The Polish Language

A niechaj narodowie wżdy postronni znają, iż Polacy nie gęsi, iż swój [trudny] język mają

(In all nations in all places let it be known, that Poles are not geese, and have a [difficult] language of their own )

-Mikołaj Rej, Do tego co czytał (To the Reader), 1562, my translation. 

Polish is considered one of the most difficult languages for English speakers to learn (about on the same level as Arabic, actually), and even among its native speakers it is not always perfectly spoken. Indeed, I find it rather humorous that Prof. Oscar Swan's "Polish Grammar in a Nutshell" is 95 pages long.  That's not "Polish Language in a Nutshell." No. That's Polish Grammar. If you really insist on getting the full picture of Polish grammar, you can find it at http://polish.slavic.pitt.edu/firstyear/nutshell.pdf . I'm proud to say that when I applied for the Fulbright to Poland my Polish was evaluated by the guy that wrote this. I've been lead to believe that he said my Polish was adequate, which considering that Prof. Swan is actually a very well-known language professor in the States, it was probably only a step or two short of having Adam Mickiewicz himself say that my Polish was "jako-tako".

When most Americans think about Polish, they probably think of a string of z's strung together to make unpronounceable words. That's actually not an unfair stereotype. For example, I understand that in the Polish version of Scrabble, there are 5 z's each worth 1 point. In general, Polish vowels sound like their Spanish or Italian counterparts (no dipthongs), Y is a vowel most of the time, J is pronounced roughly as "yeh", the k or hard c sound in English is always represented by K in Polish, and C is soft, like the "ts" as in "tsar." W is pronounced like in German, i.e. like the English v, except in some situations where it is pronounced more like an f. Ł is pronounced like an English w. U and Ó are both pronounced "u". Special characters are ą (sort of an "awn" sound), ę (kind of like "en"), ż ("zh"), ź ("zhi"), ś ("sh"), and ć ("ch").  X and V are not used except in blatanly foreign words. Common letter combinations include cz (pronounced "ch"), sz (pronounced "sh") and dz (pronounced a little bit like the English letter J is). The words are spelled just like they sound!

Polish is hard to pronounce if you aren't used to it, but given practice it does get easier. Apparently there's a very big focus on standard pronunciation, and "Polbonics" is frowned upon in educational settings. Ironically, this means some people occasionally have trouble understanding foreigners speaking Polish, because 1) there aren't that many foreigners who live in Poland and 2) speak enough Polish for the accent to really matter and 3) most younger people aren't even used to hearing the equivalent of, say, a Bronx accent versus a Chicago accent versus one from Mississippi.

The hardest part of the language is probably the idea of grammatical case as well as case endings. For those of you who have studied Russian or other Slavic languages, German and Latin this should evoke familiar groans. To get an idea of how daunting speaking Polish grammatically can be, I will just say there are 7 different cases: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, instrumental, locative and vocative. Russian has all of these cases except the vocative and German has a comparably light 4. Latin has an ablative case rather than an instrumental, but has the same number of cases overall.

 

For those not familiar with a language that has cases, think of it as a requirement to conjugate nouns as well as verbs. The closest analogy I can draw is this one: you are now reading Mark's blog. Now in English, the " 's" is tacked on to the end of a word to signify possession of something. But what if you wanted to get my attention? You could say "Hey, Mark'u" where the " 'u" would signify that you were calling to me, or "I gave the book Mark'owi" signifying that I am the direct object of a sentence: you gave the book to me. Now, Polish does not use apostrophes, so the above examples simply become "To jest blog Marka", "Hej, Marku", and "dałem tą książkę Markowi." Oh yes, and the adjectives that modify each and every one of these nouns also has to agree with the case of the noun. There are some general rules for masculine, feminine, and neuter nouns, however as with any rule there are exceptions. Furthermore, there are often situations where it is hard to tell whether a noun is masculine, feminine, or neuter because in certain cases it takes an ending that is used by another gender in another case. So if you have a sentence with three nouns, each of those nouns will have to take a different case and a different ending. Oftentimes if you simply change word-order you have to change your case endings as well. Every noun is declined. You can see how this gets complicated.

Then there are things that Polish does that are just weird. For example, when you're talking about money, it's 1 złoty, but 2,3, and 4 złote and 5 or more złotych. When counting things, the case is dependent on how many of those things you're talking about. 

Oh yes, and speaking of counting, it's "ośmiu mężczyzn" (eight men), but "osiem kobiet" (eight women) and "ośmioro osób" (eight people, when that's a mix of men and women).

I'd love to meet the guy who made this language up. Incidentally, I understand that the fate of the Polish language rests in the hands of a bunch of old geezers at Jagellonian University, who are continuing to think up new ways to make the language more complicated. From what I understand there's not a National Academy (as in France and Spain) per se, but the language is governed by the equivalent of the Chicago Manual of Style.

  

Now, there are, believe it or not, some advantages to the way this language is structured. Because of the case endings and because adjectives have to agree with the nouns they are modifying, there is less potential for ambiguity than in English. Word order is also much less strict than in English. There are no direct or indirect articles, and verbs are much simpler: there's a past, present, and future tense and that's it. Of course, the verb has to agree with the gender of the noun that is doing whatever is going on, but that's comparatively not so bad. 

I will add that even Poles don't always speak grammatically. For example, I'm noticing that relatively few people actually use the vocative case, and quite often people will talk about "25 złoty" rather than "złotych." I've also heard that in grammar school, Polish children have to stand at the front of the class and recite nouns in all of their appropriate cases. Essentially, rather than spelling bees, there are grammar bees here.

Anyway, it's been a lot of, well, I guess you could call it fun, learning the language. I must say that on a good day I'm the most fluent in a second language that I've ever been in my life, and being able to communicate in that second language is one of the most thrilling experiences I've had.