When I recently traveled through some States around the Baltic Sea, mostly but not exclusively the Baltic States, I came into contact with many interesting languages and I continue to stay in touch by studying about the languages. Well, for Poland [1], that is Polish, but Kashubian [2] also belongs to Poland. I will go into these languages in more detail.
The journey took me through Germany, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Finland and back to Germany. I didn't really want to write about Germany. But there is one language, and that is Sorbian. It should not go unmentioned here, as it is a West Slavic language, like the Polish language and others. So which languages are there in Poland? First of all, in addition to the Polish and Kashubian (in the Gdansk region) already mentioned, there is also German in Opole, Belarusian on the border with Belarus and Lithuanian on the border with Lithuania. And what surprised me a lot is that Karaite [3], which is spoken by the Karaites, also belongs partly to Poland. However, I only got to know the language in Lithuania, so I will mention it in more detail in the section on Lithuania.
Polish [4] usually appears to native speakers of Romance or Germanic languages as a cluster of consonants. [Język polski dla rodzimych użytkowników języków romańskich i germańskich jawi się zazwyczaj jako zbitka spółgłosek.] In addition, unusual diacritical marks or letters are used that we are not familiar with. But let us first consider that our alphabet has a history. It was developed to represent the Latin language. And even in Italian there are difficulties in representing sounds with it. Most Germans, for example, pronounce gnocchi or zucchini incorrectly. This is because the Italian language had to adapt the letters to the sounds. And so it happens that one letter stands for several sounds and this has to be indicated by another letter (to avoid ambiguity). In English it may be even worse. After all, fish can also be written ghoti, which is not my idea. This is a very old example to illustrate the irregularities in English spelling and pronunciation. This can be read very well in Wikipedia, which has its own article for ghoti [5] and of course it says that James Joyce used this example in "Finnegans Wake", as he alludes to ghoti in: "Gee each owe tea eye smells fish."
I had wondered whether Poland would have done better if it had used Cyrillic letters to represent its language, but then it would of course seem even more exotic to us. That was not the reason why Latin letters were chosen. Poland belongs to the Catholic circle of influence, while Russia, for example, belongs to the Orthodox circle of influence. The first writings were therefore already in Latin letters.
For the orthography of Polish, letters had to be expanded with diacritical marks, such as Ą, Ć, Ę, Ł, Ń, Ó, Ś, Ź and Ż. The letters Q, V and X only appear in foreign words. If we take the word for consonants „spółgłoski“ (plural, spółgłoska singular) from our example above and try to represent the sounds in English, then we could try "spoowhgwhoskee", but there is probably a less absurd possibility to do so.
Would you like a little bit of grammar? In the German language there are a total of four cases: nominative, genitive, dative and accusative, which are also used, although a large part of society neglects the genitive. Hungarian has 25 cases, English has four cases, but only the genitive is different from the others; practical for learning, because with two forms each for singular and plural, you can quickly tick off tedious learning. With Polish you have to learn more, because Polish has seven cases: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, instrumental, locative, vocative.
Let's look at some phrases:
Good evening! Dobry wieczór!
Good morning! Dzień dobry!
I'm sorry. Przepraszam.
Do you speak English? Czy mówisz po angielsku?
I don't speak Polish. Nie mówię po polsku.
The last sentence probably sums it up best. I myself am curious to see if I will ever get around to reading “The Very Basic Guide to Polish”. It would be interesting enough.
There are a number of minority languages in Poland, such as the aforementioned Kashubian and further as national minority languages: Armenian, German, Hebrew, Yiddish, Lithuanian, Russian, Slovak, Czech, Ukrainian and Belarusian, as well as ethnic minority languages: Karaite, Rusyn or Lemko, Romani and Tatar. Don't worry, we won't cover all of them.
Kashubian (Kashubian: kaszëbsczi jãzëk; Polish: język kaszubski) is a West Slavic language and belongs to the Lechitic subgroup. I won't elaborate on this. Kashubian is understood by about 300,000 people living west and south of Gdansk and about a third still speak this language in everyday life. Kashubian is an endangered language. Why am I interested in it now? The mother of Günter Grass [6] has been of Kashubian-Polish origin and Günter Grass indentified himself as Kashubian.
Let's take a look at the Lord's Prayer in different languages [7]:
Our Father in heaven English
Ojcze nasz, któryś jest w niebie Polish
Wójcze nasz, chteri jes v njebjesech Kashubian
Wótče naš, kiž sy w njebjesach Upper Sorbian
Here the question will probably arise as to what extent we are dealing with languages or dialects. I myself am more in favor of the term languages.
And now Sorbian [8], of which there are two languages: Upper Sorbian (hornjoserbšćina) in Upper Lusatia and Lower Sorbian (dolnoserbšćina) in Lower Lusatia. These two languages also belong to the West Slavic languages. They are mutually intelligible. Since there are only about 60,000 Sorbs left in Germany, both languages are threatened, although experts assume that one of the two, Upper Sorbian, will survive the 21st century.
Wikipedia has a table, a small part of which I would like to quote:
I think you can see how close the languages are to each other in terms of basic concepts. But there is also history and its influences and so these languages, like all languages, do not have the same loanwords or the same developments. To give a completely different example: the language that is closest to Spanish is not Italian but Portuguese, as spoken in Brazil.
I still have a lot to discover in the West Slavic languages and I hope that I have inspired people to study these languages as well. Learning all languages as not possible, but also not necessary.
Links and Annotations:
[1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polen#Sprachen and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poland#Languages
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kashubian_language and https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaschubische_Sprache
[3] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karaimische_Sprache and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karaim_language
[4] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polnische_Sprache and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_language
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghoti
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%BCnter_Grass
[7] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprachvergleich_anhand_des_Vaterunsers
[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorbian_languages and https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorbische_Sprache
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