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96-754: As presented in the Tintin books, Syldavian has a superficial resemblance to certain Central European languages, particularly Polish and Hungarian , due to its orthography . Like Serbian , it uses both the Cyrillic and Latin scripts, although apparently in somewhat different contexts; it is most commonly written in the Cyrillic alphabet, albeit with the Latin alphabet by the royal court. It shares numerous orthographic features found in various Eastern European languages, most notably

192-499: A / (spelled a ), / ɔ / (spelled o ) and / u / (spelled u and ó as separate letters). The nasal vowels are / ɛ w̃ / (spelled ę ) and / ɔ w̃ / (spelled ą ). Unlike Czech or Slovak, Polish does not retain phonemic vowel length — the letter ó , which formerly represented lengthened /ɔː/ in older forms of the language, is now vestigial and instead corresponds to /u/. The Polish consonant system shows more complexity: its characteristic features include

288-507: A class of je- verbs, where the dental suffix has dropped, i.e., -je < -iad .) Swiss German also has two types of weak verbs, descended from Class I and Classes II and III, respectively, of Old High German weak verbs and marked with -t and -et , respectively, in the past participle . In the history of English, the following changes happened: In modern English, only one productive weak paradigm remains, derived from Class II. A number of Class I verbs still persist, for example: As

384-468: A cross-language paradigm of a short-stem Class I verb * *gramjaną "to anger" (Gothic gramjan , Old Norse gremja , Old High German gremmen , Old Saxon *gremmian , Old English gremman , Old Frisian *gremma ). Note that the Old Saxon and Old Frisian verbs given here are unattested, almost certainly due to the small nature of the respective corpora. The following

480-445: A dental, but in some of the languages, including most varieties of English, /t/ and /d/ are alveolar instead.) In all Germanic languages, the preterite and past participle forms of weak verbs are formed from the same stem. Historically, the pronunciation of the suffix in the vast majority of weak verbs (all four classes) was [ð] but, in most sources discussing Proto-Germanic , it is spelled ⟨d⟩ by convention. In

576-759: A dialect of Polish. Many Silesians consider themselves a separate ethnicity and have been advocating for the recognition of Silesian as a regional language in Poland . The law recognizing it as such was passed by the Sejm and Senate in April 2024, but has been vetoed by President Andrzej Duda in late May of 2024. According to the last official census in Poland in 2011, over half a million people declared Silesian as their native language. Many sociolinguists (e.g. Tomasz Kamusella , Agnieszka Pianka, Alfred F. Majewicz, Tomasz Wicherkiewicz ) assume that extralinguistic criteria decide whether

672-609: A few culturally and linguistically related tribes from the basins of the Vistula and Oder before eventually accepting baptism in 966. With Western Christianity , Poland also adopted the Latin alphabet , which made it possible to write down Polish, which until then had existed only as a spoken language . The closest relatives of Polish are the Elbe and Baltic Sea Lechitic dialects ( Polabian and Pomeranian varieties). All of them, except Kashubian , are extinct. The precursor to modern Polish

768-511: A large number of branches in all of these areas) offers services available in Polish at all of their cash machines in addition to English and Spanish . According to the 2011 census there are now over 500,000 people in England and Wales who consider Polish to be their "main" language. In Canada , there is a significant Polish Canadian population : There are 242,885 speakers of Polish according to

864-533: A lect is an independent language or a dialect: speakers of the speech variety or/and political decisions, and this is dynamic (i.e. it changes over time). Also, research organizations such as SIL International and resources for the academic field of linguistics such as Ethnologue , Linguist List and others, for example the Ministry of Administration and Digitization recognized the Silesian language. In July 2007,

960-404: A more extreme form of szplug hamaïh! - praising or surprise, could be something like "hail!" or "wow!" hält! - a command, probably meaning "stop!" or "halt!" szcht! - another command, sounds almost like "shh!" and perhaps means "silence!" zsálu - a greeting, probably "salute" or "hello". The verb normally follows the object: Where there's an auxiliary and a main verb,

1056-454: A nasal consonant, rather than a nasal vowel. For example, ą in dąb ("oak") is pronounced [ɔm] , and ę in tęcza ("rainbow") is pronounced [ɛn] (the nasal assimilates to the following consonant). When followed by l or ł (for example przyjęli , przyjęły ), ę is pronounced as just e . When ę is at the end of the word it is often pronounced as just [ɛ] . Depending on

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1152-558: A remnant of a dental ending are leggen , which has the preterite leed , and the verb hebben , which has harr with old r -ending from the Middle Low German dental. In Icelandic , the dental was originally a voiced dental fricative /ð/ . It is preserved as such after vowels, voiced fricatives, and /r/ but has been hardened to a stop /d/ after nasals and /l/ . It and has been devoiced to /t/ after voiceless consonants and in some other cases (in most Old Norse texts,

