Off-Topic / PF - The Omnibus Edition [1502]


I only got one poem in my postbag.

polishforums.com/write_poem-41_33437_0.html

USA, Canada / Why no Polish stuff in Chicago? [41]

... and what is wrong with toothless banjo-playing retards?

Ah! I see. They're toothless banjo-playing retards.


What would be 2nd?

Life / Russian rap vs Polish rap [87]

Mysterious things happen sometimes. Russian and Polish rap isn't as mysterious as black Americans suddenly playing balalaikas and eating barszcz. I'm not sure that that has happened ever though.

I couldn't really comment on this subject. I've heard some fairly good Polish rap and some that's pretty awful. I haven't knowingly heard any Russian rap, but imagine that it's probably not very different. I'll have to scroll back to page 1.

Love / What are Polish Women like? Just started to date one. [256]

I like the bit about Polish men not looking at English women. People's personal experiences, along with the stereotypes come into play, but a man not looking at an attractive woman because she's from a country with a high divorce rate! Oh my gosh! Where do we begin? My girlfriend's Polish and she's a divorcee, just as her mother was before her (it's quite complicated and doesn't fit the vision Poles often have of their family units). They still have a strong family though, but I see a lot of strong families in this country, even after things have gone wrong.

Sapphire: remember to dance on the pub table and be sick outside afterwards. You don't want to let the side down.

Life / Polish stereotypes of other nationalities!? [472]

Most countries have both positive and negative stereotypes. The lucky ones have no stereotypes at all.

Love / What are Polish Women like? Just started to date one. [256]


This will be a first for me. I don't use internet abbreviations, but there's a first time for everything:

lol

Life / Polish stereotypes of other nationalities!? [472]


But Swedes know that their country is guilty of the crime of Ikea.

Genealogy / Red Hair - recessive gene from Poland? [108]

Isn't hair colour caused by the interplay of more than one gene? There are so many shades of hair colour and a limited range of things that one gene can actually do. Redness occurs in all parts of Europe to some extent and that doesn't just mean Scottish or Irish people spilt some genes there at some point in history.

Food / Bigos Recipe [151]


I think bigos is a better name.

Food / Bigos Recipe [151]

Not entirely true...

Food / Bigos Recipe [151]

Wiem, wiem. I'm glad this old thread has re-emerged. I'd like to have a go at cooking bigos. I'm not sure about the bit someone said about lamb shank though. That looks very un-Polish.

Love / Are 98% of young Polish girls emotionally unstable and mood changing? [191]

Polish women just fall at my feet.

I should stop tripping them up, I suppose.

Language / Present tense, past tense, past participle in polish [34]


I've just gathered a little collection of questions.

What is an active verb?
What is a transitive verb?
Are verbs either active or transitive or are some neither?
What is an adjective present participle?
What is an adverbial present participle?
What is a passive participle?
Can anyone give me two of three examples of each of these, in sentence form rather than single words?

Love / What are Polish Women like? Just started to date one. [256]

The more people who really know you who are linked to you on social websites, the harder it is to create a facade. Almost no-one knows me on myspace, so I'm an intergallactic travelling troubadour of space and time and inventor of the multi-galactic banjo, a giant musical instrument constructed out of a cluster of galaxies which have been altered by high-powered beams of energy of their own making, deflected and reflected off eachother to create a harmonic pandimensional twangiverse (TM). On facebook, I have to be content with just being me.

Language / Present tense, past tense, past participle in polish [34]

Thanks SO much for all that, Mr. Mafketis. It will take me a little while to digest all of that.

The problem I have is that the book I've been using seems to run out before it mentions any of this stuff. There are a few other important things it doesn't cover. But what this book does have, is a good way of explaining grammatical things chapter-by-chapter, with a reference section at the end, so you know where to find various words or grammatical constructions where they are introduced in the main body of the book.

I have another book that probably does explain all of this, but has no reference section. In the key to the chapters, it doesn't even mention what grammar is mentioned in each chapter. I just decided to swap books to see if this other book is any good, started from the very last page (the best place to start with many books) and the first thing I saw (the last thing in the entire book) was the word

będąc

I still don't know what it means, but with your explanation, I should be a step closer to finding out. Thanks again.

Language / Present tense, past tense, past participle in polish [34]


I thought you were quoting me when I saw these words on the latest threads page. This is the exact book I have, published some time in the 1960s. But I haven't seen any reference to adjectival or adverbial participles. Another thing not found within this book is conditionals. Consequently, these are two of the subjects I struggle with.


Having written all that, you would most likely be a bit tired.

Language / Present tense, past tense, past participle in polish [34]


I refuse to ignore it. When people talk about things in language no longer being used, there is always someone still using it. Transposition of endings: this would be like when one of my colleagues asked me "zdrowyś?" I also hear the vocative in use. Do people assume that the only Polish to learn is the Polish of young urban people? Plenty of Poles working in the UK are old and come from small villages in the east of Poland, where I imagine the continuity of Polish habitation is much stronger and longer than in the west of the country.

