History / Slavic vs Germanic thinking.... and the philosophical differences [251]

More simply put, on a German map, "Warszawa" appears (less often nowadays, I admit, but earlier) as "Warschau", on an American map as "Warsaw", same for "Toruń", "Poznań" < "Thorn", "Posen" etc..

The French refer typically to "Varsovie" and "Cracovie"...

Language / Should I learn Polish or she learn English? [83]

Grubas,

It really cuts both ways. There are some Poles who sound practically as fluent, accurate and aesthetically pleasing as any erudite Anglophone could hope for, while others sound like vulgar cartoon characters, a poor parody of every Lech, Maciej and Mieszko who ever cracked open an English reader and tried sounding out the words:-) No offense.

The same for Anglophone Polish speakers. Some sound truly ridiculous and had best use an interpreter who is bilingual in both languages. Then again, there is the rare foreigner and non-Slav to boot who speaks and writes a perfect Polish. Sadly, I'm but merely such a wannabe.....though in time I'm sure I'll get there, though many will probably already be collecting Social Security by that stageLOL

Language / Should I learn Polish or she learn English? [83]

Hear, hear Sobieski! Couldn't concur more:-)

Now, let's hope it resonates with some of those lazy ex-pats out there who think the world should dance to their (out-of) tune!!

Language / I need advice - how long does it take to learn Polish? [70]

RIGHT ON, BUSTER!! That's tellin' him:-)

There's an old saying, first penned by Mark Twain: "To learn English takes one thirty days, French, thirty months,.....and German, thirty YEARS!!!"

Language / I need advice - how long does it take to learn Polish? [70]

Exactly Kevvy! You've got it. This is one reason Russians especially, and Poles also to a degree tend to sound rather "primitive, Me-Tarzan-You-Jane" when speaking English, French or even German:

Shopkeeper: Mister! Take please fast. Customers waiting.

US Shopkeeper: Pardon, sir! D'you mind expediting your purchase(s), there are other guests behind you.

Language / I need advice - how long does it take to learn Polish? [70]

And if the stray Pole, seeing your heroic efforts to speak his/her "unpronounceable" tongue, casts a chirpy English greeting your way, "HALLAOO!" as they often do in that sort of nasal drone of theirs, just politely respond in your best Polish and that usually does the trick.

Delphiandomine, you're right on the money!

Poles, like many other Europeans, become most impatient with this Anglo-American habit of smiling before an exceptionally indirect, super-polite request, rather than simply getting right to the point and making their request plain without warming up, e.g. "Hi there! Howya doin'? When you have a chance, would you kindly let me have the check/bill?" etc.. Poles just say, "Proszę o rachunek!", Germans, "Zahlen, bitte!" (lit. "Pay, please!") and so on.

Language / I need advice - how long does it take to learn Polish? [70]

Pre-empting Kevvy's response for the moment, Polish orthography is MUCH more straightforward, I dare say, transparent, than English with her umpteen silent letters, muted vowels and swallowed dipthongs! Polish consonant clusters personally pale by comparison. Take for instance "P - R - Z - Y.." before a word; it's ALWAYS going to be pronounced as a "P - S - Z.." (using Polish phonetics here) and nothing else.

So much for the consistency of Polish phonology.

Granted, the inflectional morphology of Polish, verbal aspects and number quirks CAN indeed leave the rest of us non-genii out there scratching our heads:-)

Language / I need advice - how long does it take to learn Polish? [70]

The most daunting, and surely (one of) the most rewarding, no?
:-)

Saying hello's half the battle right there. Kevvy. It's the goodbye part that keeps people reelingLOL

History / Slavic vs Germanic thinking.... and the philosophical differences [251]

Let's concede the fact that Copernicus was a native "Pole":-)

Nothing changes the fact that the borders between Poland and that-time "Germany" were often blurrier than my historical knowledge has ever been!

History / Slavic vs Germanic thinking.... and the philosophical differences [251]

That's not the point of the thread though. We're supposed to be comparing Germanic and Slavic world views. Even if contemporary Slavs and Germans express themselves to one another in English rather than in German or another language, their thoughts, be they in English, will nonetheless be filtered through the lense of their native language/culture:-)

History / Slavic vs Germanic thinking.... and the philosophical differences [251]

Hitler in fact re-named many Polish city names, e.g. £ódź became "Litzmannstadt", later morphing into simply "Lodsch" for the German tongue and its unfamiliarity with Polish phonology:-)

Language / Dla Anii or Ani? [17]

Ah yes, the old standby indeed:-) Many thanks, natanielcz! Never too "old" for posting pertinent info.
I at least need to review ^^

News / Poland progresses in PISA ranking. 5th place in Europe and 14th in World [16]

