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Posts by Lyzko  

Joined: 12 Jul 2013 / Male ♂
Warnings: 2 - AO
Last Post: 8 hrs ago
Threads: 45
Posts: 9,464
From: New York, USA
Speaks Polish?: tak
Interests: podrozy, rozrywki, sport

Displayed posts: 9509 / page 10 of 317
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Lyzko   
23 Jan 2024
USA, Canada / Where can I meet Polish women in Chicago [85]

I'm not trolling! I was merely making a remark about a well known movie
about Polish life in Chicago, nothing more!
You extrapolated something from the message which wasn't there.
Lyzko   
22 Jan 2024
Language / Is it possible to master the Polish language fluently for a non-Polish speaker? [120]

@Mowiciel prawdy,
I find it interesting if nothing else, that one of the master stylists
in the English language, Joseph Conrad, was a Pole who didn't
learn English until his was a young merchant seaman.

They say he spoke with a heavy Polish accent, yet his writing
seems to reveal no such interference.
Never once did I suspect he was anything but a native English
speaker until I was in my last year in high school and learned
he was a Pole from a well-born family.
Lyzko   
22 Jan 2024
Life / Jerzy Kosinski: Are his works popular in Poland? [48]

Thanks so much for your timely response. His biography, not to mention
his professional resume, is indeed impressive. Never quite understood why
he was ever so dogged by plagiarism during the latter phase of his relatively
short life.
Lyzko   
22 Jan 2024
Life / Jerzy Kosinski: Are his works popular in Poland? [48]

His much tanished reputation notwithstanding
along with his sporadic successes in the US, I'm curious
as to how Kosinski, a Polish Jew who wrote in English and who as an adult always lived abroad ,
is currently received in the land of his birth.
Lyzko   
22 Jan 2024
Language / Is it possible to master the Polish language fluently for a non-Polish speaker? [120]

Polish has an exceptionally elaborate morphology, complete
with a conservative system of productive prefixed verbs which
require a more subtle usage than their English equivalents.The
concept of "imperfective" vs. "perfective" can drive many a learner
to distraction!

For example, "pisac" (to be engaged in the act of writing) vs. "NApisac" (to have completed the act of writing) vs. "pisYWac" (to be continually writing),

and finally "ROZpisYWac" (to write until one's fingers are about to fall off, figurately speaking of course) etc...

English requires explanation more than translation, whereas in Polish, the prefixes themselves do all the work.
Lyzko   
21 Jan 2024
Language / Is it possible to master the Polish language fluently for a non-Polish speaker? [120]

@Mowiciel prawdy, Norwegian's a most apt example, actually.
Nynorsk isn't even a centuries' old language, but a construct
based on Ivar Aasen's attempt during the mid-19th century to return Norwegians to their
true Norse roots by extricating all Dano-Norwegian aka Bokmaal/Riksmaal words from the language in a sort of nativist, peasant revolt.
He succeeded!
Lyzko   
21 Jan 2024
USA, Canada / Where can I meet Polish women in Chicago [85]

And you remind me of a guy who WISHES he were trapped in the 1940's
and pretends his isn't.

There was much to be said for the immediate post-War Era, my friend.
Lyzko   
21 Jan 2024
Language / Is it possible to master the Polish language fluently for a non-Polish speaker? [120]

This discussion reminds me of a most engaging debate between linguists
during a symposium headed by the Canadian Prof.Steven Pinkert, in which the concept
of dialect vs. language was being discussed.

A gentleman rose during the session and quipped, a dialect is merely an appendage
to a language, whereas the latter is merely a dialect with an army and a navy behind it.

Standardization, as I've said before, is as much political, indeed social, as it is linguistic!
:-)
Lyzko   
20 Jan 2024
Language / Is it possible to master the Polish language fluently for a non-Polish speaker? [120]

Allow me to qualify. The language of the Dutch West Indies/Antilles aka Papiamento is technically a pidgin,
as is the varieties of English spoken in both Hawaii as well as the Pitcairn Islands in the South Pacific.

However, Australian English for example, is not a pidgin because it remains a recognizable facsimile
of the language which we all recognize as "English", albeit spoken in a different area of the world than
the UK, same with American along with Canadian English.

Typically, pluracentric languages such as English, Spanish or French, will experience dialect variation
throughout the world as a consequence of centuries of colonization, whereby "foreign" varieties, such
as new lexic etc. are gradually added to become part of the base vocabulary.