It's useful to know linguistic features that are no longer in common usage because although they're not in common usage, they are still in some usage, and even if they are not going to feature in the kind of language I attempt to speak, I'd rather not get tripped up by them. In any case, my English is not always up to the minute. I even have quite a good handle on thee, thou, ye and you, older English word endings like -st and -th, and these are normally only found in old texts such as Shakespeare and the Bible, but may still be heard in English dialects, even if this usage is now extremely limited.

In other words, I have a thirst for knowledge and believe that we should all know more than we seem to need to know.


I have read the book from cover to cover. I think the conditional -by- element is mentioned once, but not explained. It deserves at least a chapter, if not more. They are not mentioned in any of the index or in the contents. I almost think there's a missing volume 2.

History / Poles in the Napoleonic era [224]


It started to fall down with Napoleon when he decided to style himself as Emperor, thus losing the respect of many people in his day, including Beethoven.

Hello Crow. I'm going to set my muja friends on you. We're going to divide and rule you with our margarine. It was actually under Napoleon III that the French invented margarine, but surely a few facts like that are not important. Like the fact that not everyone of one nationality think the same way.

So either you like Napoleon and everything he did for Europe or you don't. If you want to complain about the British counterbalance of Napoleon's empirical plans, then you may be saying that Napoleon using Poles as cannon-fodder and the Poles' farm animals as sexual playthings must be okay.


Now there's a subject about which I know slightly more. Plant breeding, including that of Roses, occurs in many parts of the world, including Britain (although not amongst royalty - they either talk to their plants or just wave at them and ask them what they do for a living), France (where all roses believe in liberty, egality and fraternity - especially fraternity as we are talking about the old gene pool), the Netherlands where Napoleon insisted that everyone had a silly surname and now they also give their plants silly names, Rosa "Golden Showers" being a great example.

Didn't Napoleon once seek asylum in Britain? Not when he was caught and exiled, but earlier in his interesting career. They used different terminology back then - for plants and self-styled despotic warmongering emperors. I'm not saying the British back then were much better - one of the countries that still lives with the anachronism of monarchy and is the country guilty of naming a Himalayan bramble Rubus cockburnianus. Hmmmm.

Still, you had fun in Moscow?

History / Poles in the Napoleonic era [224]

Does it say "This Napoleon is not available?" like it does on a lot of these videos?

History / Poles in the Napoleonic era [224]

I mentioned before that Beethoven didn't like him. I don't know how well the rule applies, but people who speak German and have long scruffy-looking hair tend to be much more agreeable than German speakers with very short hair or no hair at all.


There would also have been no Eurovision 1974 winning entry from ABBA. Go on - admit that you like it.

But ever-so-slightly more seriously, are these things amongst Napoleon's legacy:

The metric system is almost the only system of measurements used in Europe and consequently it is used throughout much of the known world.
Small man syndrome has a famous figurehead.
Napoleon Brandy.
La code de la route - Most of Europe's traffic passes on the right.

That second one is far less reliably associated with Boney as many countries changed sides long after he'd snuffed it.

Language / Ukrainian language similar to Polish? [236]

Is there really anything to challenge the conventional model of the early split between South Slavic and North Slavic, which then split into East and West Slavic, which then split into Russian, Belorussion and Ukrainian in the east and Polish, Czech and Slovak in the west? Certainly there have been borrowings between these languages, but the mass of Latin-derived words in English doesn't stop English being a Germanic language.

Language / Ukrainian language similar to Polish? [236]


Interesting opinion even if it doesn't always entirely make sense.


Get southern talking about girls then for comparison.

I think Slovakian sounds a bit more "Goodbye Mister Bond" than Polish. There is always something of a dialect continuum in the Slavic family, with some linguistic borders stronger than others. Even Slovenian and Czech are supposed to have similarities that can seperate them from all the others despite being seperated by German and Hungarian speaking areas and the fact that they are in seperate groups - West and South Slavic.

There is something called the Balkans linguistical gubbins (my name for it because I've forgotten the real one) where even Romanian and Albanian share similar features to their neighbouring langauges due to developing in close proximity to eachother.

Ukrainian? I dunno.

Language / Your perception of the Polish accent [145]

Why is it that modern British accents tend to centre on cities rather than rural areas, whereas Polish accents seem to be the other way around? Is there an assumption there that accents are somehow uneducated or even wrong? I worry about the idea of everyone speaking "with one voice".

I've spent plenty of time with people from £omża, plenty more time with people from some little place east of Warsaw called Mokobody, and had to endure sharing my flat with someone from close to the Lithuanian border. Most differences I have heard I put down to personal differences in choice of words or sound of voice, although some of these differences may be to do with accent or regionalisms.

I was on the tube (for those of you who don't know, that's the London Underground - a system of railways, many of which are situated underground, especially within the more central parts of London). As the train rolled along, two women and a man were standing by the doors talking and joking noisily. I don't really know what they were talking about, I wasn't eavesdropping. I could tell, though, that they were from the southeast but weren't Londoners.

