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Issue 23 of MED Magazine included an interesting article on borrowings and false friends between Polish and English. My purpose in this article is to look a bit more closely at some of the relationships between the vocabularies of these two languages, to identify some points of divergence and possible confusion, but also to reveal some hidden similarities. If you look at a text in Polish – even though Polish is written in the Latin alphabet, unlike some of the other Slavonic languages – you won't spot many obvious similarities with English. And even then, some of the apparent similarities are misleading. You'll see the words to and ten, but in Polish these are determiners. You'll see do, but this is a preposition. You'll see ale, but this is a conjunction, rather than something to quench your thirst with. In fact, there are more similarities than first impressions might suggest, although some of them need to be treated with caution by the Polish-speaking learner of English or the English-speaking learner of Polish. Bilingual homographs, homophones and homonyms Starting with purely coincidental similarities between English and Polish, here are a few examples of what I call bilingual homographs (same spelling in both languages, but different pronunciations), bilingual homophones (more or less the same pronunciation, as far as the pronunciation systems of the two languages allow, but different spelling), and bilingual homonyms (same spelling and more or less the same pronunciation). Examples of bilingual homographs:
Examples of bilingual homophones:
Examples of bilingual homonyms:
Polish and English, as a Slavonic and Germanic language respectively, have a shared Indo-European ancestry, and there are a considerable number of ancient cognates, though in some cases the similarity is more obvious than in others:
From the Renaissance on, European languages in general have tended to borrow large amounts of learned vocabulary from Latin and Greek, either directly or via some other language such as French. Polish is no exception, and the result has been an enormous increase in the vocabulary that Polish and English have in common. Here are just a few examples:
Borrowings from English intact Polish has also borrowed from other languages, notably German, but in recent times English has been the predominant source. Some words have been borrowed from English more or less intact, with the spelling unchanged and no deliberate adaptation of the pronunciation:
In Polish, show is something of a curiosity. If it was given the normal inflections for case and number, there would be bizarre consequences for spelling and pronunciation, and so, unusually for a Polish word (there are a few more such examples), it remains uninflected. When words are borrowed ostensibly intact, some interesting fluctuations in pronunciation and spelling can arise among people unfamiliar with the original English versions. The word styling is used in the context of hairdressing, and is sometimes pronounced like 'stealing'. Hot dog sometimes appears as hod dog, and there are some creative spellings of cheeseburger, including chessburger. More usually, there is some adaptation to borrowed vocabulary, with the pronunciation being preserved at least approximately, and the spelling altered to fit with Polish spelling conventions:
Unlike show, borrowed words are generally subject to normal Polish morphological processes, and this sometimes has the effect of disguising the similarity with the original English version:
(The phoneme /ž/ is a voiced palato-alveolar fricative
and / Borrowed words often form the basis for quite large word
families. A very productive process is the formation of verbs ending in
-owa
But others are increasingly invented on an ad hoc basis, and cause a certain amount of adverse reaction:
Perfective forms of these verbs can be formed by adding prefixes:
For nouns, productive suffixes are -acja, corresponding to English -ation (or -izacja/-yzacja, corresponding to -isation):
and -owanie, which often corresponds to the gerund in English:
For adjectives, a common suffix is -ny/-alny:
And there are corresponding adverbs with -nie/-alnie:
Another productive adjectival suffix is -owy:
The suffix -ka is regularly used to derive feminine forms from masculine ones. So a barman is barman, and a barmaid is barmanka /bar'manka/. Sometimes Polish forms expose lexical gaps in English.
Solidarno Not surprisingly, there are many cases where apparently equivalent items in the two languages have totally different meanings, or where there is some partial difference in meaning or usage. In English, angina is heart disease, but in Polish angina is a throat disease. A Polish dekada can be ten years, but also ten days; the first dekada of December is the first ten days of December. A pulpit in Polish is a music-stand, or a desktop in computerspeak. A drink is not a drink in general, but usually a strong alcoholic drink or cocktail. A konkurs is not a concourse but a competition. A rower is not a rover but a bicycle, named after the Rover company which made the first bicycles that became popular in Poland. Similarly, trainers are adidasy, after the brand name. More surprisingly, the singular form adidas is used informally to mean AIDS, or as a derogatory term for a person suffering from that condition. If something is fatalny, it might be unlucky, awful or pathetic, but not fatal. An audycja is a radio programme, not an audition. A kolega is a friend, who may or may not be a colleague. Pensja is a salary, not a pension; renta is a disability benefit, which may or may not be enough to pay your rent with. In English you can resign from a job or some other
kind of official position, but in Polish you can rezygnowa Digging deeper into the vocabularies of the two languages reveals a great deal of similarity which isn't evident on the surface, but which results from parallel processes of combining lexical elements which are quite different in form but closely similar in meaning. The Polish word wszechmocny and the English words almighty and omnipotent are formed from the constituents wszech/al/omni, meaning 'all' and mocny/mighty/potent, meaning 'powerful'. Indeed, another equivalent word in English is 'all-powerful'. Almighty uses Germanic elements in English, whereas omnipotent uses corresponding Latinate elements. There are many more parallels of this kind, where the English word is formed from Latin or Greek elements:
Recognition of Latin and Greek elements in English opens windows onto all kinds of parallels in Polish. To take just one example, the Latin element cur-, meaning 'run', appears in a large number of English words, such as:
Some of these have close equivalents in Polish: kurs
(course), kurier (courier), kursor (cursor), kursywa
(cursive). But in many other cases the equivalents can be found in words
based on bieg or bie
Polish makes use of many of the same key metaphors as English. (You can read more about 'Metaphor' in the Language Awareness section of the Macmillan English Dictionary.) Here again, I'll give just one example: understanding is like seeing. In English, we say things like:
Similarly, in Polish:
The elements shown in bold all have basic meanings connected with seeing and light. Polish and English have a large number of idioms in common, including:
Sometimes there are slight differences although the basic idea is the same:
In these few examples of English and Polish vocabulary,
we have seen examples of:
These are all normal processes of vocabulary development.
Borrowings and loan-translations can change the character of a language's
lexicon to a greater or lesser extent, but they don't normally have any
impact on the fundamental structure of the language that does the borrowing.
But an example of a potentially more substantial impact is provided by
a recent trend in compounding in Polish, under the influence of both English
and German, in which it is a normal means of word formation.
In other words, what's been borrowed is a morphological process which can be applied to native Polish elements as well as borrowed ones. So far the number of modifying elements it can be used with is limited, but who knows how it might develop? In any case, it seems likely that Polish will be influenced increasingly by English as the overall level of knowledge of English rises among the population, and more and more people are involved in passive contact with, or active use of, English in their daily lives. Andrzej Markowski's book Polszczyna znana i nieznana
(Gda A good source of information on the history of Polish
words is Andrzej Ba If you'd like to read more about the semantics of English borrowings into Polish, see MED Magazine's October 2004 issue. The topic of the next article in this series will discuss the Maltese language and its borrowing from English. * Note: Except where noted, the meanings are closely similar to the original English ones. |
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fatset/
o
ki
e/
. Many of
these are well-established:
?
= walk, go
/co
= together
-,
also meaning 'run' (
is a regular alternation of g in derived forms) such as:
ni
skie Wydawnictwo
O
ownik
J
zyka
Polskiego (Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN, 2000). Unfortunately, only two
of the projected three volumes, A-K and L-P, have been published.