1248-402: A reversed diacritic hook called an ogonek . Polish is a synthetic and fusional language which has seven grammatical cases . It has fixed penultimate stress and an abundance of palatal consonants . Contemporary Polish developed in the 1700s as the successor to the medieval Old Polish (10th–16th centuries) and Middle Polish (16th–18th centuries). Among the major languages, it

1344-415: A sentence, the particle nietz is placed after the subject, in auxiliary position. In copulative sentences, nietz is placed after the verb (or czesztot ) : Most adverbs tend to be identical to adjectives in form. Adverbs can be used to modify verbs: szplug - a curse word, perhaps equivalent to "damn". (Not found in original French edition, only English translation.) szplitz on szplug -

1440-618: A significant number of cognate verbs appear as Class II verbs in Old Norse and as Class III verbs in Old High German. This class has fientive semantics, that is, " become X ," where X is an adjective or a past participle of a verb. Note that the last two are deverbal even though the underlying root is adjectival because they are formed to other verbs (which are in turn formed from adjectives). The vast majority of Class IV verbs appear to be deverbal. Class IV verbs derived from weak verbs keep

1536-491: A single word. This applies in particular to many combinations of preposition plus a personal pronoun, such as do niej ('to her'), na nas ('on us'), prze ze mnie ('because of me'), all stressed on the bolded syllable. The Polish alphabet derives from the Latin script but includes certain additional letters formed using diacritics . The Polish alphabet was one of three major forms of Latin-based orthography developed for Western and some South Slavic languages,

1632-451: A verb has become weak in the preterite but not in the participle and may be thought of as "semi-strong" (not a technical term). Dutch has a number of examples: An example in English is: Often, the old strong participle may survive as an adjective long after it has been replaced with a weak form in verbal constructions. The English adjective molten is an old strong participle of melt , which

1728-405: A verse by Jan Brzechwa ) is W Szczebrzeszynie chrząszcz brzmi w trzcinie [fʂt͡ʂɛbʐɛˈʂɨɲɛ ˈxʂɔw̃ʂt͡ʂ ˈbʐmi fˈtʂt͡ɕiɲɛ] ('In Szczebrzeszyn a beetle buzzes in the reed'). Unlike languages such as Czech, Polish does not have syllabic consonants – the nucleus of a syllable is always a vowel. The consonant /j/ is restricted to positions adjacent to a vowel. It also cannot precede

1824-478: A vowel when it precedes another vowel (it represents /j/ , palatalization of the preceding consonant, or both depending on analysis). Also the letters u and i sometimes represent only semivowels when they follow another vowel, as in autor /ˈawtɔr/ ('author'), mostly in loanwords (so not in native nauka /naˈu.ka/ 'science, the act of learning', for example, nor in nativized Mateusz /maˈte.uʂ/ 'Matthew'). Some loanwords , particularly from

1920-455: Is German fragen (to ask), which is historically weak and is still weak in standard German. However, for a time in the 18th century, the forms fragen, frug, gefragen by analogy with, for example, tragen (to carry) were also considered acceptable in the standard. They survive today (along with a present tense frägt ) in the Rhinelandic regiolect and underlying dialects. In Dutch,

2016-684: Is a West Slavic language of the Lechitic group within the Indo-European language family written in the Latin script . It is primarily spoken in Poland and serves as the official language of the country, as well as the language of the Polish diaspora around the world. In 2024, there were over 39.7 million Polish native speakers. It ranks as the sixth most-spoken among languages of the European Union . Polish

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2112-423: Is a cross-language paradigm of a long-stem Class I verb * *hauzijaną "to hear" (Gothic hausjan , Old Norse heyra , Old High German hōren , Old Saxon hōrian , Old English hīeran , Old Frisian hēra ) Class II verbs were formed with a suffix -ō- . In the northern West Germanic languages, an alternative extended suffix -ōja- sometimes appears in the non-past forms, e.g.,

2208-419: Is also spoken as a second language in eastern Germany , northern Czech Republic and Slovakia , western parts of Belarus and Ukraine as well as in southeast Lithuania and Latvia . Because of the emigration from Poland during different time periods, most notably after World War II , millions of Polish speakers can also be found in countries such as Canada , Argentina , Brazil , Israel , Australia ,

2304-427: Is most closely related to Slovak and Czech but differs in terms of pronunciation and general grammar. Additionally, Polish was profoundly influenced by Latin and other Romance languages like Italian and French as well as Germanic languages (most notably German ), which contributed to a large number of loanwords and similar grammatical structures. Extensive usage of nonstandard dialects has also shaped

