Hello everyone. Welcome to the Langfocus Channel and my name is Paul. Today's topic is the Polish language, or
język polski as it's called in Polish. Polish is the official language of the
Central European country of Poland where 97% of the population speaks it as a
native language. That makes Poland the most linguistically homogeneous country
in Europe. It's the second most widely spoken Slavic language after Russian
with around 45 million native speakers and an additional 5 million second
language speakers. As you may know, Slavic languages are a branch of the
indo-european language family. Between the Year 500 CE and 1000 CE, Proto-Slavic gradually diverged into dialects and by 1000 CE there were already
distinct West Slavic, East Slavic, and South Slavic languages. Dialects of
these three languages developed into the languages of each Slavic branch. The West
Slavic languages include Polish, Czech Slovak,
Sorbian (a minority language in eastern Germany) and Kashubian (a minority
language in Poland). Poland first became a state in the 10th century around the
time that Slavak was developing into various distinct languages. The
unification of various Slavic tribes within one Polish state helped tie their
dialects together as a single language. The Christianization of Poland took
place in the decades following the creation of the Polish state, and along
with that came Latin via the Roman Catholic Church, which became the formal
written language and the language of the nobility. Polish continued to be the
predominant spoken language among the general population, but Latin certainly
had some influence on polish because of its prestigious position. Polish was not
a written language until the adoption of Christianity and the arrival of Latin.
From that point on vernacular Polish began to be written informally using the
Latin alphabet. The oldest sample of written Polish that
we know of is a list of names dating back to the year 1136. The oldest
written Polish sentence that we know of dates back to 1270.
There are more substantial texts from the 14th century onwards as Polish
became more commonly written. From the beginning the Latin alphabet was
insufficient for writing all the different sounds of Polish, so overtime
Polish writers began using a variety of diacritics that have become part of the
Polish alphabet and a characteristic part of Polish writing. During the
Jagiellonian dynasty Polish became an official language alongside Latin. Also
during this time, cities were founded and administered under a German system of
law known as Magdeburg law. Due to the influence of this system of law, numerous
German words entered Polish. German loanwords in Polish include "ratusz"
meaning "town council", and "bBurmistrz" meaning "mayor". Also, there had always been
contact with Germanic speakers, especially in the northwestern areas, all
the way back to Proto-Slovak. So there are other Germanic loanwords in Polish
that go back a long way. Latin remained an official language
alongside Polish through the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, but
Polish had gradually become more widely used by the nobility than Latin. In the
sixteenth century while Polish was becoming more standardized, it served as
the vehicle for the Golden Age of Polish literature. It also became the lingua
franca throughout much of Central and Eastern Europe, spoken by the ruling
classes not only in Lithuania but also in Ukraine and Belarus, which were mostly
part of the Commonwealth at the time. The third official language of the
Commonwealth was Ruthenian which was spoken in the eastern areas and would
later develop into Ukrainian and Belarusian dialects. Polish was
influenced by Ruthenian to some extent due to contact. Poland was erased from
the map between 795 in 1918 after being partitioned between the Russian Empire,
Austria, and the Kingdom of Prussia and later the German Empire which it was a
part of. Polish ceased to be an official language anywhere and dialectal
differences grew in the different occupied parts of Poland. After the First
World War, the borders of Europe were redrawn and an independent Polish state
was restored. Lands which were considered historically Polish were taken back from
occupying powers, but not all lands. The borders were once again redrawn
after World War II with the "Recovered Territories" being given from Germany to
Poland, and the Soviet Union occupying Eastern areas and making them part of
Belarus and Ukraine. Many Poles were forcibly transferred from those
neighboring countries to Poland, "transferred" being a euphemism for "kicked
out". This forced transfer of Poles from their homes to different dialect areas
resulted in dialect leveling, the loss of dialectal differences. And transfer, in
other words expulsion, of non-Poles to neighboring countries made Poland a very
linguistically homogeneous country. Today four main dialects of Polish are usually
recognized, but the differences are now slight. There is Greater Polish; Lesser
Polish; Masovian; and Silesian, though speakers often consider themselves a
separate language community; and sometimes counted is Kashubian, which is
generally considered a separate language but is closely related to Polish. So what
is Polish? Like pronunciation and orthography, Polish writing has a number
of characteristic features that are quite striking at first glance. The
Polish alphabet has 32 letters, but there are also seven digraphs, pairs of letters
which represent individual sounds. Notice that 4 of those digraphs feature the
letter Z. This makes Z the most common (consonant) letter in Polish writing. And notice that
there are two additional letters that are derived from Z which appear in
another two digraphs. If you include those, people seeing polish in writing
for the first time willdefinitely notice the abundance of Z's and Z-like
letters. But those two Z-derived letters are not the only special letters in
Polish. There are 9 in total. This letter (ł) is pronounced /w/, while in Polish the letter "w" is normally pronounced /v/. These letters represent nasal
vowels More specifically, vowels followed by
nasal semivowels. The exact quality of the nasal sound varies depending on the
surrounding sounds. And the nasal sound is normally absent before ł /w/ or in the
nasal "e" (ę) at the end of a word. For example, this word (się) is normally pronounced [ɕɛ]
and is only pronounced like this: [ɕɛ̃w̃] in very careful formal speech.
