The orthography is OK. It spams ⟨z⟩ for the same reason why Romance and Germanic languages spam ⟨h⟩ - too few letters, too many sounds, got to use digraphs.
The phonetic and phonemic part is like your typical European language. As in, “WE NEED A NEW SOUND! OTHERWISE WE CAN’T REPRESENT THE KITCHEN SINK DRIPPING!!!”
The morphology is complicated, but the alternative is to make the syntax become a hellish mess. Like Mandarin or English. Language is complicated, no matter which one.
Germanic languages spam ⟨h⟩
? English? German has way less h. Ok, more ch, but that’s for different reasons, same reasons as ck.
I was kind of painting a broad stroke, but you’re right - German uses mostly ⟨ch⟩ and ⟨sch⟩. Should’ve said “English” alone.
the alternative is to make the syntax become a hellish mess
The alternative is Czech.
A Polish colleague of mine once accidentally picked Czech in an online work training exercise and then spent the next 30 minutes giggling to himself. I asked him afterwards what was up “Czech sounds like baby talk”
So I’ve heard. The feeling is mutual, oddly enough.
Czech babies just out there speaking English. This is why we’re falling behind. We’ve gotta stop starting our babies on Czech
English syntax hard?
There’s a lot of issues with English. Most of them are for using loanwords without phonetically changing how they’re spoken in the English alphabet. Then people wonder why they’re spelled like Ledoux and sound like Lehdoo.
Romance. Romance languages are the fucking reason you word slurring tongue twats.
But hey, at least we’re not Turkik.
English syntax hard?
Yes. Sequence of tenses. It’s harder than Latin. As in, what the hell does “future-in-the-past” mean?
Or tenses (+aspect+mood) in general, I guess. You guys have too many of them.As for the orthography, you know what is to blame. The Great Vowel Shift.
English syntax hard?
Yes, it is. It has 9001 rules for the allowed order of the words, 350 for each, and you have lots of those small words with grammatical purpose that don’t really convey anything, but must be there otherwise your sentence sounds broken. Refer to my examples with yes/no questions and *blue famous raincoat (instead of “famous blue raincoat”).
That happens because any language is complex, there’s no way around. You can dump that complexity in the word order, like English does, or dump it in different word forms, like Polish; but you won’t be able to get rid of it.
There’s a lot of issues with English. Most of them are for using loanwords without phonetically changing how they’re spoken in the English alphabet.
That’s something else, the spelling.
the alternative is to make the syntax become a hellish mess. Like Mandarin or English.
Now hang on just a second. English is fine. You just have to memorize or correctly guess the etymology of whatever word it is you’re trying to spell/pronounce in order to get … oh, okay, I think I see the problem now.
Ah, what you’re saying is spelling. Syntax is word order, obligatory words, stuff like this. English syntax is a maze, or how programmers would call it, spaghetti code.
For example, here’s how to ask a positive/negative question in…
- Latin - attach -ne after the relevant word.
- Spanish - why bother? Intonation is enough.
- Polish - start the sentence with “czy”.
- German - shift the verb to the start of the sentence (first position).
- English - if the verb belongs to a small list of exceptions, do it as in German. However most verbs refuse this movement to the first position, so for those you need to spawn a dummy support “do”, then let it steal the conjugation from the leftmost verb, and then shift that “do” instead. Noting that semantic “do” also refuses the movement, so it still requires a support “do”, yielding questions like “did you do this?”
Then there’s the adjective order. In Latin for example it’s just a “…near the noun? Whatever, just don’t be ambiguous.” Polish is probably like Latin in this. English though? Quantity or number, then quality or opinion, then size, then age, then shape, then colour, then material or place of origin, then purpose or qualifier, then the noun. And don’t you dare to switch them - “your famous blue raincoat” is a-OK, but *“your blue famous raincoat” makes you sound like a maniac.
Think you this some kind of joke?
