|
Polish (język polski, polszczyzna) is the official language of Poland. It has the second largest number of speakers among Slavic languages (after Russian). Polish is the main representative of the Lechitic branch of the West Slavic languages. It originated in the areas of present-day Poland from several local Western Slavic dialects, most notably those spoken in Greater Poland and Lesser Poland. Polish was once a lingua franca in various regions of Central and Eastern Europe, mostly due to the political, cultural, scientific and military influence of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Although no longer having as great an influence outside of Poland, due in part to the dominance of the Russian language, it is still sometimes spoken or at least understood in western border areas of Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania as a second language. It shares some vocabulary with the languages of the neighboring Slavic nations, most notably with Slovak, Czech, Ukrainian and Belarusian.
Classification The Polish language is the most widely-spoken of the Slavic language subgroup of the Lechitic languages which include Kashubian (the only surviving dialect of the Pomeranian language) and the extinct Polabian language. The three languages, along with Upper and Lower Sorbian, Czech and Slovak, belong to the West branch of Slavic languages. Geographic distribution Polish is mainly spoken in Poland. In fact, Poland is one of the most European countries in terms of its mother tongue, as close to 97% of Polish citizens declare Polish as their mother tongue. After the Second World War the previously Polish territories annexed by the USSR retained a large amount of the Polish population that was unwilling or unable to migrate toward the post-1945 Poland and even today ethnic Poles in Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine constitute large minorities. In Lithuania 9 percent of the population declared Polish to be their mother tongue. It is by far the most widely used minority language in the Vilnius County (26% of the population, according to the 2001 census results), but it is also present in other counties. In Ukraine, Polish is most often used in the Lviv and Lutsk regions. Western Belarus has an important Polish minority, especially in the Brest and Grodno regions. There are also significant numbers of Polish speakers in Argentina, Australia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Brazil, Canada, Czech Republic, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Israel, Ireland, Kazakhstan, Latvia, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Romania, Russia, Slovakia, UAE, the UK and the United States. In the U.S. the number of people of Polish descent is over 11 million, see: Polish language in the United States, but most of them cannot speak Polish. According to the United States 2000 Census, 667,414 Americans of age 5 years and over reported Polish as language spoken at home, which is about 1.4% of people who speak languages other than English or 0.25% of the U.S. population. Dialects The Polish language became far more homogeneous in the second half of the 20th century, partly due to universal education, but also because of the mass migration of several million Polish citizens from the eastern to the western part of the country after the east was annexed by the Soviet Union in 1939, during World War II. "Standard" Polish is still spoken somewhat differently in different regions of the country, although the differences between these broad "dialects" are slight. There is never any difficulty in mutual understanding, and non-native speakers are generally unable to distinguish among them easily. The differences are slight compared to different dialects of English, for example. The regional differences correspond mainly to old tribal divisions from around a thousand years ago; the most significant of these in terms of numbers of speakers are Great Polish (spoken in the west), Lesser Polish (spoken in the south and southeast), Mazovian (Mazur) spoken throughout the central and eastern parts of the country, and Silesian spoken in the southwest. Mazovian shares some features with the Kashubian language (see below). Some more characteristic but less widespread regional dialects include: Phonology Orthography The Polish alphabet is based on the Latin alphabet but uses diacritics such as kreska (graphically similar to acute accent), superior dot and ogonek. Note that Polish , are not retroflex but apical (contrary to , which are laminar), and is not palatal (and it has the same articulation place as , ). Polish orthography also includes seven digraphs: Note that although the Polish orthography is mostly phonetic, some sounds may be written in more than one way: The pronunciation of geminates (doubled consonants) in Polish is clearly prolonged, as in Italian. For example, the word panna (young lady) is not pronounced the same as pana (man's). When pronouncing a word slowly and carefully, Polish speakers articulate and release each of the two consonants separately. The prolongation is therefore rather a repetition of the consonant. Thus, panna should be pronounced pan-na, with two n. This includes not only native Polish words (like panna or oddech), but also loan-words (lasso, attyka). In Polish, geminates may appear in the beginning of a word, as in czczenie (worshipping), dżdżownica (earth-worm), ssak (mammal), wwóz (importation), zstąpić (to descend; to step down), and zza (from behind; from beyond). Grammar Polish is often said to be one of the most difficult languages for non-native speakers to learn; of course, this depends on one's native language. While difficult for English speakers, it is relatively easy for speakers of other Slavic languages. Polish has a complex gender system. The complexity of this system is due to its combination of three categories - gender (masculine, feminine, neuter), personality (personal versus non-personal) and vitality (animate versus inanimate). The aspects of personality and vitality combine with the masculine gender but do not affect the feminine or neuter genders. The result is five genders - personal masculine, animate masculine, inanimate masculine, feminine, and neuter, based on the adjective-noun agreement criteria. The forms in nominative singular and the meanings are: There are seven cases (nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, instrumental, locative and vocative) and two numbers (singular and plural). Polish is highly inflected and retains the Old Slavic case system with seven cases for nouns, pronouns, and adjectives. Verbs are inflected according to gender as well as person and number, but the tense forms have been simplified through elimination of three old tenses (the aorist, imperfect, and past perfect). The so-called Slavic perfect is the only past tense form used in common speech. In Polish, one distinguishes between three tenses (present, past and future - however, when considering the aspect of the verb, one could detect five tenses - not six, since present perfect forms do not exist in Polish), three moods (indicative, imperative and conditional) and three voices (active, passive and reflexive). Aspect is a grammatical category of the verb, and almost all Polish verbs have two distinct forms - one imperfective and one perfective. A few verbs have two imperfective forms, where the imperfective aspect subdivides into either the indeterminate and determinate aspect (chodzić - iść - pójść (to go)) or the actual and frequentative aspect (pisać - pisywać - napisać (to write)). The perfective verb form is usually an imperfective verb changed with prefixation (robić - zrobić (to make; to do)), suffixation (kichać - kichnąć (to sneeze)) or stem alternation (oddychać - odetchnąć (to breathe)). A few verbs show suppletivism in their aspect formation, like brać - wziąć (to take). Nouns, adjectives and verbs are inflected, and both noun declension and verb conjugation follow a rather complex pattern with a large amount of irregularities. The tenses include: Movable suffixes (those of the past tenses) are usually attached to verb or to the most accented word of sentence, like question preposition. The fifth Polish tense, future imperfective, is an analytic form, and consists of the simple future form of the auxiliary verb być ‘to be’ (będę, będziesz...), and either infinitive or past participle (imperfective). The choice between będziecie robić and będziecie robili is free, and both forms have the same meaning. Sometimes the sentence may be emphasised with a particle -że- (-ż). So what have you done ? can be: All the above examples show inflected forms of the verb "zrobić" for the subject "you" informal plural ("wy"). However, it is of note that none of the above examples include the subject itself. The inclusion of the subject is not necessary here because Polish is a pro-drop language. This means that a subject does not need to be used with an inflected verb. Instead, the reader or listener can tell which subject is implied through the type ending on the verb, which is different for each person, singular and plural. Because the subject can be dropped, using it with an inflected verb signals emphasis. Of the above three examples, a native speaker would not include the subject in the middle sentence and would be unlikely to include a subject in the last one. The below examples show how the subject could be included in such sentences, where possible: The past participle depends on number and gender, so third person, past perfect tense can be: Word order Basic word order in Polish is SVO, however, since it is a morpheme rich language, it is possible to move words around in the sentence, and to drop subject, object or even sometimes verb, if they are obvious from context. These sentences mean more or less the same ("Alice has a cat"), but different shades of meaning are emphasized by selecting another word order. In increasing order of markedness: However, only the first three examples sound natural in Polish, and others should be used for special emphasis only, if at all. If a question mark is added to the end of those sentences they will all mean "does Alice have a cat?"; an optional 'czy' could be added to the beginning (but native speakers do not always use it). If apparent from context, you can drop the subject, object or even the verb: Note the interrogative particle "czy" which is used to start a yes/no question, much like the French "est-ce que". The particle is not obligatory, sometimes rising intonation is the only signal of the interrogative character of the sentence: "Ala ma kota?". There is a tendency in Polish to drop the subject rather than the object and you rarely know the object but not the subject. If the question was "Kto ma kota?" (who