying that
the G in G'day ought to be pronounced as Good and that they could not
claim British ancestry as a result of having bastardised the English language?

Americans do tend to play the ancestry card when it suits them though.
Just wait till the Apaches get a licence to open a new casino in your neighbourhood and watch
all the Italian, Irish and Polish Americans who just happen to conveniently remember that
granny might have been Apache. Having said that I would do the same thing.
Furthermore, if you are a complete mutt, you will claim the ethnic group that you feel is coolest
hence Jon Bon Jovi - a self confessed mutt but he claims Italian ancestry because it probably
enabled him to walk around with a poodle hair do and not get the good kicking he deserved.

now it is my turn to go squealing to the Mods. could we have a lifetime ban for anyone
who starts squabbling over the word busia please?

It's weird you mention Apaches. My wife is super-curious about Native Americans. Is this a Polish thing? I could ask her, but she's asleep... Oh, here's and example: One time we were having drinks at Cheddar's, and Ola (my ol' lady) was CONVINCED that the Latina-looking girl bussing the table next to us was Native American. This was almost a year ago and she STILL talks about it. Weird.

not that weird. It is one of the few Indian tribes that I can spell

I was originally going to try and spell Commanchee
however now having checked it turns out it is in fact spelled

Comanche

Here's one you should have no problem remembering (yeah, it's real): Kickapoo

I've never met an Australian who claims that g'day is English: it is Aussie. Although few Aussies will thank you for pointing out that they're just a Pommie with a suntan anyway.


Ever wondered why you ever meet people who describe themselves as Welsh-American. I have, but I've got no idea why Welsh-Americans are such a rare breed.


That's somewhat unlikely, given that direct homophobic abuse doesn't even get an edit, let alone a warning. Just search for uses of 'fudgepacker'.

one can live in hope that mentioning the B word results in a lifetime ban though

homophobic abuse is the least of our worries.
we have had advocates of murder, terrorism, genocide and racism all happily posting without so much as a by your leave

stuff that even Stormfront would take a dim view of on account that it is giving neo-facism a bad name
oh the irony

impossible from phonological point of view (the accent falls on the first syllable of 'babushka')

It is clearly a Welsh-Cambodian word. And I can produce as many dictionaries to support me on that as those who claim it's a Polish word.

Getting back to the topic, does anybody else think that it's a bit odd that one does have to speak Polish in order to naturalise as Polish (i.e. one has lived here for ten years) but if one has a great-grandparent who was Polish, has never been to Poland and only wants a Polish passport in order to work in France, the things are given out without the need to even say prosze? A cynic might make some connect there between the likely skin colour of the passport applicants (but I of course would not).

The EU is sorting all this out at the moment.

It's ridiculous. There should be a mandatory language check for anyone who is claiming through either naturalization or ancestry - and it should be set quite high. I'd allow the test to be done in a national minority language too - but there should be no citizenship without language.

It's frightening to think that there are people voting out there on the basis of such websites like freepl.info. A truly terrifying site.

if you can't see that Russians did and still do mess up with the investigation and that to some extent Polish authorities collaborate in that effort (willfully or not) and that the whole thing stinks you shouldn't really read anything that contradicts your views as it must it a traumatic experience for you

Yes I already knew that. Czechs are a different thing being only about a third Slavic because of intermixing with other Europeans, they have a lot of Germanic even 'Mediterranean' blood in them. Poles are also mixed with Ukrainians, Germans, Lithuanians, Russians but it's much less then our southern neighbors. There is no doubt that a Polish look exists, or a couple. Even with a variation of hair, eye and skin shades 80% of the time you can easily tell who is Polish by their facial characteristics. Just like u can tell an Italian, Irishman, Russian etc. Saying Polish blood is really just mixed blood sounds so anti-Polish, like u'd never say that about your own heritage, u'd wanna preserve the outlook not destroy it.

Poles with foreign names?? Those people are clearly mixed. How many Poles have a Polish name? 80-90% far more. Language? c'mon that sounds silly like the Hispanics who live in the US say they're Spanish, they're Spanish speaking not Spanish. We see how the Spanish 'accept' their Hispanic friends in their country, they want nothing to do with them. Call a Ukrainian Russian, just cause he speaks it, see if he wont get offended.


No racial superiority, self identity. The language, culture, tradition, physical outlook identify a people. Most of the time who can tell who is Jewish quite easily just like anybody else. How do Americans know I'm Polish? because of my haircut? i look it.

There was an exhibition of movie posters made in Poland to advertise American Westerns at the Gene Autry museum a few years back and it was obvious that Poles are fascinated by Native Americans. Most of the American posters would have the cowboy stars on them while the Poles almost always put the Indians on the posters. The museum explained this by claiming that Poles, as another indigenous people that battled foreign invaders, identify with Native Americans. The Plains Indians with their equestrian tradition and their cockiness are particularly akin to Poles.

You mean "Polish Americans who have nothing to do with Poland identify with Native Americans".

The claim that "Poles as another indigenous people" is utterly laughable to anyone who knows the slightest thing about the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

No I don't. read my post again and maybe you will understand it was about an exhibition of movie posters from Poland, not from America, and it showed the identification.


You are wrong. Poles are indigenous to Poland, or if one believes the theory of Slavic migrations they arrived in Poland well over one-thousand years ago which makes them pretty much indigenous as well.

what do you mean by that - that it was Crimean Tatars, Bavarians, Saamis, Magyars, Lithuanians or Cumans who were indigenous population in the majority of the Kingdom of Poland (the Korona) in say A.D. 1699

Exactly.


One problem is that whenever an 'indiginous people' are mentioned, someone else can always come along and mention whatever group preceded them. Right back to the Neanderthals. The earliest known residents of Mazowsze were Burgundian.

Correct. In fact with the reunification after ww1 you can be indigenous if your ancestors were around in the late 19th century. Politically and anthropologically,indigenous is used as a contarst to invaders.

Hahahahaha "Exactly"!? How? The fact that the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was ethnically diverse does nothing to change the fact that Poland had already been a political entity for centuries before the PLC formed and that Poland was founded by the indigenous Slavs of the land. Poles in Poland are indeed another indigenous people and the claim that saying so is laughable because of a multiethinic political union that formed centuries after the original kingdom of Poland formed is really what is laughable.


It is not a problem for anyone not being ridiculous. Otherwise no homo-sapiens outside of Africa can claim to be indigenous to the lands their ancestors have inhabited for centuries. The Indo-European Slavs that migrated into Poland did so in the First Millenium, at the latest, and it was they who formed the original Polish state. Poles are an indigenous population.

The fact is that the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth finished ten generations ago and has no impact on anyone's identity today. Except perhaps fantasists'.


Twenty generations ago. Ditto.


Mad as a box of frogs.


Very true.


More of a caste. But then again, your 'knowledge' is at best third hand.

Poland is nothing to do do with what is or isn't 'indigenous' - it is a culture, united with and indivisible from a shared language.

The pride in which Polish people take in speaking "correct Polish" suggests that this is indeed correct. Even the far-right lunatics would never admit that other languages (other than Polish) have anything to do with Polish culture.


You do realise that the borders have...well...shifted a few times?

You only have to see the stigma attached to regional dialect and the shift towards a standard pronunciation of Polish to see this,

Indeed, I even saw a row break out in my class today over the proper word for a "pencil sharpener" in Polish.

I 100% agree with her, that annoys the **** out of me and I'm not even Polish!

tell it to the Kashubians

I wasn't aware that they consider their language to be either Polish or a dialect of Polish (despite post-war attempts of the Polish government to claim that it is and thus justify the stance that areas where Kashubians lived were 'recovered territories').