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You make the case that Polish uses affixes and inflection to convey meaning where English would use helper words. Fusional vs. analytic. That's not the same as
by wl 6y ago
You make the case that Polish uses affixes and inflection to convey meaning where English would use helper words. Fusional vs. analytic. That's not the same as the assertion that English curse words are pretty restrictive in comparison.
- ajuc 6y agoAll of these words are variants of "to fuck", but instead of one root word (fuck) there's three (actually 4 - I forgot of "walić" - the least vulgar out of them) with different levels of vulgarity, and instead of less than 10 helper words there's dozens of pre- and post fixes-, and helper words also modify the meaning (to X someone vs to X something vs to X self can be completely unrelated). I can translate each of English vulgar fuck+sth into several versions of Polish fuck+sth. For example "fuck off" would be "odwal się" (mildly vulgar, but rude), "odpieprz się" (definitely vulgar) or "odpierdol się" (very vulgar). An in the meaning of "go out" "fuck off" would be "spieprzaj" or "spierdalaj". But there's no direct equivalents in English for most of the examples I gave in my previous post. Yes you can say "I fucking ate too much", but that's the equivalent of "zjadłem, kurwa, za dużo", and not of any of these verbs. The nuance is lost :) So I rest my case - cursing in English is very limited. Which isn't good or bad, just interesting how languages differ.