There are some noticeably long consonant clusters in Polish. This one has a
cluster of five consonants in a row: "bezwzględny" meaning "ruthless". Then
there's this one: przestępstwo meaning "crime". It has a
cluster of only four consonants, but there's also a digraph in this first
cluster which makes it appear to have three consonants instead of two. So to
someone looking at Polish for the first time, it probably appears to be full of
long consonant clusters, even though some of them are just digraphs. Most simple
Polish consonants are pronounced like their English equivalents, but note that
C is pronounced as /ts/ and as I mentioned before "w" is pronounced /v/.
And also note that the letters X, V, and Q are not used in Polish. The sound /ks/,
usually represented by X in English, is spelled KS in Polish. One important
feature of Polish pronunciation is hard and soft consonants, a common feature of
Slavic languages. Soft consonants are generally palatalized, like a hard
consonant pronounced together with a /j/ sound.
Aside from "j" and "l" which are always soft, soft consonants are indicated by an
accent above the letter, or by a "i" following the consonant. For example, /s/ - /ɕ/, /n/ - /ɲ/, /p/ - /pʲ/. Most of the digraphs we saw before
belong to a subset of hard consonants that derived from historically soft
consonants. Why do hard and soft consonants matter? Because in Polish some
inflectional suffixes are different depending on whether they are preceded
by a hard consonant or a soft consonant. Most consonants, specifically obstruents:
stops affricates and fricatives, when they appear in consonant clusters, must
all be voiced or voiceless. This results in voiced obstruents
becoming voiceless when they come before or after a voiceless consonant. For
example, "kwiat" /kfʲat/, łódka /wutka/. This also happens at the ends of words. This word meaning "car":
"samochód" /saˈmɔ.xut/, and this word meaning "doctor": "lekarz" /ˈlɛ.kaʂ/. This type of devoicing is one
of the main things that keeps Polish from being a fully phonetic language, in
other words, a language in which one grapheme equals one sound. Another thing
is that the distinction between a few sounds has been lost, so
that now these letters are pronounced the same. Grammar. Let's start with the
word order of Polish. The unmarked or neutral word order in Polish is SVO as
in English. For example, "Moje dziecko jest słodkie", meaning my child is cute or my child is sweet. The word order here is exactly
like in English: subject-verb-complement. The sentence has no object, but the
adjective here is a compliment. Another example. "Mężczyzna je obiad", which means
"The man is eating dinner". Subject-verb-object. Notice that there is
no definite article in Polish, and actually there isn't an indefinite
article either. Now this is the unmarked or neutral word order, but polish word
order is quite flexible, and elements of the sentence can be moved in order to
emphasize them. In the first sentence we could emphasize "my child" by moving it to
the end. "Słodkie jest moje dziecko". In the
second sentence we could emphasize "man" by moving it to the end. "Obiad je mężczyzna". So this sentence is now "Dinner - eats - the man". Technically, any word order is
possible. though some sound unnatural and would be most suitable for written
poetry or something. How can these words be moved around freely like this? Doesn't
that get confusing? The main reason is that Polish is a highly inflected
language and nouns, among other words, have case endings endings that tell us
the function of the word in the sentence. Because the function of the word is
obvious from its ending, we don't need to use word order or syntax to
determine the function of the word. "Dziecko" means "child". This is the singular form
in the nominative case, which is usually used for the subject of a sentence or a
predicate adjective after a linking verb. There are six other cases in Polish:
genitive, dative, accusative, instrumental, locative, and Vocative. These are the
singular forms but there are also plural forms. It's important to note that polish
has grammatical gender. "Dziecko" is a neuter noun. In their most basic form, the
nominative form, neuter nouns end in ~e, ę, ~o, or ~um.