has a cat?), the answer should be "Ala" alone, without a verb. In particular, "ja" (I) and "ty" (you, singular), and also their plural equivalents "my" (we) and "wy" (you, plural), are almost always dropped, much like the respective Spanish pronouns. Conjugation Conjugation of "iść" ("to go, walk" in the present tense): In Polish, the use of personal pronouns is not necessary. Therefore, one many omit the personal pronouns as follows, while retaining the same meaning: Borrowed words Polish has, over the centuries, borrowed a large number of words from other languages. Borrowed words have been usually rapidly adapted in the following ways: Depending on the historical period, borrowing has proceeded from various languages. Recent borrowing is primarily of "international" words from the English language that tend to have Latin or Greek roots. For example komputer (computer), biznes (business), produkcja (production), korupcja (corruption) etc. Slang sometimes borrows and alters common English words, e.g. luknąć (to look), but these borrowings are usually short lived, going out of fashion after several years. Concatenation of parts of words (e.g. auto-moto), which is not native to Polish but common in e.g. English is sometimes used. When borrowing international words, Polish often changes their spelling. For example, Latin suffix '-tio', corresponds to -cja. To make the word plural, -cja becomes -cje. Examples of this include inauguracja (inauguration), dewastacja (devastation), konurbacja (conurbation) and konotacje (connotations). Also, the digraph qu becomes kw (kwadrant=quadrant; kworum=quorum). Other notable influences in the past have been Latin (10th-18th century), Czech (10th and 14th-15th century), Italian (15th-16th century), French (18th-19th century), German (13-14th and 19th century, Hungarian (14th-16th century), Turkish(17th century), Old Belarusian, Ukrainian, and Russian. Many words have been borrowed from the German language, as a result of being neighbours for a millennium, and also due to a sizeable German population in Polish cities in medieval times. Examples include: szlachta (from German Adelsgeschlecht, nobility), punkt (Punkt, dot, point), rachunek (Rechnung, bill/invoice), ratusz (Rathaus, town hall), burmistrz (Bürgermeister, mayor (of a town)), handel (Handel, commerce), kac (Katze/Kater, hangover), kelner (Kellner, waiter) and malarz (Maler, painter; also, the word malować has entered Polish as the verb "to paint"). The regional dialects of Upper Silesia and Masuria (former East Prussia) have noticeably more German loanwords than other dialects. Latin was a language known to a larger or smaller degree by most of the numerous szlachta in the 16th to 18th centuries. Its influence can still be seen somewhat by the greater number of verbatim Latin phrases in Polish literature (especially from the 19th century and earlier), than, say, in English. In the 18th century French supplanted Latin in this respect, along with France's rising prominence in Europe at this time. Some words also date from the Napoleonic era, when the Poles were enthusiastic supporters of Napoleon. Examples include ekran (from French écran, screen), abażur (abat-jour, lamp shade), rekin (requin, shark), meble (meuble, furniture), bagaż (bagage, luggage), walizka (valise, suitcase), fotel (fauteuil, armchair), plaża (plage, beach) and koszmar (cauchemar, nightmare). Some place names have also been adapted from French, such as the two Warsaw boroughs of Żoliborz (joli bord=beautiful riverside) and Mokotów (mon coteau=my hill), as well as the suburb of Żyrardów (from the name Girard, with the Polish suffix -ów attached to form the town's name). Other words are borrowed from other Slavic languages, for example, sejm, hańba and brama from Czech. Some words like bachor (an unruly boy or child) and ciuchy (slang for clothing) were borrowed from Yiddish, spoken by the large Polish Jewish population before their numbers were severely depleted during the Holocaust. Typical loanwords from Italian include pomidor from pomodoro (tomato), kalafior from cavolfiore (cauliflower), pomarańcza from l'arancio (orange), etc. Those were introduced in the times of queen Bona Sforza (wife of Polish king Sigismund the Old) who was famous for introducing Poland to Italian cuisine, especially vegetables. Another interesting word of Italian origin is autostrada (from Italian "autostrada", highway). The contacts with Ottoman Turkey in 17th century brought many new words, some of them still in use e.g. jar (deep valley), szaszłyk(sheesh kebab), filiżanka (cup), arbuz(water melon), dywan (carpet) etc. The mountain dialects of the Gorale in southern Poland, have quite a number of words borrowed from Hungarian (e.g. baca, gazda, juhas, hejnał) and Romanian from historical contacts with Hungarian-dominated Slovakia and Wallachian herders who travelled north along the Carpathians. Pre-war thieves' slang included such words as kimać (to sleep) or majcher (knife) of Greek origin, considered then unknown to the outside world. Surprisingly enough, direct borrowings from Russian are extremely rare, in spite of long periods of dependence on tzarist Russia and Soviet Union, and are limited to such internationalisms as sputnik or pieriestrojka. Personal pronouns Numbers Months of year Animals Others See also Dictionaries | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 |
|
| |