2400-528: Is now a purely weak verb with the participle melted . The participle gebacken of the German verb backen (to bake), is gradually being replaced by gebackt , but the adjective is always gebacken (baked). The reverse process is very rare and can also be partial, producing "semi-strong" verbs as in show showed shown (originally a weak verb with its participle modelled on sown ) Weak verbs that develop strong forms are often unstable. A typical example

2496-416: Is ongoing. For example, the English verb to cleave currently exists in both a conservative strong form (past tense I clove ) and an innovative weak form (past tense I cleaved ). In Germanic languages, weak verbs form their preterites and past participles by means of a dental suffix , an inflection that contains a /t/ or /d/ sound or similar. (For comparative purposes, they will be referred to as

2592-447: Is possible to say ko goście zoba czy li? – here kogo retains its usual stress (first syllable) in spite of the attachment of the clitic. Reanalysis of the endings as inflections when attached to verbs causes the different colloquial stress patterns. These stress patterns are considered part of a "usable" norm of standard Polish - in contrast to the "model" ("high") norm. Some common word combinations are stressed as if they were

2688-595: Is subdivided into regional dialects and maintains strict T–V distinction pronouns, honorifics , and various forms of formalities when addressing individuals. The traditional 32-letter Polish alphabet has nine additions ( ą , ć , ę , ł , ń , ó , ś , ź , ż ) to the letters of the basic 26-letter Latin alphabet , while removing three (x, q, v). Those three letters are at times included in an extended 35-letter alphabet. The traditional set comprises 23 consonants and 9 written vowels , including two nasal vowels ( ę , ą ) defined by

2784-512: Is the Old Polish language . Ultimately, Polish descends from the unattested Proto-Slavic language. The Book of Henryków (Polish: Księga henrykowska , Latin : Liber fundationis claustri Sanctae Mariae Virginis in Heinrichau ), contains the earliest known sentence written in the Polish language: Day, ut ia pobrusa, a ti poziwai (in modern orthography: Daj, uć ja pobrusza, a ti pocziwaj ;

2880-518: Is the most widely-used minority language in Lithuania's Vilnius County , by 26% of the population, according to the 2001 census results, as Vilnius was part of Poland from 1922 until 1939. Polish is found elsewhere in southeastern Lithuania. In Ukraine, it is most common in the western parts of Lviv and Volyn Oblasts , while in West Belarus it is used by the significant Polish minority, especially in

2976-430: The kropka (superior dot) over the letter ż , and the ogonek ("little tail") under the letters ą, ę . The letters q, v, x are used only in foreign words and names. Polish orthography is largely phonemic —there is a consistent correspondence between letters (or digraphs and trigraphs ) and phonemes (for exceptions see below). The letters of the alphabet and their normal phonemic values are listed in

Syldavian - Misplaced Pages Continue

3072-407: The kzommet sentences in the corpus, prepositional phrases follow the verb. The comma, however, is a signal that the prepositional phrase has been moved for emphasis, or because it is an afterthought: Forms of 'be' directly follow the subject : The merged form czesztot 'it is, that is' begins a sentence: Czesztot Tintin . "That's Tintin." Samples of Syldavian from only two periods -

3168-401: The ś in święty ("holy") all represent the sound / ɕ / . The exceptions to the above rule are certain loanwords from Latin, Italian, French, Russian or English—where s before i is pronounced as s , e.g. sinus , sinologia , do re mi fa sol la si do , Saint-Simon i saint-simoniści , Sierioża , Siergiej , Singapur , singiel . In other loanwords

3264-496: The 't kofschip rule. In Afrikaans , which descends from Dutch, the past tense has fallen out of use altogether, and the past participle is marked only with the prefix ge- . Therefore, the suffix has disappeared along with the forms that originally contained it. In German the dental is always /t/ and always spelled ⟨t⟩ because of the third phase of the High German consonant shift (d→t). In Low German ,

3360-579: The Brest and Grodno regions and in areas along the Lithuanian border. There are significant numbers of Polish speakers among Polish emigrants and their descendants in many other countries. In the United States , Polish Americans number more than 11 million but most of them cannot speak Polish fluently. According to the 2000 United States Census , 667,414 Americans of age five years and over reported Polish as

3456-647: The Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth 's influence gave Polish the status of lingua franca in Central and Eastern Europe . The process of standardization began in the 14th century and solidified in the 16th century during the Middle Polish era. Standard Polish was based on various dialectal features, with the Greater Poland dialect group serving as the base. After World War II , Standard Polish became

3552-511: The United Kingdom and the United States . Polish began to emerge as a distinct language around the 10th century, the process largely triggered by the establishment and development of the Polish state. At the time, it was a collection of dialect groups with some mutual features, but much regional variation was present. Mieszko I , ruler of the Polans tribe from the Greater Poland region, united