Polish on the other hand has no known pidgins or varieties of language owing to colonialist expansion
as the language is primarily, indeed almost exclusively, spoken within one country, namely Poland.

@jon, you're quite right. Yet, in my experience, the "Standard" English spoken throughout England
is still RP (Received Pronunciation), although even that pronunciation has changed considerably over
the past decades, perhaps to reflect a more brashly proletarian usage, even on the BBC.
Lyzko   
20 Jan 2024
Language / Is it possible to master the Polish language fluently for a non-Polish speaker? [120]

A pidgin in linguistics refers to a bastardized variant of an established
source tongue which, owing to political influences, has morphed into a separate
entity.

Since "British" (as opposed to "American") is the Ur- or Primordial language
from which the latter derived, I don't entirely see your point here.
Lyzko   
19 Jan 2024
Off-Topic / 75 Years of Israel and the War - part 2 [457]

Are you referring by any chance to the so-called "Kalte Amnestie" or "Cold War Amnesty" of
the 1950's in former West Germany, when literally thousands of ex-Nazis were reinstated back
into both public as well as private life....with impunity for the rest of their lives, without having
to serve one day in prison?
Lyzko   
19 Jan 2024
Language / Is it possible to master the Polish language fluently for a non-Polish speaker? [120]

No so, mowiciel!

American English has long developed into her own proud language, complete with her own
distinct vocabulary, even grammatical structures, idiom, not to mention divergent pronunciation.
Our "standard accent" is based on the "dialect" or erstwhile speech of Southern English pronunciation
from the 17th century, around the time the Puritans landed at Plymouth Rock.

Both British and American have both gone in separate directions and are as different from either
the O.E of Beowulf, the M.E. of Chaucer or the tongue of the Great Bard as day and night.
Lyzko   
19 Jan 2024
USA, Canada / Where can I meet Polish women in Chicago [85]

Unrelated to current thread, but there's an old, old movie "Northside 777" (1947) w/James Stewart
and Lee J. Cobb among many others, and it's about the Polish mob on Chicago's former North Side.
There're some snatches of Polish spoken throughout and authentic location shots of the neighborhood,
giving the film a true Polish flavor.
Lyzko   
18 Jan 2024
Off-Topic / USA News and Poland - part 8 [1557]

The question though is what does Trump bring to the ticket beside
his foul mouth, bigotted mean spiritedness, unbridled greed, and his
anti-democratic posturing, not to mention his insulting the Constitution?

The answer is, he brings nothing of lasting value whatsoever. He's been
a loser practically from the get go. Where would he have been without his
old man's billions??

He's an aberration, a threat to both democracy as well as humanity, a deep-seated
cynic and hater of people who either haven't been born with a silver spoon in their mouths
or managed to do well for themselves.

Well, if you look deeply behind the Horatio Alger "rags to riches" tales, you'll find that as
far as those who supposedly brought themselves up by their own bootstraps, that in
many instances, somebody gave 'em the boots and helped 'em tie the straps.

Even self starters have to start with at least somebody's help:-)
Lyzko   
18 Jan 2024
History / Why Poland achieved nothing at all? [69]

@jon, name for me a single famous Russian who wasn't mixed with
something else!

Pushkin for instance was half black, Lobachevsky might have been part Jewish, Shostakovich
was half-Polish, the list goes on....
Lyzko   
18 Jan 2024
Off-Topic / USA News and Poland - part 8 [1557]

I'd be most interested in seeing the exit polls in Iowa.
If Biden does in fact have even a slim lead, he's going to
fall on his keester come next Nov, 5, if he and his staff
don't wake up and start smellin' the coffee!!

He and the Dumb Dems have been losing their constituents for
more years than most of our posters have been alive.

When I came into this world during the height of Sputnik, the US
DID indeed lead the world in both technology and education.

Ever since the wonder world of open admissions, untrammeled
immigration from Latin America, beginning actually with LBJ
way back in '64, long after the Cuban Missile Crisis, and of course
the Woodstock Counter Culture, America has been on a nose dive,
a collision course with mediocrity and come a second Trump admin., we'll have crash
landed but a third time. The first time was in 1980 when Reagan
got into the White House.
Lyzko   
18 Jan 2024
Life / Poles speaking English - examples [245]

You know very well what I mean. Furthermore, eighty is not old. It's the new sixty. LOL
Thanks for the compliment. Trolling's your department too.