(What do you mean you don’t want to sound like an Elizabethan or earlier?!)
…my lizard brain is now confused, because it really your question word order as in German to interpret wants, thus still for the ending “is” waiting is.
I think “think you that this is some kind of joke” is more grammatically correct (from a prescriptive POV, anyway), but I’ve seen similar sentences as the above before.
In Latin for example it’s just a “…near the noun? Whatever, just don’t be ambiguous."
It doesn’t need to be remotely close to the noun lol
Though Latin syntax can get annoying sometimes (when do I use the subjunctive? What’s the correct negation? Perfect or imperfect… maybe pluperfect? Which noun is this random genitive modifying?), it does make sense eventually. I guess that is also true for English, but I still mess up the tenses sometimes.
It doesn’t need to be remotely close to the noun lol
You can, but it isn’t that common, it’s even considered a form of hyperbaton (messing around with word order).
Note that those distinctions that you mentioned (subjunctive vs. indicative, the right negation, perfect vs. imperfect) are all handled through the morphology in Latin, not the syntax (as in English). And yes Latin morphology can get really crazy, just like Polish or any other “old style” Indo-European language.
Syntax is for nerds. I prefer a vibes based language.
That’s how it always starts, then the nerds get hold of it
Just come up with new letters, Lithuanian has 9 (ą, ę, ė, į, ų, ū, č, š, ž) extra letters. If a small language can do it, so can English.
It’s actually easier to come up with a decent orthography for a language with a small number of speakers, as it depends on getting “everyone” (more like “enough people so the opposers can be safely ignored”) on the same page. Doubly true when it’s a language associated with a single government, because once you get 2+ governments into the bag they tend to force distinctions where there’s none.
For English there’s an additional issue, the lack of any sort of regulating body like the VLKK. The natives also seem to have a weird pride against diacritics (kind of funny as English spams apostrophes, but OK, not going to judge it).
I mean, yes and no.
You are assuming that Lithuanian language became formalised when Lithuania was united under one government. Instead, most of language formalisation happened between 1880s and 1920s, when Lithuanian speaking population was actually divided between Prussian and Tzarist Russian empires. While most of the people lived in Tzarist Russia, writing in Lithuanian in Latin script was forbidden there.
Instead, books in Latin script were printed in Prussia and distributed in Russia illegally. A handful of people like J. Basanavičius and V. Kudirka ended up in charge of printing most of those books and it made it easy to set language standards. Achieving such a monopoly with a bigger language would be much more difficult.
That is also why formal Lithuanian is based on one ethnic dialect that was spoken in Prussia.
I’m not assuming when the formalisation happened. I’m saying that it’s harder to get everyone to agree on how the orthography is supposed to be, when 2+ governments and populations associated with them are forcing distinctions even when there’s none.
You’re right that it is not impossible however, and your historical example shows it. Historically Lithuanian is the exception that proves the rule because
- the local population didn’t see themselves as Prussians or Russians, but as Lithuanians, so there was a community even across borders; and
- neither Prussia nor Imperial Russia were backing specific varieties of Lithuanian. They were backing German and Russian instead.
And nowadays it’s simply not an exception. (I was referring mostly to modern times.)
Instead, books in Latin script were printed in Prussia and distributed in Russia illegally. A handful of people like J. Basanavičius and V. Kudirka ended up in charge of printing most of those books and it made it easy to set language standards. Achieving such a monopoly with a bigger language would be much more difficult.
That’s a great tidbit of info, and it’s related to what I’m saying: those Lithuanian speakers in Russia only accepted the books as suitable for their language, even if they were printed in Prussia, because they didn’t see it as coming from “those other guys”.
[Thank you for the info, by the way! Across the whole comment, not just that paragraph.]
You’re welcome.
If you want to read more about the history of Lithuania and surrounding countries and their nation formation, a great start would be Timothy Snyder’s book “The Reconstruction of Nations”, he’s the most popular historian of the region who is not from the region.
