Polish and other West Slavonic languages and "pozor vlak" :)

Jeg sagde... ok ok ok nu holder jeg op! :)))))))))

btw why don't you register?

register??? = at tilmelde sig ??

Jeg er allerede tilmeldt, £yżka aka "Marek" I've been a visiting member (gaestmedlem) for over three years, at least.
-:))

Why don't you log in, £yżko?

....already have, but PF keeps rejecting my log-ins-:))

..must be that Danish proficiency filter

??? Danish Proficiency Filter?? Sagde du det for sjovs skyld, eller hva'?

Obviously, has the Danish sarcasm eluded you completely? And don't worry I think most readers know by now that you have above average knowledge of the language so no need to turn PF into Danish forum ;)

More than "average" I'd say. Certain as good as your English LOL!!! No, Danish irony hasn't eluded me at all, spotted it at once (hence my superfluous tag)-:)) I, familiar enough with Storm P. Borge Rosenbaum (Victor Borge) etc. to sense the jesting Dane where- and whenever they rear their humorous head

Skaal!

above does mean more than as far as I know, but I was just being polite. You could go back to that thread with the Swedish chick speaking Polish where you wrote in Swedish. She was obviously lot more tactful and well behaved than me but dude I wouldn't be saying I speak fluent Danish and Swedish seeing what you wrote in both languages... just saying.

...to each his own-:) Jedem das Seine (...und dir das Meiste) he-he!

Just curious though how you found the quantum leap from Danish to Polish. Brutal? Sadistic? Plain tough? Hard? A piece of cake? Again, just curious-:) Probably, you pay far greater attention to the rules of Polish than English grammar. As I've said before, Danes think of English as almost second nature so they are often careless with it. Word of caution: HANDLE WITH CARE!!. We bruise easily.

Neither, my dad is Polish so I've always, to a lesser or higher degree, been exposed to Polish language. Even my surname is very Polish sounding.

Relief. You cannot be the son of my Polish Dane friend, then. (His name is Swedish sounding). It could have been a coincidence, you know ;)

Apropos of absolutely nothing, a Dane once told me my Danish was so good, no Swede would guess I'm German-:)))) He then asked me why in G-d's name I learned Danish, to which I replied that I was in Denmark and so what other bloody language should I speak then??! He suggested English (..in more or less repairable English!) to which I the replied, "You mean to practice?", upon which my Danish interlocutor chimed in "Ahem, uh - dude, I don't think I need to f****g "practice"!!"

And there you have it, the root of why I steadfastly refuse to speak English in foreign countries LOL
The same conversation played out in Poland during my first, and only, trip there in the mid-90's.

Its an older, but interesting thread so her i go.

It's true that some words have different meaning in the Scandinavian languages. However it seldom creates any problems because
of either the context their are used in or because the person that often have to speak to their neighbors know the difference or soon learns it.

One "dangerous" word is "rar" it means strange in Norwegian and Cute in Swedish, so someone from Sweden could say to a Norwegian

that the new girl is rar (sweet) and the Norwegian think he is saying that she is weird. This can easily go unnoticed.

Since this thread has been resurrected, I might as well add my input.


Slovak vocabulary is very close to Czech and it writes words in a very similar manner, but pronounces them a lot more like Polish. For example, "teplo" means "warm" in both Czech and Slovak. Czech pronounces "teplo" as "teplo", but in Slovak, it sounds like "tieplo" or "cieplo," which is very similar to Polish "ciepło."

Even though Ukrainian is an East Slavic language, Polish and Ukrainian share a lot of common vocabulary as a result of borrowing. East Slavic verb conjugation patterns are quite easy to understand, and even though it forms the past tense the East Slavic way (e.g. "my byli" (Russian) vs "byliśmy" (Polish) vs "byli jsme" (Czech)), this East Slavic feature has permeated many Polish dialects, and is easy to understand whether you're familiar with it or not. Ukrainian has also adopted some West Slavic grammatical features, such as using "ja maju" ("I have", "mam") instead of "u mienia jesć" (Russian).

So even though Czech and Polish have very similar vocabulary, they have diverged too far in pronunciation for easy intelligibility. And even though Ukrainian and Polish are from different branches of the Slavic family, they have converged in terms of grammar and vocabulary, most likely due to shared history.

I have 2 Czech freinds and I don't have much of a problem understanding them when they speak slowly with pure Czech language.

I have no problem understanding and speaking with Czechs either. But Slovak is 90% identical to Czech and sounds a bit more like Polish, so it doesn't surprise me that people find it easier.

Mutual intelligibility among related languages can often lead to grave miscommunications:-)
Many on this Forum therefore "logically" assume they should, indeed MUST, employ English in any and all such situations where speakers of related tongues gather on neutral ground, Swedes meeting Danes in Warsaw, Czechs encountering Russians in Paris etc... This thinking however is, naturally enough, more much more prevalent for those under fourty.

This strategy, of course, is usually a mistake ^^