Zawody bokserskie

[muckefuck]

I really was Slug Boy this past weekend. Yesterday, in an attempt to compensate, I took some boxes and bags over to my old place and started packing and then tossed a massive load of laundry in the washer when I got back. I've been cherrypicking my bookshelves with each new fancy, so you'd think by now I'd have the core of my collection at Pod Klonami, but I just know I'll be onto something new the moment everything I have on it is inaccessible. This time, I seized everything even vaguely connected to Poland, including a cookbook, a Gombrowicz novella, and another language textbook.

The last time I tried halfheartedly to learn the language, Gerald Stone's An introduction to Polish was all I had to guide me, and it's not easy on the learner. He introduces four cases and two conjugations in the first five chapters, not one of which is longer than five pages. Now that I've worked my way through a hundred plus pages of Swan, however, it's a breeze. (And this despite the much more routine nature of the narratives and dialogues. Which reminds me, the latest gem from Swan: A więc jesteś nawet nudniejszy, niż myślałem "Well then you're even more boring than I thought.") I particularly appreciate Stone's detailed notes on pronunciation, which have definitively answered some questions that have been nagging me (such as whether ę is denasalised in się and whether moim is pronounced in one syllable or two).

Incidentally, one thing I've found increasingly charming about Polish as I've gone along are the Germanisms. That may not be the best description, since I'm not always sure these are due to German influence on Polish rather than being coincidences or areal features or what-have-you, but it's always nice to find something familiar amid so much that is novel. For instance, the word for "walk" in Polish as "go for a walk" is spacer--clearly from the same source as German spazieren. In the unit on telling time, I was initially baffled by the translation of Pierwszy seans jest o wpół do dziewątej as "The first show is at 8:30" because the word for "eight", osiem, doesn't appear anywhere. Then it occurred to me that expression is literally "at half of the ninth [hour]"--an equivalent to the German halb neun rather than the English half eight.

Comments

[caprinus.livejournal.com]

I had a total loltastic moment regarding Polish Germanisms (which tend to centre around administrative, technological and military areas of the lexicon) trying to explain to my mother a few weeks back the English word "whatsit" (which then led us to "whatchamacallit", "thingamajig", "doodad", etc., all of which she found greatly amusing). Try as I might, I could not remember my native language's equivalent to this category, and had to rely on circumlocutions to get the idea across to her. She couldn't think of one either. We hung up, and half an hour later she calls me back: "Your dad just remembered the Polish word for 'whatchamacallit'! It's a little sentence, just like in English! It's 'wihajster'".

"Err, what, mom? How is it like the English? That doesn't make any sense."

My dad gets on the line: "Industry and mining in western Poland were largely developed by Germans, think about it and you'll get it".

I got it. "Hej, Janek, podaj mi ten, tego tam, hmm... wie heißt er?"

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

*pęka ze śmiechu*

Somehow I know that will come in handy.

O, jeśli masz chwilę wolnego czasu, myślisz że mógłbyś korygować moje wpisy? Wiem że są pełne błędów.

[anicca-anicca.livejournal.com]

Spacerować made me laugh. Granica sounds like an badly made up word, too.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Granica always makes me think of sorbet. And Grenze sounds so German, I was boggled to find out it came from Slavic.

[anicca-anicca.livejournal.com]

Yep, exactly, my brain keeps reading "granic(z)a(do) (de limón).
And Grenze feels urdeutsch to me as well.

[strongaxe.livejournal.com]

There are many words of French origin as well, and from what I've noticed, they seem to relate to things that relate to things that might be familiar to aristocrats - likely from the period when the Polish nobility was incestuously connected to the French nobility. For example, playing card suits (pik, kier, karo, trefl from pique, coeur, carreau, and trèfle).

(Please excuse any spelling errors - my knowledge of Polish is primarily oral, from a very early age - to the point that when I read it, I often have to vocalize it in my head to be able to understand it).

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

"Pik", "Herz", "Karo", and "Treff" are also used in Germany, at least in the areas closest to France.

The fun thing about languages which respell foreign borrowings is that moment when the penny drops and you recognise a familiar word under that exotic makeup. For instance, I was curious the other day how to say "blackmail" in Polish, and I had to smile at myself when I found the answer was szantaż.

[joliecanard.livejournal.com]

My clear favorite for the respelled foreign borrowings is the Russian шедевр (from chef d'oeuvre).

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Though you have to admit that вокзал is pretty awesome as well.

[caprinus.livejournal.com]

French was def. the language of the middle and upper classes and so features prominently in words related to entertainment and cultural/culinary pursuits -- this is true of many European countries, to be sure, but France served as a focal point for the independence-minded emigre community during Poland's division among the Three Powers, Napoleon being seen as Poland's best hope at freedom (which he did temporarily provide). Think of Napoleon's mistress (Walewska), of Chopin (Szopen), Marie Skłodowska (Curie), etc. -- there's a reason all these people ended up in France :)

There was a fairly strong current of Slavophile language reform aiming to rid Polish of its Western -- Germanic and Latinate -- borrowings (mostly unsucessful, in that the new words were adopted but the old ones also remained, thus we have "ziemniak" but also "kartofel", "śmigłowiec" but also "helikopter"; then there were outright failures, like "wstawa/dostawa" for "sinus/cosinus"), but French largely got a free pass.