Learning Polish

I have spoken fluent and fairly literate Polish all of my life. Funny that my brother’s Polish is awful, yet mine is clear and precise – although I will be the first to admit that I need an infusion of vocabulary and I do stumble sometimes in conversation. I have always wondered about the discrepancy as we were both raised in the same Polish household. I sent him a copy of Henryk Sienkiewicz’s trilogy to watch and he was unable to negotiate the formal Polish – an interesting state of affairs. I can only surmise that I have the head for languages and I like languages. One pays attention and places importance upon that which interests them. Recently my involvement in the Polish community in Philly and environs and watching Polish TV has probably helped my vocabulary as well. It has also given me a great appreciation for the formal language and its beauty – sort of like listening to formal English when correctly pronounced.
We are planning on a family reunion in Sandomierz and in preparing to join my extended family at this event I have started taking internet classes on reading and writing. After all, the onus will be on me to translate spoken and written. Although I suspect that my neices and nephews will be able to negotiate quite well in English with their cousins.
Needless to say, Shannon, who does EVERYTHING precisely and in-depth and who has an innate curiosity about the world and learning whatever she can, has started investigating all things Polish and even joined the local Polish American group. Tara is more laissez faire about life in general and makes fun of her sister’s seriousness – although she herself has many hobbies and interests.
Anyway, I digress. My self-improvement in this area has taught me more than just the fact that I need better vocabulary and to quit mixing up my “z-s.” It has reinforced a number of concepts. I post them here because I know my kids read my blog.
In the Polish language there is great complexity when dealing with forms of address. Polish IS a very formal language. And people may take offense when they’re not addressed properly. A few months ago I was out with a group of friends and strangers, foreigners and Poles. I chatted with one lady in English, turned out she was Polish, so I switched to Polish. Because in English, I addressed her as “you”, I didn’t even think twice about using the same form in Polish – “ty”. She was my age, yet her response was an icy stare and an even icier “Ja z tobą krów nie pasałam” (I didn’t tend cows with you) which is a nasty warning to a person talking to you (me in this case) that he/she has breached the Pan/Pani barrier. OOPS! Apparently, that means you’re only allowed to use “you/ty” to people with whom you were tending cows at some point in the past, or somesuch. So, how do you maneuver this minefield of Polish courtesy expressions? I asked several people and got several answers. This is more or less the general consensus:
• 1. If you don’t know someone, address them as Pan/Pani (Sir, Madam) until you know them well and have a mutual agreement that you will switch to the informal you/ty.
• 2. Within your family it is generally ok to use the you/ty except that the “intelligentsia” older generation Poles do not address their elder family members (father, mother, aunt, uncle etc.) in the familiar either. This is probably a generational thing. There are also some complex exceptions to the family as well. In some instances one uses the third person when addressing older relatives. OY!
• 3. If the person you’re addressing is much, much younger than you, then you’re safe using the familiar.

Diminutives are very popular in Polish (and are by no means reserved for children). The Polish language allows for a great deal of creativity. Most diminutives are formed by adding a suffix. Male names it may be -ek or the more affectionate -uś; for female names it may be -ka, or -nia / -dzia / -sia / cia respectively. For example, Maria has a particularly great number of possible diminutives, which include: Marysia, Maryśka, Marysieńka, Marychna, Mania, Mańka, Maniusia, , Maryna, Marianna.
The Polish language is also undergoing radical changes because of the sudden globalization movement and open boundaries. New areas of technology, new concepts, and continuous innovations bring into life new vocabulary, which gets quickly adopted in all kinds of languages around the world. This process, vigorously opposed to in some countries for the language impurity, is enthusiastically embraced in other counties. In case of Poland, there are probably as many supporters as there are critics of the new trends in Polish language. Sort of like the French and the battle in France and Quebec against the encroachment of English.
The formal literary Polish language (a beautiful thing when one knows what to listen for) is usually very carefully revised and approved by linguistic experts. They test new expressions for compliance with existing rules that regulate what is correct or incorrect in Polish native tongue. While up to a decade ago, the language was changing in a very slow motion; the last several years abounded with incredible invasion of new foreign phrases and terms to define the progress that has come from the West. There are words like shop, weekend, link, Internet, show business, gay, email, etc. that surround people everywhere and force a foreign language upon them. Now, the Polish language experts face a great challenge. How do those foreign words behave in Polish language? Should they be spelled as the original spelling calls for, or should they be spelled as the sounds are heard, which is commonly known by Poles? But if they are spelled in accordance to the sound rule, so "the show business" becomes "szoł biznes", or "weekend" becomes "łikend", there lurk other conflicts. In formal Polish language, some letters don't follow others. For instance, "ł" is never followed by "i", thus "łikend" is not an option. On the other hand, there are no easy ways to get a widely acceptable Polish translation for those new concepts. While weekend means the end of a week and as such could be translated word for word, the Polish translation is long and not as precise as weekend can be. Similar is a case with other words, such as email and business or even funnier – cell phone (cell as in the unit of biology is komura and Poles have literally translated cell phone into the word “komurka” or “telefon komurkowy.” Although, there are a couple of linguistic Polish versions of business to express the same concept, most of them are long and not as easy to say as biznes is. Some words, like email, are an ultimate challenge since there are substitutes for them in formal Polish language. Hence “imejl.” Holy cow! Or “gej” – double holy cow. And again there is the word for “HIV” which is “chif” -- pronounced "heef" (there is rarely a stand alone h and traditionally no “v.” Oh my!
Finally, the issue of rude or vulgar words is important. Polish curse words are very strange. Cholera – meaning just what it is – the disease of cholera would not be a rude word in English but it is in Polish – analogous to shit. Parenthetically, I learned the other day that in Italian curse words are frequently related to churchy issues – so in Italian a curse word might be the word for chalice. Odd, but it might reflect the Italians' view of the Catholic church. Who knows.
One of the very most rude and vulgar words is one that we don’t spend much time thinking about. It is the word for “whore” – kurwa. Even worse is “kurwa twoja macz.” So far as I can see both are summarily beeped out of even the raciest programs on Polish TV on the rare times they manages to come up. Admittedly they are ugly word to hear, sort of like f—k and its derivatives, but why the word for whore receives special censorship is odd to me, although I do remember neither my mother or father using the word in front of me. They did use a lot of cholera, occasionally prefaced by the adjective “jasny” meaning light or bright. Hence bright cholera.
So enough of my thoughts and back to my self-improvement efforts.