Then there’s Italian. We have less letters than other European languages (we don’t have k,j,w,x,y) and we still manage to avoid shit like “thoroughly” or spamming letters. We have accents, but use them way less than in Spanish and no special accents or characters like ñ ç č ß å ø ö etc
Once you understand the rules is probably one of the easier languages to spell and pronounce
Italian is the exception that proves the rule. The orthography is well-designed (transparent, without too much fluff), but not even then it could avoid ⟨ch gh⟩ for /k g/ before ⟨e i⟩, so it could reserve ⟨c(i) g(i)⟩ for /tʃ dʒ/.
It’s all related: modern European languages typically have a lot more sounds than Latin did, so Latin itself never developed letters for them. Across the Middle Ages you saw a bunch of local solutions for that, like:
- Italian - refer to the etymology to pick a digraph, then solve the /k tʃ g dʒ/ mess with ⟨h⟩.
- Occitan - spam ⟨h⟩ everywhere. (Portuguese borrowed from it.)
- English - spam ⟨h⟩ too.
- Hungarian - spam ⟨y⟩ instead.
- Polish - spam ⟨z⟩, plus a few acute accents (Polish has the retroflex series to handle too, not just the palatal/palato-alveolar like the four above)
Kinda weird to isolate Polish when Hungarian, Finnish and Basque are actually all their own distinct language families.
Polish actually isn’t in a distinct language family and shares a lot with other western Slavic languages like Czech, and Slavic languages in general.
Yeah, my first thought was, isn’t Hungarian far more complex/different. Also, Icelandic is meant to be very difficult to learn too!
Maybe it’s because it was in the same language group as those others that polish got singled out. People who speak an Indo European language will expect to be lost when first trying to learn a language outside of the group, but might not expect to be so confuddled from a related language. Expectations basically.
This is outrageous! I will call all users of our Polish instance “SZMER” to… OK, I might be getting your point.
Have you ever seen transcribed Georgian?
I remember some video where somebody was showing an example of either a word or a sentence & showed: “mbrtskvni”
this language would make you think they have to pay a fee for using vowels
I don’t think you could get the speakers of all the European languages to agree on which one is normal.
but we can all agree hungarian isn’t
You could if we had won. /s
Sure you can everyone in france know theirs is the only real language. Don’t believe me? Just ask someone from france.
It has to be French right?
Inappropriate use of vowels, 10 yard penalty for the defense
10 yard penalty for the defense
We don’t know what that means. Can you please talk european?
Parce-que non, s’il vous plait, je ne parle pas francais
Omelette
duau fromage.
Me, a non European who only speaks english, so true
Haha yeah I get it.
Took 2 years of Polish at University. I spent more time on that one class than all my other classes combined… And I went to school for Education.
I wonder if we had ž etc like Czechs would it make it easier for foreigners to read
I’m learning Polish, and spelling (rz dz sz cz ł and ą ę ż ś) is all fine for me-- the thing I struggle with is the grammatical cases. The fact that the ending of everything changes is what has caused me to give up twice 🥺
I will pick it up again, but I sucked at the Masculine/Feminine thing with French, and this is a lot more difficult.
CAT:
- KOT
- KOTA
- KOTU
- KOTEM
- KOCIE <— (This is where I quit: Locative case took the T away WTF?!)
Przepraszam moja drogi!!
Looks weired but a sound of C and T has to be somehow connected, at least it feels like they are to me. Based on my experience, sound of Polish Ć and Czech Ť are transitional between Polish/Czech T/C. Proper linguist might put some more light on it than just my speculation.
Our C is reffered in IPA as joined “TS” sound, so there is definitely some merit to that
Fun fact: The Czech adopted š, č and ž to look less German. The Lithuanians adopted it to look less Polish.
Based Jan Hus. Sparking religious wars and linguistic reforms.
