The Death of Imagination

I'm back to reading Doris Dörrie again after a pause to finish up The siege of Krishnapur and it reminded me that there's a word she used which I meant to post about before: bonnieren. At first I took this for an aphetic variant of abonnieren "subscribe", but that didn't fit the context, which was of a fast-food worker punching in an order. Even Googling wasn't turning up anything useful so I decided to try a different tack and look up German equivalents for "ring up".

And that's where I started to hit a wall. Phrasal verbs are famously one of the most challenging aspects of English for foreigners, and one of the reason is that they are more polysemous than even native speakers are wont to realise. Find "ring up" in a typical dictionary, and what you'll see is the translation for "call [s.o.] up". I'm aware of this meaning and--even though it's primarily British--I've even been known to use it myself sometimes. But it's not remotely close in meaning.

Another challenging aspect of English is the proliferation of near-synonyms, but the plus side of that is that it means there's often a (usually more formal) alternative which I can look up instead. For "ring up" in the one sense there is--as just mentioned--"call [up]", "telephone", and others. But I couldn't think of a less ambiguous verb with the meaning I wanted. Fortunately, with the help of the LEO discussion forum, I was able to track down that I was dealing with a misspelled variant of "bonieren", which does have the sense I ascribed to it (although it doesn't seem to be nearly as widely-used in German as "ring up" in English).

I had a similar problem going the other way when I attempted to chat up a Polish bear online. At first I thought he was coming on to me since his reply contained the word "połapać" which my dictionary glossed as "make out". Only after I'd pondered the entire sentence for a bit did it occur to me that this meant "make out" in the sense of "discern" and what he was trying to "make out" was what this site which he had only just joined was really good for. (Luckily I figured this out before sending my response!)

The whole language of getting acquainted is fraught with this problems. Mind you, I'm not even talking about slang particularly. It's just that this is an informal activity (who gets "presented" to a potential love interest any more?) and therefore so is much of the associated vocabulary. On one of my language boards, a learner couldn't think of the German for "stand [somebody] up" and so simply left this in English.

I thought that a good equivalent would be "jemandem einen Korb geben" (lit. "give someone a basket"), but upon investigation this turned out to apply to getting turned down (again, try looking that up!) rather than accepted and then blown off. Turns out the word he wanted was versetzen (which also has a range of technical meanings such as "dislocate", "misalign", and "stagger"). Again, it was the LEO forum which set me straight in this case, which shows how lexicography is adapting in the Internet age to solve this problem.

Possibly the most surprising thing at the Polish Museum of America Library was finding that even after neglecting it for half I year, I still speak more Polish than the weekend attendant. She mentioned that she was just learning the language, so once we had wrestled with the microfilm long enough to score an article worth printing, I offered her the challenge of deciphering the headline. She recognised one word of it.

More troublesome for me than any Slavic language was the visual language of early-20th-century Polish community newspapers. It took basically the first hour just to determine where we needed to be looking (turns out the crime news is all under notatki reporterskie "reporter's notes"), after which we had to go back scan all the earlier issues over again. Before then, I wasted much of my time in the "local news" section, which eventually revealed itself to be ordinary community events: dances, confirmations, church bazaars, etc.

Complicating things even more, this section was arranged chiefly by parish. Fortunately, my previous reading about the Polish community of Chicago had led me to anticipate this, so when I saw "Z Annowa", I knew immediately that this indicated news from the parish of St Ann(e). But which St Ann(e)'s, and was it was in any way connected with our persons of interest? (As it turns out, no: St Ann's is on the South Side, and still has one Sunday mass in Polish despite being located just off La Dieciocho.) Before yesterday I had heard of Jackowo (St Hyacinth's), Trójcowo (Holy Trinity), and Stanisławowo (St Stan's) and it was easy enough to identify Josafatowo with St Josaphat's, Wacławowo with St Wenceslaus and Kantowo with St John Cantius. But Marjanowo had me bamboozled until I caught a reference to "anieli" and realised it must be St Mary of the Angels. Even more confusing were repeated references to the "Town of Lake". None of us recognised this as the name for what would later become Milwaukee's South Side.

Speaking of these and other monuments to the piety of Chicago's Polonia, I had the good fortune to spend a few moments admiring the interior of Holy Trinity. (Normally I'm too self-conscious to go into Catholic churches looking like a bum, but luckily I was turned out for a dinner engagement later in the day.) I would've loved to have done the same at St John Cantius, but I found the doors locked. Maybe next time I'll be able to take a gander at St Hyacinth's, which from the photos looks more spectacular even than St Mary's.

Sorry it's been a while since I've had any passive-aggressive gems from Swan to post. Now that I'm at about the two-thirds mark, I've bogged down. Every chapter is packed with loads of new vocabulary and paradigms to memorise, but the dialogues are exactly the same (brief) length. Fortunately there are treasures to be found elsewhere in the lessons. In chapter XXII, we learn the words for Means of Conveyance, Bodies of Water, and Writing Implements and Materials. See if you find anything interesting in the last of these:

• pióro pen
• wieczne pióro fountain pen
• długopis ball-point pen
• ołówek pencil
• kreda chalk
• pisak (felt tip) marker
• atrament ink
• krew blood

Tá a leithéid fearthainne seo ag déanamh froig díom. Nó Breatnach. Fuaireas mo bhá ar mo shlí abhaile. Tá mo chuid gruaige fliuch fós agus é ag stealladh báistí anois féin. Cathain a bheidh deireadh leis?

Myślę że zastaję żaba. Czy Walijczyk. Zostałem przemoczony po drodze do domu wieczorem. Moje włosy są wilgotne jeszcze i ulewny deszcz pada jeszcze teraz. Kiedy zakończuje się?

Mleczarnia

mleko
mleko bulgarskie (jogurt)
śmietana
śmietanka
ser śmietankowy
ser
masło
maślanka


Mięsa

wołowina
węprzowina
szynka
kiełbasa
słonina
grobdrób
indyk
kura
kaczka
gęś
króliczyna

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.

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.

Obecnie mamy kota. On się podoba mojemu przyjacielowi, ponieważ jest bardzo piękny. On ma skórę niebieskoszarą a cztery białe lapy. Jego pierś też jest biała. Poza tym, mój przyjaciel chciał wesołego kota i on jest bardzo wesołym kotem. Prawie dużo wesoły czasami.

Nasz kot ma wiele imiona. Po polsku go nazywam "Szarym Koczurem" albo pro prostu "Koczurem". Kiedy się gniewam on jest "Bestią". Rozgniewam się, bo on mnie kąsa. Chciałbym kupić myszy, żeby on mógłby je kąsać, ale mój przyjaciel jest przeciwnym.

The maples are in full leaf these days, scattering their dappled light up and down the length of Arthur. The other night I found myself wondering about an appropriate German nickname for the street. (I knew der Ahorn, but not how to correctly pluralise it.) It's too bad that Unter den Ahornen doesn't carry within it the same poetry of its more famous cousin in Berlin.

This morning, I realised that I could also render this in Polish if only I knew the Polish name for the maple. Pod "under", like many Polish prepositions, takes the instrumental case, which to my surprise was the first non-nominative case taught in my textbook. Part of the reason for this is undoubtedly the straightforwardness of its formation (e.g. all plurals take the same ending, -ami). So given klon "maple", the result is pod klonami.

Makes the German sound positively lyrical by comparison.