3648-604: The West Germanic languages , the suffix hardened to [d] , but it remained a fricative in the other early Germanic languages ( Gothic and often in Old Norse ). In the English language , the dental is a / d / after a voiced consonant ( loved ) or vowel ( laid ), a / t / after a voiceless consonant ( laughed ), and / ɪ d / after the dentals /alveolars / t / and / d / themselves, but English uses

3744-474: The classical languages , have the stress on the antepenultimate (third-from-last) syllable. For example, fizyka ( /ˈfizɨka/ ) ('physics') is stressed on the first syllable. This may lead to a rare phenomenon of minimal pairs differing only in stress placement, for example muzyka /ˈmuzɨka/ 'music' vs. muzyka /muˈzɨka/ – genitive singular of muzyk 'musician'. When additional syllables are added to such words through inflection or suffixation ,

3840-569: The flight and expulsion of Germans (1944–50) , as well as the expulsion of Ukrainians and Operation Vistula , the 1947 migration of Ukrainian minorities in the Recovered Territories in the west of the country, contributed to the country's linguistic homogeneity. The inhabitants of different regions of Poland still speak Polish somewhat differently, although the differences between modern-day vernacular varieties and standard Polish ( język ogólnopolski ) appear relatively slight. Most of

3936-404: The standard language ; considerable colloquialisms and expressions were directly borrowed from German or Yiddish and subsequently adopted into the vernacular of Polish which is in everyday use. Historically, Polish was a lingua franca , important both diplomatically and academically in Central and part of Eastern Europe . In addition to being the official language of Poland, Polish

Syldavian - Misplaced Pages Continue

4032-582: The "sz" and "cz" of Polish . However, the language is clearly a Germanic language. Its vocabulary and grammar resembles that of Dutch and German and has little in common with any Slavic languages. But while Brusselian, Hergé's native dialect, was used as a basis for the language, Syldavian has a much more complicated grammar, with other Central European influences added. The language also appears to have been influenced by Bordurian (another fictional language), Slavic languages and Turkish . The Syldavians often bear names of Slavic origin, such as Wladimir;

4128-544: The 14th century and the 20th century - are available. But even with such a small sample, some changes can be seen in the language over a 600-year period: From a 14th-century manuscript, Noble Deeds of Ottokar IV : Medieval Spelling Modern Spelling Cyrillic Spelling English translation: More Examples Polish language Polish ( endonym : język polski , [ˈjɛ̃zɘk ˈpɔlskʲi] , polszczyzna [pɔlˈʂt͡ʂɘzna] or simply polski , [ˈpɔlskʲi] )

4224-416: The 16th century, which is also regarded as the " Golden Age of Polish literature". The orthography was modified in the 19th century and in 1936. Tomasz Kamusella notes that "Polish is the oldest, non-ecclesiastical, written Slavic language with a continuous tradition of literacy and official use, which has lasted unbroken from the 16th century to this day." Polish evolved into the main sociolect of

4320-481: The 2006 census, with a particular concentration in Toronto (91,810 speakers) and Montreal . The geographical distribution of the Polish language was greatly affected by the territorial changes of Poland immediately after World War II and Polish population transfers (1944–46) . Poles settled in the " Recovered Territories " in the west and north, which had previously been mostly German -speaking. Some Poles remained in

4416-613: The Cyrillic alphabet (for example, /ʃ/ is written "сз" instead of "ш"), and to use a few Cyrillic letters (щ, ю) for sounds for which they are never used in the real world. This, together with the use of Latin script in old medieval manuscripts, may suggest that the Syldavians adopted the Latin alphabet first, and the Cyrillic later, which is the reverse of several real-world languages (most notably Romanian ) which switched from Cyrillic to Latin. Unlike Marols, but like German (shown in italics in

4512-578: The Henryków monastery, noted that "Hoc est in polonico" ("This is in Polish"). The earliest treatise on Polish orthography was written by Jakub Parkosz  [ pl ] around 1470. The first printed book in Polish appeared in either 1508 or 1513, while the oldest Polish newspaper was established in 1661. Starting in the 1520s, large numbers of books in the Polish language were published, contributing to increased homogeneity of grammar and orthography. The writing system achieved its overall form in

4608-635: The Latin-based orthography has a number of irregularities, or else these are old inconsistent spellings that have been preserved in family names but are no longer used in the standard orthography ( as in Hungarian , where for example one may find the family name Széchenyi retaining a traditional spelling rather than the orthographically correct * Szécsenyi ). Note that Syldavian Cyrillic diverges in some important respects from Cyrillic as used in real-world languages, most notably by porting over Latin digraphs into

4704-557: The Old English infinitive -ian < *-ōjan . The following is a cross-language paradigm of * *laþōną "to invite" (Gothic laþōn , Old Norse laða , Old High German ladōn, lathōn , Old Saxon lathian [-ōjan] , ladian [-ōjan] , Old English laþian , Old Frisian lathia ). What is known as "Class III" was actually two separate classes in Proto-Germanic: The histories of this class in

