• twig@lemmy.dbzer0.com
    0·
    5 days ago

    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.

    • Redfox8@mander.xyz
      0·
      5 days ago

      Yeah, my first thought was, isn’t Hungarian far more complex/different. Also, Icelandic is meant to be very difficult to learn too!

    • RunawayFixer@lemmy.world
      0·
      5 days ago

      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.

    • boonhet@lemm.ee
      0·
      6 days ago

      Ä, ö, ü, õ, š, ž are just there to allow for phonemic ortography, biatch!

      Though then again, I’m fairly sure that the weird Polish letters.

      Also if your native tongue DOES have phonemic ortography… Well guess how difficult it was for 6 year old me in Estonia to start learning English where the words are clearly not written the same way they’re spoken???

      It gets worse hearing older people here speak English because most of them did NOT start learning the language at age 5 or 6 so uhhhh… Yeah they expect the words to be pronounced the way they’re spelled. Makes your ears bleed.

      • MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml
        0·
        5 days ago

        Btw, there’s a mising phonetic letter in Swiss German, somewhere between ä and ö, kind of a aeo. But since it’s rarely written dialekt (personal chats), we work around this with Umlauts and context.

            • boonhet@lemm.ee
              0·
              5 days ago

              Estonian actually. I’m having a hard time thinking of an English word for an example. I guess I’d write bone phonetically as bõun? Or own as õun as well. With the u in our language sounding much like u in bauen or rauchen in German if I’m pronouncing those right.

  • Bob@feddit.nl
    0·
    6 days ago

    I don’t think you could get the speakers of all the European languages to agree on which one is normal.

  • dQw4w9WgXcQ@lemm.ee
    0·
    6 days ago

    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.

    • Lemmilicious@feddit.nu
      0·
      6 days ago

      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

    • Ezek@sopuli.xyz
      0·
      6 days ago

      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

  • Lvxferre@mander.xyz
    0·
    7 days ago

    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.

    • Rinox@feddit.it
      0·
      6 days ago

      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

      • Lvxferre@mander.xyz
        0·
        6 days ago

        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)
    • MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml
      0·
      6 days ago

      Germanic languages spam ⟨h⟩

      ? English? German has way less h. Ok, more ch, but that’s for different reasons, same reasons as ck.

      • Lvxferre@mander.xyz
        0·
        6 days ago

        I was kind of painting a broad stroke, but you’re right - German uses mostly ⟨ch⟩ and ⟨sch⟩. Should’ve said “English” alone.

    • Justas🇱🇹@sh.itjust.works
      0·
      6 days ago

      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.

      • Lvxferre@mander.xyz
        0·
        6 days ago

        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).

        • Justas🇱🇹@sh.itjust.works
          0·
          6 days ago

          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.

          • Lvxferre@mander.xyz
            0·
            6 days ago

            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.]

            • Justas🇱🇹@sh.itjust.works
              0·
              6 days ago

              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.

    • BlanketsWithSmallpox@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      6 days ago

      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.

      • Lvxferre@mander.xyz
        0·
        6 days ago

        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.

      • YTG123@sopuli.xyz
        0·
        6 days ago

        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.

    • Klear@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      7 days ago

      the alternative is to make the syntax become a hellish mess

      The alternative is Czech.

      • BeardedGingerWonder@feddit.ukEnglish
        0·
        7 days ago

        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”

    • dejected_warp_core@lemmy.world
      0·
      7 days ago

      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.

      • Lvxferre@mander.xyz
        0·
        7 days ago

        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.

        • tiredofsametab@fedia.io
          0·
          5 days ago

          Think you this some kind of joke?

          (What do you mean you don’t want to sound like an Elizabethan or earlier?!)

          • Lvxferre@mander.xyz
            0·
            5 days ago

            …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.

            • tiredofsametab@fedia.io
              0·
              5 days ago

              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.

        • YTG123@sopuli.xyz
          0·
          6 days ago

          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.

          • Lvxferre@mander.xyz
            0·
            6 days ago

            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.

    • Jyrdano@lemmy.world
      0·
      6 days ago

      It would certainly make Polish easier to read for Czechs. Not sure about other foreigners, šžčřě might be just as alien.

    • nepenthes@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      6 days ago

      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!!

      • Bohurt@lemm.ee
        0·
        6 days ago

        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.