There are also masculine and feminine nouns. Masculine nouns in their nominative form usually end in a consonant. An example is "chłopak" meaning "boy". Some
case endings differ between different types of masculine nouns. Compare "chłopak", a masculine person, to "bank", a masculine object. Notice there's a
difference in the accusative plural. The endings are different for masculine
people on the one hand, and masculine objects and animals on the other. For
many nouns this is also true for the nominative plural. Also notice that the
genitive and accusative singular endings are different. In these cases the endings
are different for masculine animate nouns, in other words humans and animals,
on the one hand, and inanimate objects on the other. Though in the genitive case a
few types of nouns are exceptions. Feminine nouns in their nominative form
usually end in a or i. For example, "matka" meaning mother. Adjectives also
agree with nouns in gender, number, and case, and they have their own sets of
endings. For example, "młoda matka" means "a young mother" in the nominative case.
But here's a phrase in the genitive case: "dziecko młodej matki" - the young mothers
child. Not only the noun has a genitive case ending, but so does the adjective.
And notice that the adjective's genitive ending is different from the noun's.
Adjectives have endings for all cases, in all genders, for both singular and plural.
Verbs. Polish verbs have two tenses: past and non-past, but there are also two
major aspects which indicate completion of an action (the perfective aspect) or
incompletion of an action (the imperfective aspect). Each verb has
separate infinitives for the imperfective and perfective aspect, and
then conjugations are built around those infinitives in order to indicate the
tense (in other words, the time at which the complete or incomplete action is
done). Let's take a look at the verb meaning "to read". "Czytać" - this is an
imperfective infinitive. In other words, the reading is in progress or ongoing.
"Przeczytać". This is a perfective infinitive meaning the reading is
complete. The perfective form of verbs is derived from the imperfective form by
adding a prefix to it, or sometimes by adding a suffix or changing a vowel in
the verb stem now. Let's conjugate these in the past tense. You drop the ć
from the end of the infinitive and add one of these endings to the remaining
stem. For example, "(Ja) czytałem" means "I was reading". In other words, the reading
was ongoing at a certain point in the past.
"(Ja) przeczytałem" means "I read". In other words, I completed the action of reading
within a certain time period in the past. By the way, please note that Polish is a
"pro-drop" language, meaning that the subject pronoun can often be left out.
That's because the verb endings often make it clear who the subject is. But
something to note is how the verbs are conjugated for gender in the past tense.
In the first and second person singular there are masculine and feminine forms.
The third person singular also has a neuter form. For the plural forms, the
distinction is between masculine personal endings, in other words for
people, and all the others. A masculine inanimate object or animal will be
conjugated the same as for feminine or neuter nouns. So while a man would say
"(ja) czytałem" a woman would "(ja) czytałam". And if you're talking to a man
you would say "Ty czytałeś" but if you're talking to a woman you would say
"(Ty) czytałaś". Speakers of other Slavic languages won't see anything
strange about this, but speakers of Germanic and Romance languages might
need to get used to this. Now let's take a look at the non past conjugations. "Non-
past? What do you mean by non-past? Is it present or future? Well, that depends on
whether it's imperfective or perfective. For an imperfective verb like "czytać",
the non-past conjugation has present tense meaning. For a perfective verb like
"przeczytać" the non past conjugation has future tense meaning. "(Ona) czyta książkę". This means "She's reading a book", while this sentence: on "(Ona) przeczyta książkę" means "She will read a book" Unlike the past tense conjugations,
the non-past conjugations don't have any gender distinctions. The tricky thing
about the non-past conjugation is that there isn't just one of them. There are
actually four different conjugations, with virtually all verbs following one
of them. Conjugation I and conjugation IV are characterized by an "e" vowel in
the 3rd person singular form. Conjugation II by an "i" vowel in the 3rd person
singular form. In conjugation III by "a" vowel in the third-person singular. The
perfective non-past form is sometimes referred to as the simple future. There's
another compound future tense that expresses the imperfective future, in other
words, an action that is ongoing or repeating in the future. "(Ona) będzie czytać książkę". This sentence means "She will be reading a book". It's formed by
using the future tense of "być" - the word meaning "to be", followed by the
imperfective infinitive. "Być" is an irregular verb, using a different verb
stem in the past, present, and future forms. Here's an example in the present
tense. "Nie jestem Polakiem." This means "I'm not Polish". And as a quick side note, here we
see how Polish negation works. You simply place the negation particle "nie" before
the verb. Now that we've examined some of the major features of Polish, let's take
a look at a few more sentences and see what we find. This sentence means "My
father reads 2 books every day". "Mój ojciec codziennie czyta dwie książki."
Word-for-word it's: my father - everyday - read - two - books. First off we see a
possessive adjectives before the noun meaning "father". Possessive adjectives in
Polish are inflected for the gender and number of the noun. Here the word "ojciec"
meaning "father" is masculine and singular, so the possessive is in it's
masculine singular form. And "ojciec" is in the nominative case. Next "codziennie" is
an adverb meaning "every day". The word for "day" is "dzień". Next we see the third-person
masculine singular present tense form of the verb. Next we see the number "dwie"
which means 2. Numbers 1 to 4 in Polish have different forms depending on the
case and gender of the noun they are referring to.
