Devil take the hindmost!

[muckefuck]

While I'm on the subject*, here's something about Polish I just don't get: The placement of attributive adjectives. As far as I can tell, usage favours neither pre-noun or post-noun position. It seems almost every page of my cookbook has examples. Take the Christmas Eve menu on p. 147. The adjective wigilijny (from Latin vigilia "vigil") shows up three times. First in barszcz wigilijny, Christmas Eve borscht (which seems to differ from the usual kind mainly in the substitution of savoy cabbage for regular cabbage, but I digress), then in wigilijna zupa migdałowa, Christimas Eve almond soup, and again in chleb wigilijny, Christmas Eve bread.

Could it have something to do with the gender (feminine for zupa, masculine in the other two cases)? Nope. On page 64, you find szynka pieczona "ham baked" but pieczony indyk "roast turkey". (Don't read anything in to the difference in translations; pieczony, from the same root as piec "stove", is variously rendered "roast", "baked", and in one case, pieczone pomodory, "grilled" [actually broiled].) Besides, there examples involving the selfsame pair of words. For instance, if you look at the Polish Wikipedia entry for "sauerkraut", you'll find that the title is kapusta kiszona [adjective last] but the first line of it reads "Kiszona kapusta – rodzaj potrawy..." ("Pickled cabbage--a kind of dish...").

Now this isn't to say there aren't any pretty straightforward cases. For instance, p. 145 lists both watróbka [sic] kurza duszona w sosie [sic] madejra "liver chickeny† stewed in sauce madeira" and duszone koniuszki szparagowe "stewed tips asparagusy". Clearly duszony w sosię madejra "stewed in madeira sauce" forms a coherent unit whose meaning would be changed if a noun intervened--at least, I assume duszona wątróbka kurza w sosię madejra would carry the same implication as in English, namely that the chicken liver had first been stewed only afterwards sauced with madeira. And both ?duszona w sosię madejra wątróbka kurza and w sosię madejra duszona wątróbka kurza are presumably as awkward as their English counterparts.

In fact, there is a cross-linguistic principle at work here, namely one akin to heavy NP shifting. This term was coined by generative linguists to explain, for instance, why English speakers prefer I gave to Bill the books which my uncle left to me as part of his inheritance to I gave the books which my uncle left to me as part of his inheritance to Bill even though we wouldn't normally say *I gave to Bill the books. In the examples above, the movement takes place within the NP (Noun Phrase) rather than involving the position of the NP within the sentence, but it seems the same underlying motivation is present.

Beyond that tiny insight, however, I'm stumped. I'm sure if you asked a native speaker, they'd probably tell you that the variations are "stylistic" or--the words every learner comes to dread--"It just sounds better that way". But I know there's more to it than that, and I won't be content until I find out what it is.


*If you're one of those tired of hearing about the language, take heart: In a month or two, I'll be nattering on incessantly about something completely different.

†Polish shows a surprising (to me, at any rate) fondness for denominal adjectives instead of nouns in the genitive. So kurzy is an adjectival form of kura "hen", migdałowy of migdał "almond", szparagowy of szparag "asparagus", and so on.

Comments

[donncha22.livejournal.com]

Seattle has a Dom Polski... or Polski Dom, depending. When I asked a P-speaking friend, he didn't even get I was asking at first, it is so far below the radar for him, apparently.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

I was also wondering about the role of prosodic factors. Polish has fairly strict penultimate stress (exceptions primarily for Latinate borrowings like muzyka and festiwal), so you'd expect a general preference for Polski Dom, but there may be cases where Dom Polski flows better for whatever reason.

some help request =)

[euphoric1dr.livejournal.com]

hello, i hope its okay i comment here! you have magical linguistic powers, in my opinion. (i hope the flattery's working as pertains to your willingness to help my request haha)

i am trying to teach myself korean, as i plan to move there and teach in august. i'd like to know if you have any recommendations, should i start practicing in little 'chunks' every day? for perhaps an hour at least? i'm just starting now to feel comfortable in hangul, but i haven't devoted a lot of effort to reading and writing practice. i am not sure if i should take a more sequential grammar approach to the speaking aspect, or if i should memorize phrases. but somehow the latter doesn't seem very...'scholarly' to me. what do you think?

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Based on past experience, what works for you? I could tell you what I've success with, but you could have a completely different learning style and the advice could be worse than useless.

Certainly practicing a bit every day is crucial. It doesn't even have to be an hour; even a very focused fifteen minutes will be enough to aid progress (though obviously you'll move faster if you can devote more than that).

[joliecanard.livejournal.com]

This is a really interesting question. I don't have an answer. Have you looked for any articles on this yet?
If I have time, I'd like to take a big corpus and make a fun data set, run some regressions, and see what factors turn out to be significant. But I doubt I'll have time for that undertaking anytime soon.

[caprinus.livejournal.com]

That is a very interesting observation! And I don't have a good answer. Prosody might be one factor (although the identical metre of szynka pieczona vs. ?indyk pieczony challenges that). Some kind of "salient feature"-focusing strategy another (i.e. there are many kinds of bread or barszcz, but there's only one unusual Xmas eve version, so "chleb wigilijny" takes the commonplace first element and qualifies it with the special feature which comes last; whereas "zupa migdałowa" is in itself unusual, so this theoretical calculus of salience suggests that the first element be "wigilijna/y/e X" [one in a number of special Xmas eve dishes which are not variations of commonplace dishes], qualified by the latter placement of the special feature of it being an almond soup. But then, why not "zupa wigilijna migdałowa"? Something makes that sound odd. Still, this theory also works for the roast ham and turkey -- we have ham up the wazoo, it's common, so it goes first, most likely in a list of differently-prepared hams. We also have roasted dishes up the wazoo, but turkey is relatively new and rare (at least factoring in the conservatism of national cuisine -- cookbooks copy from older cookbooks, so in novel dishes the novelty cannot go first, unless the subtype is even more uncommon -- I would expect "indyk złocony", for example (for a dish involving a turkey covered in gold-leaf)) -- so "pieczony indyk" in a list of differently-sourced roasts. "Kapusta" and "kiszona" is a toss-up in this scheme -- both fermentation and cabbage are very common, so you'd pick which you want to highlight; but "kapusta kiszona" sounds to me like the standard order. And as for your well-analysed long example, "wątróbka kurza duszona w sosie madejra", note the unattested yet equally grammatical "kurza wątróbka duszona w sosie madejra" -- I bet the common element in that section of the cookbook is that all these dishes are organ meats, not that all are chicken -- which makes chickenyness more marked than liveryness.)

Cookbooks may not be the best thing to investigate, in any case. Building logical taxonomies and navigational aids for books, as for websites, is a clumsy art.

Or I am just telling myself "just-so" stories. :)

For what it's worth, Google says:
indyk pieczony: 5150
pieczony indyk: 5000
kapusta kiszona: 53500
kiszona kapusta: 21200
wigilijna zupa migdałowa: 353
zupa migdałowa wigilijna: 2
zupa wigilijna migdałowa: 0

And now I am HUNGRY.