Zły wpływ

[muckefuck]

Wczoraj w nocy upiłem się i poszedłem grać w gierki z sąsiadami. Każdy przyniósł coś do podziału: bourbon, "wineshine" (mieszany z winem bimber?), sherry persymonową (mój przyczynek) i więcej poza tym. Opowiadaliśmy sobie tajemnice. Państwo w sąsiednim domu mają nazwisko polskie, a więc zapytałem żonę, czy jej mąż mówi po polsku. Nie tylko nie mówi, ale nie wymawia swojego nazwiska poprawnie! Ona to wymawia lepiej niż on a jest Filipinką! Nie położyłem się aż do późna, ale dobrze się bawiłem.

Comments

[tisoi.livejournal.com]

Pronounced what better than a Filipino??

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

"She pronounces it better than he and/but [she] is a Filipina!"

[strongaxe.livejournal.com]

I've noticed that a lot of foreign names tend get anglicized, my own included, because Americans and Canadians can't pronounce them properly in their original languages, and it's easier to accept the mispronunciation than to try to educate every one comes in contact with. The mispronunciation then becomes cast in concrete with subsequent generations.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Some anglicisation is inevitable, such as in cases where the names really do incorporate sounds which are foreign to English. (On the other hand, cf. Bach.) But a lot of time, the shifts are needless and driven more by Americans' ignorance of phonics than anything else. For instance, one of my grade school classmates had the surname "Konieczny" which she pronounced "kuh-NEE-zuh-nee". This is no easier to say than a far closer approximation of Polish [kɔ'ɲɛʈ͡ʂnɨ] such as "kuhn-YECH-nee" and didn't really make her life any easier, since she was forever telling everyone how to spell and pronounce her name as it was.

[strongaxe.livejournal.com]

There are certain letter combinations in Polish that have very different pronunciations than the same ones in English (for example, c = "ts" not "k", cz = "ch" not "z", ie = "ye" not "ee", j = "y" not "dzh" etc.) It's less a matter of sounds that can't be pronounced, and more a matter that a different set of default pronunciation rules are being invoked. In her case, 3 out of 9 of the letters in her name have non-English pronunciations. In my case, it's 6 out of 7, making it almost pointless to expect English-speakers who aren't also Polish-speakers to be able to pronounce it correctly.

[caprinus.livejournal.com]

Zły wpływ :)

Wczoraj w nocy upiłem się i grałem w gierkim z sąsiadami.

"grałem w gierkim" = "played [dim.] games"? There is something weird about this sentence, something about the relation between getting drunk and playing games... In English, "I got drunk and played games with the neighbours" implicitly suggests that you played the games while (or because of getting) drunk, and possibly also got drunk with the neighbours, but somehow that implicature seems to be missing from the Polish when put like that. I would suggest "Wczoraj w nocy upiłem się grając w gierki z sąsiadami" or "Wczoraj w nocy upiłem się i poszedłem grać w gierki z sąsiadami" to get the two acts entangled, which I think they were, but am having trouble with the analysis of why the first version sounds off. It's as if I'd translate it as "I got drunk, and I also played games with the neighbours", but why? Hmmm...

Każdy przynosiał coś do dzielenia: bourbon, "wineshine" (mieszany z winem bimber?), sherry persymonowy (mój przyczynek) i więcej poza tym.

"Każdy przyniósł coś do dzielenia [: or better yet, "do podziału"]: bourbon, "wineshine" (mieszany z winem bimber?), sherry persymonowe/ą [sherry cannot be masc., could be neut., or possibly fem.] (mój przyczynek) i więcej poza tym."

Opowiadaliśmy siebie sobie tajemnice.

Państwo w sąsiednim domu mają nazwisko polskie, a więc zapytałem żonę, czy jej mąż mówi po polsku. Nie tylko nie mówi, ale o tym nawet nie wymawia swojego nazwiska poprawnie! Ona to wymawia lepiej niż on, a jest Filipinką! [lol]

Nie kładłem się do późna, ale dobrze się bawiłem.

Hmm... That first part's off. I would suggest "Nie poszedłem spać aż do późna" or "Nie położyłem się aż do późna".

Oh, and a note on the previous post: my dad thinks "koczur" sounds like a ukrainism or russicism, def. not standard Polish.

Don't worry about my burning out, this is better than most things I could be idling my brain with, and I am ungainfully unemployed. ;)

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

So why does sherry persymonową take an accusative ending but not bourbon and not przyczynek? In the first case, would it make a difference if it were spelled burbon instead? In the second, I guess this is a question about how Polish handles appositives. In German, they take the same case as the noun they are in apposition with (e.g. Ich sagte dem Bandschi, meinem Bruder, dass...) and I naturally expected Polish would work the same.

[caprinus.livejournal.com]

"Bourbon" and "sherry" are out-and-out foreign loanwords, and as such have only one undeclinable form (so's "wineshine" for that matter). Even "whisky" doesn't decline, and it's been around a while. Note also that the accusative ending is only visible if the noun is feminine -- neuter and inanimate masculine nouns look the same as in nominative, so for a masculine "bourbon" to become "bourbona" it would have to be assigned animacy. (Not impossible -- I could rhetorically personify bourbon as some sort of "demon alcohol", for example. Or I could be talking about a Bourbon king whom you were planning to share, being vampires ;)). The case of the inanimate "przyczynek" is likewise ambiguous, so let's try it with "donacja" (feminine "donation").

If the sentence had normal Polish words, it would look something like this:

Każdy przyniósł coś do podziału: króla Bourbona (żeby mu krew wyssać!), wino mieszane, fioletowy denaturat (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Denaturat.jpg), wódkę kukurydzianą (moja donacja) i więcej poza tym.

Note also that even as a feminine "donacja", attached to a feminine antecedent, to my ear the alleged appositive remains nominative. I think it's because I read the paranthetical as actually a sentence fragment -- ([to była] moja donacja), because if it were a true appositive, then like its antecedent it would have to refer back to the beginning of this sentence. And it seem to me logically awkward/untrue that everybody brought your donation. However, I suspect some speakers would find it OK.

If you want to see that appositive co-decline as you expect it to, I'd have to go with this sentence:

"Każdy przyniósł coś do podziału, ale najbardziej lubili wódkę kukurydzianą, moją donację."

[caprinus.livejournal.com]

ps: your "przynóśł" is an interestingly incorrect correction :)