man I find german harder than polish
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.
Polish is a Slavic language written out using Latin letters.
Would be so much shorter with a щ
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
Sure you can everyone in france know theirs is the only real language. Don’t believe me? Just ask someone from france.
You could if we had won. /s
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.
Grzegorz Brzęczyszczykiewicz z Chrząszczyżewoszyce powiat Łękołody.
Gesundheit.
Did you see all the Zs in there? They’re obviously talking in their sleep.
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.
Me, a non European who only speaks english, so true
Haha yeah I get it.
Doesn’t Lithuanian have tonal components? That has to be worst then Polish.
*cries at Greek
Ä, ö, ü, am i a joke to you?
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.
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.
Õ?
Oh right, french might have them. Soft ‘o’, right.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The French in the '90s had Daft Punk and the Minitel.
Après moi je dis ça je ne dis rien.
Où est passé du-coup?
The trillion dollar piece of one of a kind manufacturing equipment where I get my raw goods.
How long until internet slang/lingo snowballs out of control and becomes an actual language? I mean, it’s already constantly spawning words and a diverse enough environment.
I notice sometime I lack an optimal word to describe a concept IRL that an internet term would fit perfectly but would be cringe or meaningless unless the listener was also terminally online. There’s also stealing terms from other languages that catch on, but that don’t work offline(IE. Zeitgeist, pantsdrunk, kawaii) that get spread around enough to be generally know, even if a bit odd.Yes, including brainrot. Especially brainrot. It’s not all pleasant.
Or have the most prestigious universities and most powerful companies.
That all leads back to cultural exchange and trade through the sea though.
Thank Teddy Roosevelt and Queen Victoria for that
If ya dont you will be beaten by Roosevelt’s “big stick”.
Hungarian and Finnish have entered the chat
I think that “kokoa koko kokko kokoon” is a perfectly normal sentence and no one can change my mind.
Iceland: Hlær að öllum
drinks your einstock
Lithuanian: Palaikyk mano alų.
Getting a Haer’Dalis vibe
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.
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)
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.
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. 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…
- Latin - attach -ne after the relevant word. (Note: Latin has no word for “yes”, but still has this sort of question.)
- 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.
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
Syntax is for nerds. I prefer a vibes based language.
That’s how it always starts, then the nerds get hold of it
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. It’s a fair point when it comes to contrast with Polish though - sure, the ⟨z⟩ might look odd, but it is consistent, most of the time you can correctly predict how you’re supposed to pronounce a word in Polish.
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.
Like a cat dancing on a keyboard.
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”
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.
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.
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.
Did Hungary annex Slovakia again or what?
I genuinely stopped to think whether “next door” would prompt somebody to get pedantic about this and decided to keep it for expediency and to make the sentence flow better.
I’m not even mad about it, honestly.