4800-671: The Silesian language was recognized by ISO , and was attributed an ISO code of szl. Some additional characteristic but less widespread regional dialects include: Polish linguistics has been characterized by a strong strive towards promoting prescriptive ideas of language intervention and usage uniformity, along with normatively-oriented notions of language "correctness" (unusual by Western standards). Polish has six oral vowels (seven oral vowels in written form), which are all monophthongs , and two nasal vowels . The oral vowels are / i / (spelled i ), / ɨ / (spelled y and also transcribed as /ɘ/ or /ɪ/), / ɛ / (spelled e ), /

4896-423: The alternation is already found in heavy roots, but the light ones preserve /ð/ ). Furthermore, the voicing contrast between /d/ and /t/ has been replaced in modern Icelandic by an aspiration contrast, which may not be realized phonetically in all the relevant positions. The situation of early Norwegian was similar to Icelandic, but intervocalic /ð/ eventually disappeared. In the verbs in which it remains,

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4992-416: The artificial Romance language Wenedyk , or to the endangered Wymysorys language . Syldavian boasts a rich range of sounds. In addition to the diacritical marks shown in the chart below, there are acute and grave accents that may indicate stress. Roman letters are on the left, Cyrillic letters on the right. In addition to these letters, Syldavian also contains several digraphs and letters for which

5088-485: The cases mentioned above, the letter i if followed by another vowel in the same word usually represents / j / , yet a palatalization of the previous consonant is always assumed. The reverse case, where the consonant remains unpalatalized but is followed by a palatalized consonant, is written by using j instead of i : for example, zjeść , "to eat up". The letters ą and ę , when followed by plosives and affricates, represent an oral vowel followed by

5184-613: The conjugational system of Gothic. Class I verbs actually consist of three classes in Proto-Germanic : A small class of verbs had no suffix in the present, and no suffix in the past (other than the -d- or -t- of all weak verbs). This class had only three members: A small class of verbs had the suffix -j- in the present and no suffix in the past. This class had only five members in Proto-Germanic: Verbs of this class were said to undergo rückumlaut ("reverse umlaut") in

5280-687: The corresponding sentence in modern Polish: Daj, niech ja pomielę, a ty odpoczywaj or Pozwól, że ja będę mełł, a ty odpocznij ; and in English: Come, let me grind, and you take a rest ), written around 1280. The book is exhibited in the Archdiocesal Museum in Wrocław, and as of 2015 has been added to UNESCO 's " Memory of the World " list. The medieval recorder of this phrase, the Cistercian monk Peter of

5376-415: The dental ending of the preterite tense was originally /d/ or /t/ , according to the stem of the verb. However the ending has fallen out in pronunciation, starting in the 17th century when the preterite was written with the ending -er representing the sound [ɐ] , which was already the last remnant of the former -de and -te endings of Middle Low German. Now, the only Low German verbs that still show

5472-572: The dental is /t/ or /d/ , depending on conjugation class and dialect . It is spelled accordingly. In Nynorsk , it can be different in the preterite and the past participle. Swedish has a similar situation to that of Norwegian, but the dental is retained in the spelling, even between vowels. Some informal spellings indicate a lost dental, such as in sa ("said") from the standard spelling sade . In Proto-Germanic , there were seven types of weak verbs, five of which were significant. However, they are normally grouped into four classes, based on

5568-479: The disappearance of yers . Polish can have word-initial and word-medial clusters of up to four consonants, whereas word-final clusters can have up to five consonants. Examples of such clusters can be found in words such as bezwzględny [bɛzˈvzɡlɛndnɨ] ('absolute' or 'heartless', 'ruthless'), źdźbło [ˈʑd͡ʑbwɔ] ('blade of grass'), wstrząs [ˈfstʂɔw̃s] ('shock'), and krnąbrność [ˈkrnɔmbrnɔɕt͡ɕ] ('disobedience'). A popular Polish tongue-twister (from

5664-458: The dish szlaszeck that Tintin encountered also appears to be a borrowing. ( Szaszłyk is the Polish word for shish kebab, borrowed in turn from Turkish.) Many words are based on common French slangs. For examples, klebcz is constructed on the French Parisian slang clebs meaning "dog". This language, which is Germanic but bears a great resemblance to Polish , may be likened to

5760-430: The distinction between regular penultimate and exceptional antepenultimate stress. Another class of exceptions is verbs with the conditional endings -by, -bym, -byśmy , etc. These endings are not counted in determining the position of the stress; for example, zro biłbym ('I would do') is stressed on the first syllable, and zro bi libyśmy ('we would do') on the second. According to prescriptive authorities ,