That happened hundreds of years after Hus.
It would certainly make Polish easier to read for Czechs. Not sure about other foreigners, šžčřě might be just as alien.
Is ź and ż not enough? =D
Polish is a Slavic language written out using Latin letters.
Would be so much shorter with a щ
*cries at Greek
Bezwzględny Grzegorz Brzęczyszczykiewicz wyruszył ze Szczebrzeszyna przez Szymankowszczyznę do Pszczyny. I choć nieraz zalewała go żółć, niepomny następstw znalazł ostatecznie szczęście w źdźble trawy.
EDIT: copy/pasted from somewhere, this looks incredible to pronounce! The only polish word I know is kurwa, and Zubrowka.
Grzegorz Brzęczyszczykiwicz is a popular joke name. Plausible sounding, but, to my surprise, not registered to actually exist. Yet to close to my real name for me to find the video link all that funny, rather than a common expirience even with other Poles.
It may look hard, but those are more of a spelling nightmare than pronounciation ones
Hard ones to pronounce are for example: “Chrząszcz brzmi w trzczcinie w szczebrzeszynie” or “stół z powyłamywanymi nogami”
Or “wyrewolwerowany rewolwer”
My classmates and I played around with that one a lot back in primary school – I think I once managed to say “wyrewolwerowany rewolwerowiec wyrewolwerowuje wyrewolwerowany rewolwer” without skipping a beat.
The only polish word I know is kurwa, and Zubrowka.
You’re right, you know just one word in Polish, because it’s Żubrówka you filthy peasant.
😆
We used to have a server at my university which a polish guy set up. It received the name brzeczyszczykiewich. We decided that the server was secure enough by name, so we only put a trivial password on it for remote connection.
Are you sure it wasn’t “brzeczyszczykiewicz” (difference in last two letters)? Otherwise it seems like a little typo, which, to be fair, would be a good idea to keep it safe from Polish people haha
I’m completely sure, like 100%, fully positive without a single doubt… that I misspelled it and I would never be able to access the server again.
Can we also get some translation or something. This might shock you, but not all of us are polish.
There is no translation, it’s just a hard to pronounce Polish surname.
Whew. Good. I thought it was just me.
And when polish gets drunk, I always laugh because it changes a bit. They said its imposible to read polish subtitle on films, that is why they have a monoton voice reading out loud. They were the naughtiest in babylon 🤣
That’s actually not that bad. Definitely better than dubbing. The voiceover lets You understand everything said, but You can focus on the picture unlike with subtitles. And the monotone voice over the dialogue lets You hear the emotions of the actors.
Oh this is really cool. I didn’t know that! So foreign films brought to Poland are spoken over with a Polish translator, just like you’d have at the UN? That way you can hear the original actors and the translated dialogue in Polish?
How does this work for trying to learn a new language? I have heard of many people learning English by watching English movies and TV shows with subtitles in their own language. This allows them to listen to English and slowly start to pick up English words while still being able to understand what’s happening due to the subtitles. I myself am learning Chinese and I occasionally watch cooking videos in Chinese with English subtitles and find myself gradually picking up the Chinese words as I hear them.
I think this technique probably works best with shows and movies written for children, as those have much simpler dialogue to begin with.
Films with subtitles
That’s copeium. Most people are too lazy to match meanining with words when wathing films. Ask any weeb if they know japanese from watching anime for years. (I don’t)
I satrted to pick up language from flashcards, childrens books and textbooks. Not from translated films. (english or japanese or russian)
Well you have to be deliberate about it. You need to actually practice the language outside of watching the shows/movies. But the content you’re watching is a strong motivator to continue learning. And then one day you turn the subtitles off!
Absolutely not. It’s a great way to learn. I am living in Denmark currently and everybody here knows English, young and old, because they have movies with subtitles on their TV.