Whoa, let's please NOT confuse technical "skills" themselves with technical "training"!! Not intending here to be pedantic, advances in technology run concomitant with the level of infrastructure already in place at the time such new technologies are introduced. It is true that in contrast to, say, Finland or Sweden, Poland's infrastructure was practically Third World prior to the collapse of Communism. Indeed, her educational system across the board, save for perhaps music performance (e.g. The International Chopin Piano Competitions), was in a shabby state of affairs. This was of course hardly the case with either Finland or Sweden. Therefore, the skill level of Poles pre- Globalization was concurrent with her emerging technology. Training, on the other hand, may well have been equal to that received in Finland from at least a purely THEORETICAL point of view. It was then primarily the hands-on application which was inferior:-)

History / Slavic vs Germanic thinking.... and the philosophical differences [251]

Would I point out Thorn on a map? - You find me a German map (either prior to or from the Hitler Era) and I'd be delighted:-)

"Never met a Pole who would claim that Grass as being Polish."

Then you haven't lived, my friendLOL

My knowledge of history is continually evolving, Ironside. How about yours?

History / Slavic vs Germanic thinking.... and the philosophical differences [251]

Yes, it is typical to adapt the spelling of both geographical as well as personal names to a given language. Yet what you're describing is something quite different from historical primogeniture. Indeed, very possibly Copernicus was a Pole, and yet perhaps certain German nationalists claimed him as their own for the same reason that certain Poles honestly claim the writer Guenter Grass as a Pole, despite the fact that he was born in Danzig, at one time GERMAN!! That one of his parents was a Kaszub/Kaschub/Cashubian and the other an ethnic German merely fuels the debate!

Good hunting, folksLOL

News / Poland progresses in PISA ranking. 5th place in Europe and 14th in World [16]

While PISA may not in fact be one hundred percent reliable all of the time, I'm scarcely surprised by Poland's stature within Europe. Compared with Sweden, Iceland, even Germany (whom Poland leads !!!!!), the usual suspects (LOL), Poland has always been a terribly underestimated nation, in my opinion. When you look at the achievement of individual Poles throughout history, it's most impressive, by anyone's yardstick.

History / Slavic vs Germanic thinking.... and the philosophical differences [251]

Ironside, the period during which Copernicus (I decided to use the international, i.e. English, spelling) was born and lived was considered quite DEFINITELY the "First German Empire" otherwise known univerisally as the Holy Roman Empire!!! Present-day Polish territory on which the contemporary Republic of Poland lies was at one time the cultural heritage of German sovereigns, the presence of a Polish royal family notwithstanding.

If not, why then the dual naming of a majority of Polish towns such as Toruń/Thorn, Bytom/Beuthen, Jasna Góra/Hellberg etc.. other than owing to GERMAN colonization during the earlier era of the Teutonic Knights??

No, Copernicus may well have been of Polish "blood", even language, but a German by birth.

@TheOther et al. I'm not a German national:-)

Language / Polish was chosen the HARDEST LANGUAGE in the world to learn... :D [1558]

Yeah, same difference:-) It's still WRONG!!
lol

History / Slavic vs Germanic thinking.... and the philosophical differences [251]

Kopernikuś is justifiedly claimed by BOTH countries as one of their own, much as Chopin/Szopen is claimed as French by France because of his father's birth, but Polish by Poland because his mother was Polish and he was born in Poland, not France. When Kopernikuś/Kopernigk was born, the city of Thorn (Toruń) was part of the territory still belonging to the German Empire:-)

News / Are the Germans taking back Świnoujście? [22]

Ironside, although technically Poland was one of the countries in Europe NOT to be occupied by the Nazis, this by no means signifies that there weren't as many collaborators as there were resistance fighters!

Language / Polish was chosen the HARDEST LANGUAGE in the world to learn... :D [1558]

The point is, that Kohlisms, much like supposed "Bushisms", reflect a degree of questionable usage in both languages:-)
Turkish-German?? The only such lapse with which I'm even vaguely familiar apropos this topic is the phrase "Ich habe fertig!" allegedly uttered by a well-known Italian soccer star playing against Germany during the World Cup in or around 1970-something.

The grammar's wrong, although clearly "foreign".

Not exactly analogous, but, anyway....

Language / Polish was chosen the HARDEST LANGUAGE in the world to learn... :D [1558]

Thanks! Forgot about THAT faux pas as wellLOL

Language / Polish was chosen the HARDEST LANGUAGE in the world to learn... :D [1558]

Believe too that your Helmut Kohl was known to have coined (or at least popularized) an especially questionable grammatical usage in German "Dieses unsere Vaterland..." (This our...), something mimicked to death by cabaret comics over the decades:-)

When last in Germany, a twenty-something year-old chap confronted me and asked why I bother speaking to him in German. After throwing a few verses of Christian Morgenstern at him, I then asked the astounded fellow whether he'd ever even heard of W.S Gilbert of the "dynamic duo" of Gilbert & Sullivan. After much hemming and hawing he confessed he hadn't.

