man I find german harder than polish
Be Polish. Live at the crossroads of three major continental zones. Incorporates traditions from Arabic, Latin, and Nordic languages into a unique synthesis. Everybody hates it. Nobody wants to speak it.
Be English. Live at the ass end of nowhere, and become a haven for vagrants, dissidents, pirates, and exiles. Incorporate traditions from Latin, Germanic, and Frankish languages into a unique synthesis. Everyone hates it. Nobody wants to speak it. Become worlds most spoken language anyway.
Moral of the story. People will have to learn your shitty incoherent language if you build a big enough navy.
Or invent the internet.
glances at who builds all the processors and hardware components
Time to start learning Chinese and/or Korean.
See, those are essentially the raw goods now. Finished goods are entertainment and the internet.
Be Lithuanian. Get culturally dominated by Poland. Refuse to speak Polish anyway. Refuse influence from any language. Remove loan words, replace them with newly made Baltic sounding ones. End up impossible to learn.
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.
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 yes/no question in...
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.
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"
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.
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.
😆
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"
I feel like we'd all be much more on board with this if Poland wasn't in the shadow of Hungary right next door looking like somebody's cat had a serious episode on top of a keyboard.
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.
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.
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.
laughs in Welsh
Can't say I've ever been to Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch.
This is outrageous! I will call all users of our Polish instance "SZMER" to... OK, I might be getting your point.
It's not spelling, it's the grammar and ortography that would make you want to peel your skin off.
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.
Po twojej pysznej zupie
Nie ruszam dupy z klopa
Ta zupa była z mlekiem;
Na mleko mam alergię
Po twojej pysznej zupie
Nie ruszam dupy z klopa
Ta zupa była z mlekiem;
Na mleko mam alergię
...
I wonder if we had ž etc like Czechs would it make it easier for foreigners to read
Grzegorz Brzęczyszczykiewicz z Chrząszczyżewoszyce powiat Łękołody.
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