5856-620: The early stages of the Germanic languages were strong. However, as the ablaut system is no longer productive except in rare cases of analogy. Almost all new verbs in Germanic languages are weak, and the majority of the original strong verbs have become weak by analogy. As an example of the rather common process of originally strong verbs becoming weak, we may consider the development from the Old English strong verb scūfan to modern English shove : Many hundreds of weak verbs in contemporary English go back to Old English strong verbs. In some cases,

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5952-520: The eastern parts of the former Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth wrote Polish in the Arabic alphabet. The Cyrillic script is used to a certain extent today by Polish speakers in Western Belarus , especially for religious texts. The diacritics used in the Polish alphabet are the kreska (graphically similar to the acute accent ) over the letters ć, ń, ó, ś, ź and through the letter in ł ;

6048-420: The end of words (where devoicing occurs) and in certain consonant clusters (where assimilation occurs). For details, see Voicing and devoicing in the article on Polish phonology. Most Polish words are paroxytones (that is, the stress falls on the second-to-last syllable of a polysyllabic word), although there are exceptions. Polish permits complex consonant clusters, which historically often arose from

6144-469: The entire country. Polish has traditionally been described as consisting of three to five main regional dialects: Silesian and Kashubian , spoken in Upper Silesia and Pomerania respectively, are thought of as either Polish dialects or distinct languages , depending on the criteria used. Kashubian contains a number of features not found elsewhere in Poland, e.g. nine distinct oral vowels (vs.

6240-462: The following table. The following digraphs and trigraphs are used: Voiced consonant letters frequently come to represent voiceless sounds (as shown in the tables); this occurs at the end of words and in certain clusters, due to the neutralization mentioned in the Phonology section above. Occasionally also voiceless consonant letters can represent voiced sounds in clusters. The spelling rule for

6336-538: The language spoken at home, which is about 1.4% of people who speak languages other than English , 0.25% of the US population, and 6% of the Polish-American population. The largest concentrations of Polish speakers reported in the census (over 50%) were found in three states: Illinois (185,749), New York (111,740), and New Jersey (74,663). Enough people in these areas speak Polish that PNC Financial Services (which has

6432-439: The letter y . The predominant stress pattern in Polish is penultimate stress – in a word of more than one syllable, the next-to-last syllable is stressed. Alternating preceding syllables carry secondary stress, e.g. in a four-syllable word, where the primary stress is on the third syllable, there will be secondary stress on the first. Each vowel represents one syllable, although the letter i normally does not represent

6528-431: The main verb remains at the end, and the auxiliary verb moves just after the subject: In earlier Syldavian the pronoun may follow the verb, and this form may still be used for emphasis: You can say either Eihn ben ek, Eihn bennek or Ek ben eihn, but never *Eihn ek ben (unlike English, where you can say 'Here I am'). In general "X is Y" can be inverted to "Y is X". When X is a pronoun, the inversion adds some emphasis: In

6624-431: The middle aged and young speak vernaculars close to standard Polish, while the traditional dialects are preserved among older people in rural areas. First-language speakers of Polish have no trouble understanding each other, and non-native speakers may have difficulty recognizing the regional and social differences. The modern standard dialect , often termed as "correct Polish", is spoken or at least understood throughout

6720-568: The modern Germanic languages. In modern German, for example, descendants of the original subclass (ii) of Class I are still irregular (e.g., denken [dachte] "to think", brennen [brannte] "to burn"), and subclasses of the productive verb paradigm are formed by verbs ending in -eln or -ern and in -ten or -den , among others. One of the regular weak verb conjugations is as follows. Weak verbs should be contrasted with strong verbs , which form their past tenses by means of ablaut (vowel gradation: sing - sang - sung ). Most verbs in

6816-460: The most widely spoken variant of Polish across the country, and most dialects stopped being the form of Polish spoken in villages. Poland is one of the most linguistically homogeneous European countries; nearly 97% of Poland's citizens declare Polish as their first language . Elsewhere, Poles constitute large minorities in areas which were once administered or occupied by Poland, notably in neighboring Lithuania , Belarus , and Ukraine . Polish

6912-476: The name Tarzan . Germanic weak verb In the Germanic languages , weak verbs are by far the largest group of verbs, and are therefore often regarded as the norm (the regular verbs ). They are distinguished from the Germanic strong verbs by the fact that their past tense form is marked by an inflection containing a /t/ , /d/ , or /ð/ sound (as in English I walk~I walked ) rather than by changing

7008-418: The new strong past vroeg of the cognate vragen is standard today, but its past participle is weak gevraagd (though some dialects do have gevrogen ). The weak conjugation of verbs is an innovation of Proto-Germanic (unlike the older strong verbs, the basis of which goes back to Proto-Indo-European ). While primary verbs (those inherited from PIE) already had an ablaut-based perfect form that

