More than one type of love (linguistically speaking)

IN Polish, does "miłość" refer only to romantic love? Are there words for other kinds of love, for example, maternal, fraternal, friendship etc? I know in Greek there are many words for love,and fear I may have just sent someone an inappropriate message......

Help!!?

French love, for example?

haha not sure about that.....c'mon Pawian, you know what I mean,,help me out here!

I already helped you. :):):)


Nope. In Polish it is almost always miłość and its nature is defined by proper modifying adjectives:

maternal - miłość macierzyńska

wysokieobcasy.pl/wysokie-obcasy/1,103260,82895.html

fraternal - miłość ojcowska

naobcasach.pl/a.202.Ojcowska_milosc.html

French love - miłość francuska

milosne-pozycje.pl/milosc-francuska.html

Thank you so much Pawian!

uhmm.... i dont know how should i ask this. i mean, a correctly question in english.... well i'll try: how do u write that little stress mark/accent over the consonant (i mean on the computer, not hand writting of course)? what is the sound for them?

the sound for the 'n' with an 'accent' is very similar to the Spanish n with the wave (as in Espana), other 'accented' consonants are a different story

well you need to have a special keyboard layout installed to be able to use those Polish special characters (you can take them from a windows install disk for example) - you can switch between a couple of keyboard layouts (so you can have a Spanish layout, an English one and Polish one and switch between them) - the most popular Polish keyboard layout is 'Polish programmer's keyboard' which uses alt+'key' (alt+n = accented n) to obtain those special Polish characters

you don't really need to have a special keyboard layout installed, unless you want to type in Polish all the time.

Sometimes I need diacritical signs from other languages for my translations and I simply use the Microsoft Word toolbar, but I know that other programs, like Open Office for instance, have these options too.

So, in order to type a Polish word, you need to go to the "insert" option on Word toolbar, then to "special symbols", or "symbols" option, and pick the letter you need from all possible alphabets unfolded there. I guess the list only lacks Sanskrit.

Unfortunately, if you need to type a long text in Polish, this technique is time-consuming :) I only use it for single words or sentences..

I see, so that n sounds like ñ, (i speak spanish), so maybe it wont be so difficult to speak Polish. Thank u for ur answer..!


Yes, great idea, ur right too. Thank u. =)

no - it will be difficult for you to render a good couple of so called 'soft' consonants (they are called palatalized linguistically - podniebienne - precisely those ś's, ć's, ź's and dź's

- note: some of the sounds of Polish language are written using two letters these are - sz (English equivalent sh), cz (English and spanish equivalent - ch), dż - (English equivalent is j in 'journey'), rz (sounds the same as 'ż' in speech - it equals the sound for the second 'g' in English word 'garage', also equals French 'j' sound), and there is also that 'dź' thing which lacks equivalents in Western European languages, both 'h' and 'ch' are used to denote a sound that is near the spanish 'x' in 'Xavier' (historically 'h' and 'ch' were different sounds in Polish) - oh I've forgotten about 'dz' (it is a non-palatalized version of 'dź' and so lacks Western European equivalents)

anyway it is a good idea to start learning Polish from the alphabet and basic phonetics - there are some 'stickies' in the General Polish language which have links to Polish learning resources on the web General Language - you can also use ivona.com to hear how Polish words are pronounced (you enter a Polish word into a box and you can choose to hear it pronounced by one of a couple of available voices - this is a free speech synthesizing software)

Thank you for such a good information Gumishu.