Talk:Polish language/Archive 1

message: * Talk:Polish language archived by Halibutt on 06:45, 14 October 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Polish does have five grammatical genders (noun classes), taking into account all seven cases and both numbers: masculine-personal, masculine-animate-non-personal, masculine-inanimate, neuter, and feminine. There are many overlaps when it comes to grammatical agreement, but consider the following:I. Widzę jednego dobrego nauczyciela. Widzę i innych dobrych nauczycieli.II. Widzę jednego dobrego psa. Widzę i inne dobre psy.III. Widzę jeden* dobry dom. Widzę i inne dobre domy.IV. Widzę jedno dobre drzewo. Widzę i inne dobre drzewa.V. Widzę jedną dobrą dziewczynę. Widzę i inne dobre dziewczyny.All the about nouns (nauczyciel, pies, dom, drzewo, and dziewczyna) are of different grammatical genders (noun classes) because there exists at least one instance of a case and number that distinguishes one from another.--Jeziorko (talk) 02:20, 31 July 2008 (UTC)

message: 158.169.9.14 wrote:
> Total speakers: 60 Million
This number seems to be very overestimated. Could you please tell us what the source of these data is? Or where those Polish speakers live?
Boraczek 10:59, 28 Nov 2003 (UTC)
replies: text: Yesterday the same user changed such data in the German language version of Wikipedia and added wrong figures in the demographic sections of Germany and Poland. Maybe a nationalist? 82.82.120.181 11:02, 28 Nov 2003 (UTC)

text: OTOH, the number of 43 million seems a little low. There are approx. 39 millions speakers in Poland itself and the diaspora is estimated at 15-20 millions. The higher number might be the estimated quota of people speaking the language as opposed to 43 millions of mother-tongue speakers.Halibutt 09:33, 7 Jan 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Those 15-20 million aborad are just Polish descendants. Many of them can't speak Polish. The current information (46 million) seems to be a quite exact estimation. Do you agree? Boraczek 14:05, 14 Jan 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Fair with me.Halibutt 14:56, 14 Jan 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Total speakers

message: Is co żeście zrobili correct? I've always thought it's not though it seems to be a very common mistake (even more than poszłem). What does ż- mean here anyway? It's neither że ("that") as in:
::Myślałem, żeście to zrobili. - "I thought that you had done it."
nor an exclamatory suffix -ż(e) as in:
::Cóżeście (co + -ż --> cóż + ście --> cóżeście) zrobili?
Kpalion 18:58, 6 Mar 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: co je?cie zrobili
Where je?cie was an appropriate form of the word to be.
The complex past evolved into simple past by merging of the auxiliary verb and the participle into one word (zrobili?cie). Historically, words like zrobili are not verbs but adjectival participles.
The auxiliary verb can attach to some other word (it doesn't attach to verbs, as zrobili isn't really a verb), like in wy?cie, co?cie etc. It can also function alone, but the je- changed into ?e- in modern Polish. So the ?e- doesn't mean anything – ?em ?e?, ?e?my and ?e?cie are forms of the verb by? (to be).
It gets confusing, because in the third person there was no ending to move, so zrobi?/zrobili can function as third person words. If one wants to be peculiarly historically correct, one can see zrobi? as a particle and a null verb.
In no case is ?e?my incorrect. Taw 05:38, 11 Jul 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: ''Żeście''

message: Some time ago I prepared voice samples for most of the Polish cities and some famous personalities. Perhaps I could prepare some voice samples with phonetics or some basic texts for the Polish language page? Any ideas? Halibutt 05:42, Aug 20, 2004 (UTC)
I added those samples anyway. Any comments? Halibutt 15:15, Sep 10, 2004 (UTC)
::Boraczek recently sugested we removed two of the samples. Indeed, the final consonants in those examples are voiceless, but this does not mean that they make no sound. Halibutt 18:34, Dec 3, 2004 (UTC)
::: ??? I think this is an obvious misunderstanding. You can't give a word which does not contain any voiced velar plosive consonant as an example of a voiced velar plosive consonant.  The word bóg does not contain any voiced velar plosive consonant, it only contains a letter g. Therefore, I remove these examples. BTW thank you for adding soundclips! Boraczek 08:37, 4 Dec 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Phonetics and voice samples 