7104-631: The nobles in Poland–Lithuania in the 15th century. The history of Polish as a language of state governance begins in the 16th century in the Kingdom of Poland . Over the later centuries, Polish served as the official language in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania , Congress Poland , the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria , and as the administrative language in the Russian Empire 's Western Krai . The growth of

7200-468: The other languages: In Late Old English, further verbs in -can were drawn into this class by analogy, but with umlaut maintained, e.g., bepǣcan "to deceive", past tense bepǣhte , earlier bepǣcte , or wleccan "to warm," past tense wlehte , earlier wlecede . At the same time, verbs in -ccan were modified to follow the same pattern, as in the new past tense form cwehte alongside earlier cweahte . A large class of verbs had

7296-659: The others being Czech orthography and Croatian orthography , the last of these being a 19th-century invention trying to make a compromise between the first two. Kashubian uses a Polish-based system, Slovak uses a Czech-based system, and Slovene follows the Croatian one; the Sorbian languages blend the Polish and the Czech ones. Historically, Poland's once diverse and multi-ethnic population utilized many forms of scripture to write Polish. For instance, Lipka Tatars and Muslims inhabiting

7392-401: The palatal sounds / ɕ / , / ʑ / , / tɕ / , / dʑ / and / ɲ / is as follows: before the vowel i the plain letters s, z, c, dz, n are used; before other vowels the combinations si, zi, ci, dzi, ni are used; when not followed by a vowel the diacritic forms ś, ź, ć, dź, ń are used. For example, the s in siwy ("grey-haired"), the si in siarka ("sulfur") and

7488-601: The past, since the umlaut occurring in the present (triggered by the -j- ) is undone or "reversed" in the past (due to the lack of the umlaut-triggering stem -i- of subclass [iii]), leading to a non-umlauted vowel in the past. These verbs also have consonant and vowel alternations between present and past that are due to regular sound changes but result in strikingly different forms in the historical Germanic languages (e.g., think , past tense thought ). Specifically: The class remained small in Gothic, but expanded significantly in

7584-417: The previous list shows, although there is only one productive class of weak verbs, there are plenty of "irregular" weak verbs that do not follow the paradigm of this class. Furthermore, the regular paradigm in English is not unitary, but in fact is divided into subclasses in both the written and spoken language, although in different ways: Both of these characteristics occur in a similar fashion in most or all

7680-511: The previously Polish-ruled territories in the east that were annexed by the USSR , resulting in the present-day Polish-speaking communities in Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine, although many Poles were expelled from those areas to areas within Poland's new borders. To the east of Poland, the most significant Polish minority lives in a long strip along either side of the Lithuania - Belarus border. Meanwhile,

7776-647: The pronunciation is uncertain: Roman letters are on the left, Cyrillic letters on the right. Note: As in Czech , the letter ⟨r⟩ can be syllabic, as seen in names such as Staszrvitch and Dbrnouk . There are some additional digraphs and trigraphs, including ⟨tch⟩ (used in names and pronounced with / t͡ʃ / , the apparent Syldavian version of the common Serbo-Croatian/Balkan surname ending -ić ), ⟨chz⟩ (uncertain, but may be an alternative form of ⟨cz⟩ / t͡ʃ / ), and ⟨th⟩ / t / . These demonstrate that

7872-540: The same applies to the first and second person plural past tense endings -śmy, -ście , although this rule is often ignored in colloquial speech (so zro bi liśmy 'we did' should be prescriptively stressed on the second syllable, although in practice it is commonly stressed on the third as zrobi li śmy ). These irregular stress patterns are explained by the fact that these endings are detachable clitics rather than true verbal inflections: for example, instead of ko go zoba czy liście? ('whom did you see?') it

7968-401: The same stem form as the underlying weak verb. However, class IV verbs derived from strong verbs adopt the ablaut of the past participle, for example: In the modern languages, the various classes have mostly been leveled into a single productive class. Icelandic, Norwegian and Frisian have retained two productive classes of weak verbs. (In Frisian, in addition to the class with -de , there is

8064-488: The sense of causing the action denoted by that strong verb (for example the strong verb to rise was turned into the weak verb to raise ). However, over time, the weak verbs have become the normal form of verbs in all Germanic languages, with most strong verbs being reassigned to the weak class. For example, in Old English the verb to lock ( lūcan ) was strong (present tense ic lūce 'I lock', past tense ic lēac 'I locked'), but has now become weak. This transition

8160-410: The series of affricate and palatal consonants that resulted from four Proto-Slavic palatalizations and two further palatalizations that took place in Polish. The full set of consonants, together with their most common spellings, can be presented as follows (although other phonological analyses exist): Neutralization occurs between voiced – voiceless consonant pairs in certain environments, at

