Tags
diacritics, komorowski, misspelling, Polish language, ł, ś, ż, ą, ć, ę
If you think the Latin alphabet is missing something, say…a bunch of accent marks, slashes and dangling bits on, through and under letters, and you happen to not be a big fan of the letters X, V, and Q – the Polish alphabet might be just what you’ve been looking for!
But, wait, there’s more: if you ever wanted two different ways of writing your ‘H’ and ‘U’ sounds, you might well be a switched at birth Pole! (H & CH)
Another attraction are what linguists call digraphs – “a pair of characters used to write one phoneme (distinct sound) or a sequence of phonemes that does not correspond to the normal values of the two characters combined.” For those keeping score at home they are: ch, cz, dz, dź, dż, rz & sz.
Poles take a slightly perverse pride in foreigners’ difficulties with their language, but are, themselves, not immune to its challenges. A striking example is Polish President Bronisław Komorowski’s entry in the Japanese embassy’s condolences book following the 2011 tsunami.
Komorowski, a history graduate and former journalist, fell into the two “U’s” trap – writing “w bulu” (in pain) instead of “w bólu.” Then, he added “i nadzieji” (and the hope) instead of “w nadziei” – all in less than five lines of text.
Proving, that even though your Polish will never be perfect, it just might be good enough to get you elected president of the Republic of Poland.
With the advent of electronic communications the usage of Polish letters has become less and less prevalent. A recent study found that more than half of Poles skip the various ‘tails and dots’ in their SMSs and emails. Earlier this year, as part of the United Nations’ International Mother Language Day a large publicity campaign was launched to highlight the problem.
“Język polski jest ą-ę” or “Polish (language) is ą – ę” plays with the idea that proper pronunciation of letters such as ą and ę is somehow ‘classy’ or ‘fancy.’ Unfortunately, the website http://www.językpolskijestąę.pl/ is a dead link since the internet does not use either ‘ą’ or “ę.” In his 2010 song “ĄĘ” rapper Łona encouraged listeners to “press alt once in a while” while mock rapping in Polish without using diacritics.
(On a personal note, following my return to Poland I had to remind myself that my last name begins with the letter ‘ś’ rather than the ‘s’ which I had used for some 20 years – in a perfect world this blog would be KWŚone.)