"Dwie" is feminine and is used for nominative and accusative case. Here it's
the accusative. The number is feminine because the word for book is feminine.
Książki is the plural form used for nominative and accusative cases, and here
it's the accusative. A moment ago I mentioned that numbers 1 to 4 have
different numerous forms. Numbers higher than 4 have only two forms. When counting
masculine personal nouns they are in the genitive case and the nouns they refer
to are in the genitive case. And when counting all other nouns they are in the
nominative/ accusative case, but the noun is still
in the genitive case. So if we change the number in this sentence say from two to
five the sentence would look like this. "My father reads five books every day".
"Mój ojciec codziennie czyta pięć książek." The number five has two forms: pięciu for
masculine people, and pięć for all others, including objects like books. "Książek." This noun is in the genitive plural form. And one more sentence. This
sentence means "Everyone likes him because he often laughs". she's single
"Wszyscy go lubią, bo często się śmieje." Word-for- word it's: everyone-him-they-like-because-
often-reflexive-pronoun-laughs. First we see the pronoun meaning "everyone".
Pronouns in Polish have different case forms. Since this is the subject of the
sentence, it's in the nominative case. Next we see a personal pronoun meaning
"him". Personal pronouns also have different case forms. This one is in the
accusative case. There are two other accusative forms: jego, niego. "Go" is
used when the pronoun is not being emphasized. "Lubią" is the third-person
plural form of the verb "lubić" meaning "to like". This verb belongs to conjugation
II and has an "i" vowel in the third-person singular.
Next we see "bo", a conjunction meaning "because". And after that we see "często" -
an adverb meaning "often". Next we see a reflexive verb meaning "he laughs". Polish
has lots of reflexive verbs meaning that both the doer and the receiver of the
action are the same. That may not always be obvious in terms of meaning, but in
terms of grammar that's how it works. This word "się" is a reflexive pronoun
which you simply add to the verb to form the reflexive. It has only one form.
Finally something simple in Polish! The verb here is in the third-person
singular present tense, and this verb belongs to conjugation I. Let me take
this part of the sentence and ask a question about it. "Czy wszyscy go lubią?"
meaning "Does everyone like him?" The way you ask yes or no questions in Polish is
very simple. You simply add the question marker "czy". Let's formulate another
question. This means "Who do they like?" "Kogo lubią?" This is an open-ended
question using an interrogative pronoun meaning "who".
Interrogative pronouns in Polish have different case forms. This one is in the
accusative case. In the nominative case it takes a different form, so if you
wanted to ask "Who likes him?" it would be Kto go lubi? "Kto" is the nominative form.
Honorable Mention. This is a last-minute addition to the video, but several Polish
speakers have asked me to include this particular feature of the language. When
talking about the presence of something in Polish you use the verb "być", meaning
"to be". For example, "On tu jest" means "He is here". That seems straightforward. The
unusual part is the negative form. "Nie ma go tu." NOT- IT- HAS-HIM. So this is like
saying "It doesn't have him here". But who is IT?
I don't know, but I suppose it's like a dummy subject in English, like when we
say "It's sunny". It doesn't really refer to anything. As
you can see Polish is an extremely interesting language, but it's also one
that many learners find daunting and intimidating. But as with any language,
there are people who learn it, whether they move to Poland or they're simply
deeply interested in Polish culture. Those people didn't learn everything
about the language all at once. They learned certain pieces first, then they
learned other pieces afterwards, until eventually they had a fuller picture of
the language. So don't let the details of Polish scare you off if you have the
interest and the motivation to go for it. The Question of the Day. To native
speakers of Polish: what additional features of Polish would you like to
tell us about? For example, are there any features of informal speech that you
would like to share? And to students of Polish: what do you find most challenging
about the language? Do you have any tips on how to deal with it? If you enjoyed
this video then please check out the various Langfocus social media
accounts, and of course as always I want to give a very special thanks to my
Patreon supporters, especially these ones right here on the screen who are my top
tier Patreon supporters, so I want to say a very special thanks to them for their
support. And to everyone, thank you for watching, and have a nice DAY!
Nobody: Polish speakers: Zcszs wsczkicz
6:26 Don't do that, it's called hypercorrection. Unless you really want to emphasize it:
My wife is Polish. And her parents have been pushing for me to learn the language. My wife watched this with me and the entire time was basically: srugs "sorry"
Watching as a Slavic person:
It's really funny seeing this here because I had just found this channel yesterday!
u/DestinationVoid
Ja bym to przypiął