message: I have some remark on this fragment of the article:
These sentences mean the same ("Ala has a cat"):
    * Ala ma kota
    * Ala kota ma
    * Kota ma Ala
    * Ma Ala kota
    * Kota Ala ma
    * Ma kota Ala
Yet only the first of these sounds natural in Polish, and others should be used for emphasis only, if at all.
In fact, all these sentences sound natural, and all of them are in daily usage; nevertheless this strongly depends on context. Only the first one is completely neutral from the point of view of grammar (and handbooks):
* Ala ma kota - Ala has a cat.
The remaining sentences depend on context and also imply something:
* Ala kota ma, (ale go nie karmi)        - Ala does have a cat (but f.e. she doesn't feed it)
* Kota ma Ala, (a psa ma Ola)            - Ala has the cat (but f.e. the dog belongs to Ola)
* Ma Ala kota, (ale nie ma psa)          - Ala does have a cat (but f.e. she doesn't have a dog)
* Kota Ala ma, (ale nie ma nic poza tym) - Ala has a cat (but f.e. she doesn't have anything else)
* Ma kota Ala, (ale nie ma kota Ola)     - Ala has a cat (but f.e. Ola doesn't have a cat)
82.210.159.30 01:24, 6 Apr 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Word order

message: I think the information on number of speakers in respective countries is quite informative. I believe it should stay as it does no harm. 14:37, 10 Apr 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Number of speakers

message: In the early days of the Internet, when ASCII was all you could use, Poles using IRC (Internet Relay Chat) and, indeed, email, developed a convention for the representation of accented characters -- especially the awkward ones such as ą ę ł ś ź ż. With the spread of Unicode these dialects are no longer used and have been forgotten.
I remember this fact - and also that the convention was fixed and widely understood [this being a case where mutual comprehensibility is an overwhelmingly strong selective pressure] - but I do not, sadly, remember the exact details. I'm hoping that someone with a better memory and a sense of history will be able to record them here for posterity. Spontaneous linguistic evolution is rare and therefore hard to observe so it's important to have records of it wherever you can.
Some of the adaptations are obvious: thus ł was l' and ś was s'. More interesting was the re-use of the non-Polish letters q, v, and x to represent single Polish letters. This is where, frustratingly, I can't remember how they were assigned. If, for example, x was chosen to represent ż, one so rapidly learnt to *see* x as ż that and *type* ż as x that one no longer noticed that the "wrong" letters were being used. (But it might have been q or v rather than x - that's where someone with a better memory is needed).
[Of course, much of this went by the board if one was typing fast and didn't need accents for disambiguation].
It's also interesting that the Poles didn't handle the problem by adding digraphs (eg. ż=zh). Spaniards, on the whole, do: when faced with typing ¿cuántos años tienes? ["how old are you?" lit: "how many years to you have?"] on a foreign keyboard they either type 'anos' (anuses) and rely on the context to supply the accent or if they don't want their humorous interlocutor to say ¡uno, por supuesto! ["one, of course!"] then they'll type 'anyos'. For some reason the Poles preferred to re-use unused single letters.
::I doubt there was a single system used. I remember that some of my friends (back in the good old BBS times...) simply dropped diacritics while others made it up for themselves. Among the most popular system was x for ź (in Polish keybords you type ź by Alt+x combinaion), ñ for ń, and the rest with apostrophes and commas (c' for ć, s' for ś, a, for ą and so on). There was also a system (currently seen mostly in internet blogs by teenagers) to put down Polish with quasi-English transcryption. That is instead of Litwo, ojczyzno moja, ty jesteś jak zdrowie they put Leetvo ojchyzno moya ty yestesh yak zdrovie. However, this has hardly anything to do with technical issues. Halibutt June 29, 2005 08:35 (UTC)
::In fact the convention of omitting accents when writing Polish was older than the beginnings of the Internet. It all started in the 1980' when first computers had been brought to Poland without localized software and without any means of typing in Polish. Later in the early 1990' several codepages have been developed. However, because they were mostly incompatible (including Microsoft's CP852 for DOS and WINDOWS-1250) and people decided that letters lacking few pixels are less disturbing than when replaced with some ridiculous characters. Stlman (talk) 20:58, 14 March 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Pure ASCII alphabet 

message: Uh, Konstantynopolitańczykowieneczka isn't the longest word in Polish, is many longer words, for example dziewięćsetosiemdziesiątdwatrylionyczterystasiedemdziesiątosiemmiliardówpięćsetsześćdziesiątpięćmilionówsiedemsetczterdzieścipięćtysięcydwieścieosiemdziesięcioczteroitrzyczwartenanokilogramowy.
The problem with you reasoning is that compound numerals are written separately in Polish. So, the above numberal is in fact 13 separate words (that BTW are usually put down as even more words wor simplicity's sake): dziewięćsetosiemdziesiątdwa tryliony czterystasiedemdziesiątosiem miliardów pięćsetsześćdziesiątpięć milionów siedemsetczterdzieścipięć tysięcy dwieścieosiemdziesiątcztery i trzy czwarte nanokilograma. BTW, it means roughly 282 478 565 745 284.75 x 10-9 kilogrammes. Halibutt 10:51, 17 September 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  ''Konstantynopolitańczykowieneczka''