8256-500: The six of standard Polish) and (in the northern dialects) phonemic word stress, an archaic feature preserved from Common Slavic times and not found anywhere else among the West Slavic languages . However, it was described by some linguists as lacking most of the linguistic and social determinants of language-hood. Many linguistic sources categorize Silesian as a regional language separate from Polish, while some consider Silesian to be

8352-435: The stative conjugation in one or more northern West Germanic languages: Class IV verbs were formed with a suffix -nan , e.g., Gothic fullnan "to become full". The present tense was conjugated as a strong verb, for example, Gothic fullna, fullnis, fullniþ , etc. The past tense was conjugated with suffix -nō- , e.g., Gothic fullnōda, fullnōdēs , etc. This class vanished in other Germanic languages; however,

8448-494: The stress normally becomes regular. For example, uniwersytet ( /uɲiˈvɛrsɨtɛt/ , 'university') has irregular stress on the third (or antepenultimate) syllable, but the genitive uniwersytetu ( /uɲivɛrsɨˈtɛtu/ ) and derived adjective uniwersytecki ( /uɲivɛrsɨˈtɛt͡skʲi/ ) have regular stress on the penultimate syllables. Loanwords generally become nativized to have penultimate stress. In psycholinguistic experiments, speakers of Polish have been demonstrated to be sensitive to

8544-484: The suffix -j- in the present and -i- in the past, for example, Gothic satjan "to set" (Old English settan ) and sandjan "to send" (Old English sendan ). As shown in the Old English cognates: This class was split into two subclasses in all the Old Germanic languages, one consisting of short-stem verbs and one of long-stem verbs. The distinction between the two was originally due to Sievers' Law , and

8640-453: The suffix spelling ⟨ed⟩ regardless of pronunciation, with the exception of a few verbs with irregular spellings. In Dutch , /t/ and /d/ are distributed as in English provided there is a following vowel . When there is no following vowel, terminal devoicing leads to the universal /t/ . Nevertheless, Dutch still distinguishes between the spellings in ⟨d⟩ and ⟨t⟩ even in final position: see

8736-733: The table), Syldavian definite articles are extensively inflected. Adjectives precede nouns: There is no sufficient evidence to tell whether adjectives change form. The rules of Dutch, a control language of Syldavian, are very complex. Note: the derivation Klow > Klowaswa is merely one of many adjectivizations, however, compare Zyldav 'Syldavian' Adjectives can be used to modify verbs like adverbs: 3rd person singular neuter objective and possessive and 2nd person plural pronouns are reconstructed based on Dutch and German. czei - this tot - that Verbs are either weak or strong . This decides how they are conjugated. Strong verb: blavn 'to stay' Weak verb: löwn 'to love' To negate

8832-511: The various Germanic languages are quite varied: An example is the stative verb reconstructed as Proto-Germanic * *habjaną "to have", past indicative third-person singular * habdē : Only four stative verbs survive as Class III verbs in the northern West Germanic languages (i.e., Old English, Old Saxon, Old Frisian and Old Low Franconian ): However, there are five more verbs that appear as Class III verbs in Old High German, Gothic, and/or Old Norse that also have remnants of

8928-400: The verb's root vowel (as in English I rise~I rose ). Whereas the strong verbs are the oldest group of verbs in Germanic, originating in Indo-European , the weak verbs arose as an innovation in proto-Germanic . Originally the weak verbs consisted of new verbs coined from pre-existing nouns (for example the noun name was turned into the verb to name ), or coined from strong verbs to express

9024-563: The vowel i is changed to y , e.g. Syria , Sybir , synchronizacja , Syrakuzy . The following table shows the correspondence between the sounds and spelling: Digraphs and trigraphs are used: Similar principles apply to / kʲ / , / ɡʲ / , / xʲ / and /lʲ/ , except that these can only occur before vowels, so the spellings are k, g, (c)h, l before i , and ki, gi, (c)hi, li otherwise. Most Polish speakers, however, do not consider palatalization of k, g, (c)h or l as creating new sounds. Except in

9120-443: The word, the phoneme / x / can be spelt h or ch , the phoneme / ʐ / can be spelt ż or rz , and / u / can be spelt u or ó . In several cases it determines the meaning, for example: może ("maybe") and morze ("sea"). In occasional words, letters that normally form a digraph are pronounced separately. For example, rz represents /rz/ , not / ʐ / , in words like zamarzać ("freeze") and in

9216-399: Was extended due to changes such as West Germanic gemination , which affected short-stem but not long-stem verbs. The West Germanic languages had a third subclass consisting of short-stem verbs ending in -r (e.g., Old English erian "to plow," nerian "to save," styrian "to stir"), due to West Germanic gemination and subsequent loss of -j- not taking place. The following is

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