14
votes
Accepted
Why does Polish use "w" instead of "v"?
It wasn't always written this way: in the earliest records of written Polish (such as the Bull of Gniezno), the letters "u" and "v" were used for this sound as well. There was no official "standard" ...
- 62.3k
13
votes
Accepted
Why does "brother" have the instrumental case in this Polish sentence?
I don't understand either grammatically or morally, how is "brother" an instrument with which the subject goes on a walk.
You are right, brother is not an instrument here. "I go with ...
- 8,557
10
votes
Accepted
Declensions in Polish
I can recommend this book: Słownik odmiany rzeczowników polskich by Stanisław Mędrak. The good news is that it's exactly what you want: a dictionary that lists all the noun declension paradigms. The ...
- 1,773
9
votes
What is the difference between Silesian Polish and neutral/standard Polish?
Native Polish born in Upper Silesia here. Here is my answer: When a native Silesian of older generation (say, 60+) speaks standard Polish, he/she has a strong regional accent which includes following ...
- 91
9
votes
Why does "brother" have the instrumental case in this Polish sentence?
The preposition z meaning 'with' takes the instrumental case, is all. E.g.
Mieszkam w domu z ogrodem
You say
The instrumental case is used to indicate the instrument/object with which an action or ...
- 6,836
7
votes
Accepted
why in Polish we change ją to jej when negating the phrase?
Yes, you do understand correctly what those sentences mean.
In the Slavic languages in general and in Polish in particular, the direct object of a verb is in the Accusative case when the verb is ...
- 17.7k
6
votes
How similar are Polish and Slovenian?
As indicated, Slovenian and Polish are from different subgroups of Slavic languages (South Slavic and West Slavic respectively). As such they are not mutually intelligible (actually spoken Czech and ...
- 2,353
6
votes
Accepted
What is the difference between sibilant sounds in Polish? (ć,ś,dź,ź vs cz,sz,dż,ż,rz)
In short, ć, ź, dź and ś are alveolo-palatal consonants, all articulated with the tongue raised towards the alveolar ridge (located just behind the upper teeth) and the palate (the roof of the mouth ...
- 1,773
6
votes
Accepted
Instrumental - nominative inversion in Polish
TL;DR: Your assumption is correct, "the new relation" is the main subject, while "result of the expression" is the nominal predicate.
It's a remnant of the ancient Essive/Translative grammatical ...
- 8,557
6
votes
Why is the Polish pronunciation of Łódź [wut͡ɕ] rather than [wudʑ]?
There are many explanations for the properties of a given random sound file on the internet. Since Wiki provides virtually no metadata on recordings, one can only speculate as to the circumstances of ...
- 80.3k
6
votes
Why does Polish language not use letters Č, Š, and Ž?
"Tradition" is the best explanation. Czech, Polish, Slovak and even Hungarian face similar problems of having consonants lacking Latin equivalents. When the Latin alphabet was first ...
- 80.3k
5
votes
Accepted
Influence of Polish and Czech on the phonology of German dialects
Areal features are often under-appreciated, especially the more subtle structural and semantic ones, as opposed to the more superficial lexical and phonological ones.
And the contact between Slavic ...
- 7,522
5
votes
Accepted
Can the voiceless velar fricative, [x], be represented in Japanese?
I will assume that by "translate" you mean which syllables in words loaned by Japanese correspond to [x] in their source language.
The answer is that words containing [x] which come directly from ...
- 4,868
5
votes
Accepted
Suffix -sk[a/i] for adjectives derrived from nations in Nordic and some Slavic languages
The suffix *-isk- is Indo-European. It has offspring in Greek, Germanic, Baltic and Slavic, and also in Romance, where it seems to be borrowed from Germanic.
- 23.7k
5
votes
Can a case system in a language help resolve gramatical ambiguites?
Being a native speaker of Czech, which is quite close to Polish, I think ambiguity can be avoided, or at least reduced, to some extent.
As for your Polish sentence, it would probably be wrong to use ...
- 982
4
votes
Accepted
Where exactly was the Polish-German language border in Silesia around 1900?