This actually doesn’t help with understanding English. You will pick up a few words, but You can’t listen to two people talk at the same time. You can only pick up how they act, but not what they say. I learned English watching cartoons without any translation when I was 7.
Idk if you’ve seen one of these dubs/voice overs, but usually the underlying is so quite, it is closer to being muted than actually understandable
I’m Polish, so I’ve been seeing them all my life. And I have to disagree, I’ve never had a problem with hearing the actors.
It’s not spelling, it’s the grammar and ortography that would make you want to peel your skin off.
Like the couple dozen ways why can say “two”.
It’s not just numbers. Almost all verbs are like that.
Say “jumping” - skakać
I am jumping - skaczę I was jumping (male) - skakałem I was jumping (female) - skakałam you are jumping (singular) - skaczesz you were jumping (singular male) - skakałeś you were jumping (singular female) - skakałaś you are jumping (plural) - skaczecie you were jumping (plural male) - skakaliście you were jumping (plural female) - skakałyście they are jumping - skaczą they were jumping (male) - skakali they were jumping (female) - skakały
And so on and so on. You have no chance of remembering all of that - you either learn the rules and how to apply them, or you fail at polish language
A notch worse than German - that’s actually impressive. German only distinguish between genders for (pro)nouns.
At least these all have the same radical. Here’s the different radicals you can use in French for the verb “be”:
- Être
- Je suis
- Tu es
- Nous sommes
- Nous étions
- Je fus
- Tu seras
- Soyons
The only common point between some of those is the letter “S”, which is not even part of the infinitive.
(Not all tenses are represented because at least they share the radical with that list, but like Polish we have a bunch of tenses and the verb changes with plurality and pronoun).
Anyway I don’t fucking know why everyone glamorizes French because as a native speaker please do not attempt to learn it, you will just hurt yourself.
The verb “be” (in Spanish we have two of them btw, apparently it’s confusing as hell for foreigners details at the bottom) it’s usually very irregular in a ton of languages. I suppose because it’s one of the prime verbs and thus usage brings change.
(“To be in a a place” -> «estar», “To be something” -> «ser»).
Also, French (while having picky pronunciation rules I don’t think it’s that bad. Sure it sounds as if you were nasally congested but I like it. (Learned a bit in high school). As alsmot any other language I consider it to be better than the phonetical mess that it’s English.
Bro, why can’t you have some fucking sense??
I should have picked philosophy and linguistics instead of CS.
((This coment is a mess and I don’t have the energy to improve it, sorry))
Generally French speakers don’t consider English to be phonetically messy. Because when you pronounce every word with the thickest French accent known to man without any regard for correctness, suddenly the phonology becomes quite regular! (Side-effect being that native English speakers may not understand what the fuck a French speaker is saying, but that’s never stopped French speakers who famously disregard the English’s opinion on… well everything)
What’s really annoying about French besides the needlessly complicated tenses is that it had a bunch of already archaic orthographic and grammatical rules 300 years ago or so, and at that point the aristocracy decided to freeze it in place. I won’t get on another rant about the Académie française but if a French word has an overly complicated spelling given its pronunciation, it’s these guys’ fault who have refused to enact any real reform since the early 1800s despite calls for it since at least the 1700s. Despite it supposedly being their jobs.
Doesn’t all of these additionally change depending on the casus?
Note: They have seven of them. SEVEN.
You mean declension - yeah, there are seven. For every single noun.
Oh, yeah, you’re right. It just tempus and stuff. For example:
skaczę. Przeskakuję. Odskakuję. Podskakuję. Przeskoczyłem. Odskoczyłem. Podskoczyłem.
Thank you for the hint, though.
Two, couple, pair, twin, duo, dyad, tandem, twain. That’s all I got
Not what I meant. Those are synonyms. I mean specifically “two” in English. Dwa, dwie, dwóch, dwoje, dwójka, dwóm, dwojgu… they all translate to two.
That sounds even worse than Japanese’s counting system.