So much for his EnglishLOL

History / Slavic vs Germanic thinking.... and the philosophical differences [251]

Ironside, whilst it is true that the German Empire settled only sparingly, "colonizing" places such as Tanganyika (formerly German East Africa), Cameroon (Kamerun) and parts of the Central Congo, namely by Carl Peters the explorer, compared with France, Britain, Portugal or Spain, don't forget either that had Hitler won the war, practically ALL of Europe, Russia, perhaps the US herself, would have become enslaved through one of the most massive colonization efforts the world has ever seen since the mighty Genghis Khan himself several thousand years prior:-)

A further major difference between so-called Slavic vs. Germanic thinking revolves around this peculiarly German idea of "Weltfroemmigkeit", something nearly impossible to translate accurately, but approximating "secular piety", the notion that the external world holds sway over the spiritual, that obedience to the higher law supersedes even the belief in God, and that finally disobeying this supreme will represents an even greater crime than murder, the latter idea being extracted from Kant's Critique!! It could be argued that Kant's philosophy would've been non-existent without the foundation laid by this turning away from a monotheistic God as the cornerstone of civilized society.

This philosophical tradition of secular piety has no equivalent in any Slavic culture with which I'm even partly familiar.

Apologies there, Ironside! My post was meant for PlasticPole.
:-)))

Language / Polish was chosen the HARDEST LANGUAGE in the world to learn... :D [1558]

The same may be said for English:-)

Nice message, JanMovie!

History / Slavic vs Germanic thinking.... and the philosophical differences [251]

Yes and no to your riposte, Ironside et al.

Indeed, Prussia did seek tremendous expansion throughout the 18th and on into the mid-19th century prior to the 1871 Unification of the German Empire under Bismarck. The Hugenots however claimed practically 'asylum' status as a persecuted minority in staunchly Catholic France, thus Prussia merely offered them their succor as a supposed "free" state (although of course, she wasn't "free" at all)!

Read Hans Kohn's "The Germans" published (in English, by the way) in 1960. He gives a wonderfully comprehensive account of the so-called shibboteth surrounding "Germanic" thinking, providing a layman's groundwork for the trends and currents which eventually lead to the rise of totalitarianism to its Teutonic apotheosis in the figure of the Fuehrer. Plessner's "Nationhood Deferred: On the Political Gullibility of the Bourgeoise Intellect" (1933?? and reprinted in 1959) offers a more religious explanation for the foundations of Nazism as due to the slow, yet ineluctable decline of Christian brotherly acceptance of the equality of man as subjugated by the insurmountable control foisted upon the Church by the petty princes, fiefdoms, duchies and kingdoms within the Holy Roman Empire, making the healthy growth of enlightened democracy as practiced in England. France or the fledlging United States of America, nearly impossible.

News / Poland and Germany should unite, says Lech Walesa [72]

Not amongst the mainstream population, McDouche! However there always crops up some adjit-prop fringe group which asserts its insane desire to re-annex fomer "Prussia" with the present German republicLOL

Life / Polish people are the most ignorant people in the world! [331]

The thread, I believe, consists in establishing that Polish people are the most "ignorant", i.e. LEAST educated, and not the stupidest:-) You're quite right, of course. Having attended and even graduated university hardly means one has more smarts than someone who hasn't!

Language / Frustrated Polish Learner -- people in Poland try to speak to me in English [31]

Dear Frustrated!

My time-tested advice is (and always has been!!) that when Europeans start getting smart-alecky and answering back in broken English, you know you're up s*****t creek without a paddle, let me put it to you that way:-)

In brief, iniquitius non carborundum est - just continue speaking to them in Polish and sooner or later (most likely the former) they'll have little recourse but do do as they ought to have done from the outset; answer in Polish ^^

Hang in there and be a Polishfighter )))

History / Slavic vs Germanic thinking.... and the philosophical differences [251]

In essence, scholars of Germany, from Friedrich Meinecke through Gordon Craig, have basically agreed that the foundations of Germanic "thinking" were shaped primordially by the drive for territorial expansion, dating back to the days of the Teutonic Knights during the early Middle Ages! This eternal quest throughout history for a "Volksgemeinschaft", one of those almost untranslatable concepts in German meaning roughly "community of race and nationhood", shaped a good deal of German history right on through and culminating in Hitler's Third Reich!

Slavic history was shaped by different currents, whereby culture more than sheer territorial expansion, informed Slavic thinkers and writers. Poles such as Mickiewicz saw themselves as both proud Poles as well as historically Baltic ("Litwo, ojczyno moja.!") in nature. Russian philosophers saw a kind of Russian "melos" or cultural melancholy as informing the pessimistic "Russian soul".

Clichees perhaps, and yet much of history can be boiled down to general trends and developments.