You can find some information about the language boundary in the project "Digitaler Wenkeratlas" at http://regionalsprache.de/ (not easy to navigate even with knowledge of German; the main ...
- 29.6k
4
votes
Can a case system in a language help resolve gramatical ambiguites?
In Polish, ambiguity in that case is not existent.
I killed the man with a spoon (man with spoon) - Zabiłem człowieka z łyżką
I killed the man with a spoon (using a spoon) - Zabiłem człowieka ...
- 1,418
4
votes
Can a case system in a language help resolve gramatical ambiguites?
The answer is, the case system can help avoid ambiguity, but it is not a silver bullet.
From the functional standpoint, the example sentence is actually two distinct phrases:
killed (a man who has a ...
- 8,557
4
votes
Why does Polish have male and female accents?
I have known a few languages other than Polish throughout my lifetime, which include Russian, English, French, Greek, and Hebrew, but in none of them have I observed any consistent difference between ...
- 759
3
votes
Is there a phonological division in Slavic languages as important as the La Spezia-Rimini line? If not, is there a most important partition anyway?
The main classification of Slavic divides it into South Slavic, West Slavic and East Slavic.
The most important partition of Slavic languages is the band that separates South Slavic from the rest of ...
- 7,522
3
votes
Are Polish-> Russan translations generally better than Polish->English?
There is a large variation in translation quality inside a given language pair. My guess is that this variation outweighs any systematic effects caused by choosing different target languages. Even if ...
- 29.6k
3
votes
Accepted
Why is the Polish pronunciation of Łódź [wut͡ɕ] rather than [wudʑ]?
To be precise, it is /wudʑ/ and in most contexts it will be pronounced [wut͡ɕ]. Phonologically there is phoneme /dʑ/ because when you decline the word, there is a vowel that follows, the phoneme stays ...
- 2,353
3
votes
Why does Polish use "w" instead of "v"?
The original sound in Western Slavic dialects in place of today's /v/ was bilabial /w/. I can't find a good reference, but here the corresponding consonant is definitely stated as bilabial. It is ...
- 1,221
3
votes
Accepted
When does the voiceless velar fricative, [x], undergo voicing?
⟨ch⟩ is pronounced [x] in Polish and as many other Polish sounds, it can undergo so called "voice assimilation".
Assimilation is a process during which a speech sound gets a feature from an adjacent ...
- 2,353
3
votes
What is the nature of the voiceless velar fricative, [x], in Polish?
I'm Polish and I can assure you that nowadays "ch" and "h" are pronounced exactly the same. Only elderly people (really few), especially in Eastern Poland, still keep the sound [h]. By the way, this ...
- 131
3
votes
Accepted
What is the nature of the voiceless velar fricative, [x], in Polish?
In Polish, most (if not all) words containing letter ⟨h⟩ are actually loanwords as there was no [h]/[ɦ] sound in Polish (as opposed to Czech, Slovak and Ukrainian, where [ɦ] evolved from Slavic [g]). ...
- 2,353
3
votes
Can a case system in a language help resolve gramatical ambiguites?
Some languages would have ambiguity between instrument and attributive possessum (and possibly also comitative `I went with a friend'), and some won't. This is not strictly dependent on case. For ...
- 1,066
3
votes
How Polish influenced Ukrainian
The reason why two languages differ is always complex, there's no one single factor, it's the combination of the factors. You can look at it as you've formulated, or you can look at it like Russian ...
- 17.7k
3
votes
Accepted
Why is there a Second Palatalization in personal nouns but not in non-personal nouns in Nominative Plural in Slavic languages
That's not a common-Slavic, but purely Polish phenomenon, since Polish distinguishes masculine persons' vs. other nouns' declension patterns in the plural (human vs. nonhuman). In other Slavic ...
- 17.7k
3
votes
Accepted
Question about a phrase with the Polish case genetive (dopełniacz)
Do is found in all the Slavic languages as a preposition with the meanings “[up] to” and “before”. In all the Slavic languages which have cases, this preposition governs only the genitive case, so it'...
- 17.7k
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