Then one of the women started to laugh. It was a very loud laugh, punctuated by snorting sounds which gradually, as she laughed more and more, happened more and more. They were all laughing, but this one woman was particularly loud, and funny with the way she laughed.

Nearby sat a family with two little girls. The woman's laugh made me smile and chuckle to myself. I looked up just after a break in the laughter and suddenly, just as my eye caught one of the little girls, the laughing woman suddenly made another very loud snorting sound, then the little girl burst out laughing as well. Then I couldn't help laughing out loud too.

Anyway, as the family started talking, I could tell instantly that it was some kind of Slavic language, but I couldn't tell which. Judging by their appearance, almost definitely somewhere in the Balkans. The laughter had quietened down for a while, when suddenly the laughing woman said in a loud voice "v****al w**k" and started laughing again. Luckily, these words in particular didn't seem to register as anything to the family with young children. The one woman who sat nearby and who paid absolutely no attention to any of this was probably a Londoner. Londoners on tube trains are normally the ones who manage to remain completely blank and expressionless.

Later on, I was sat on another train, now much closer to home. I noticed, just as the man who had sat opposite me for the last half an hour stood up to leave the train, that he'd been reading a book with the words on the cover reading "Język portugalskiego" with something that suggested that this was Brazilian-style Portuguese.

Now that would be an accent to hear. But sometimes the best sound a voice can make is just laughter, even if some people's laughs would be unbearable in anything other than small doses. I'm sure I could only have taken her sense of humour in small doses.

Language / Polite forms in Polish vs English [49]


The answer could be "No, you're alright."

There's nothing wrong with answering no. Not really is a good one though. The best way of using this kind of politeness is not to be completely vague or unobstrusive, just slightly.

Language / Your perception of the Polish accent [145]

For a language to lose it's dialects and accents, along the way, people have to feel bad about the forms of speech that have developed naturally over generations in favour of another one that just has the power of authority behind it. I much prefer mutually intelligible accents rather than just one common accent.

Those here who have more ability to speak more than one language would possibly have the understanding that different languages involve thinking differently. Different accents, although obviously much closer than different languages, still go hand in hand with other differences in manner, perception and thought and these are differences the world needs.

Barney, I would most definitely not use the word advanced.

News / What's the stupidest question asked about Poland? [414]

Budapest is in India, named after Buddha and all those flies and bugs that can be such a pest. The capitool of Poland is Walsall.

Language / Polite forms in Polish vs English [49]

The trouble with this subject is that English is a language, whereas Polish is a language and a culture. I'm not saying there isn't diversity within Polish, but it doesn't have widely divergent forms covering first and second language speakers in a variety of countries around the globe, all with histories of their own.

Let's take South Africa as as example. It is one of the world's younger English-speaking nations. The story I heard is of a South African boy starting school in England. The teacher says "Would you like to..." then follows what is actually an order to complete a piece of work. The South African boy replies "No, I wouldn't like to, but if I should do it, then I will."

Another story: I stood in the queue at the Chinese noodle stall (sadly defunct) at St. Albans market one Saturday morning. Just in front of me in the queue was an American chap. With each item he ordered, he said the words "Can I get..." which struck me as sounding quite rude. For him, this was polite enough, but for a native like myself, this way of asking for service is flipping out of order!

The butcher whose shop I go to whenever I need to buy some good quality meat for cooking, always calls me sir. He doesn't have to. He doesn't have a boss telling him to address everyone as sir or madam. He is the boss. He just calls everyone sir or madam because it is a polite form in the English language.


It may be because informal speech is generally accepted as the mode of speech to use in the workplace, that polite address in Polish is something I have almost only ever seen in books. I don't feel comfortable using it because I have such limited experience of actually using it and hearing it first hand.

Language / Polite forms in Polish vs English [49]

In some, perhaps many cultures, polite address is used with those who are unfamiliar and those who are familiar but not liked. Polynesians apparently are good at this - if you want to insult someone, it's best to address them with utmost politeness.

Would sir care to hear me most graciously call him a complete and utter.... now what was it I said about this time last night?

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

BB, how easily can you tell the gender of a noun in German? In Polish, it's not usually too difficult to know whether a noun is masculine, feminine or neuter. There are exceptions (the masculine -a, the feminine non -a nouns for example) but by and large this is a relatively easy part of the language.

I've never tried learning German, but a mate of mine who's married to a German has not got very far with his learning in the last six or seven years, whereas I've learnt a lot more Polish in the last three years, and that's supposed to be more difficult.

I'm still tempted to give up Polish and learn Portuguese, Swedish or Fang instead.

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

and Krankenwagen, Bahnhof, Schmetterling or Fussborden?

The examples you gave are all the same gender as they would be in Polish! (Shock! Horror!)

Having said that, I have read about the word dziewczę, meaning girl. It is neuter, apparently, but I've been told that no-one uses it these days.