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People are giving pronunciation tips for other languages in the comments, here are tips for polish. Polish often seems incomprehensible for english speakers bec

People are giving pronunciation tips for other languages in the comments, here are tips for polish. Polish often seems incomprehensible for english speakers because of the sheer amount of consonants though it actually flows quite nicely if you know the rules 'sz', 'cz' - those are equivalent to 'sh' (shop,shell) and 'ch' (chop, check) 'w' - it's a hard 'v' as in 'very', 'vary'. Always, no exceptions and never anything else, it's Ko-v-alski (Kowalski) and Le-v-ando-v-ski (Lewandowski). This is, I think, the most common mistake when reading polish names because english speakers often soften the 'w' to english 'w' as in 'when'/'why' 'Ł or ł' - that's the thing you think of when you see 'w' in english. It's the same sound as in 'when'/'why'/'when'. It's not a weird accent on 'L', for some reason we don't have 'v' in our alphabet and we moved 'v' sound to 'w' and 'w' sound to 'ł' ó - it's called 'closed u', the same as normal, open u, pronounced as in 'put'/'dude'. The only difference between open and closed 'u' is in writing, none in speaking y - a vowel, I don't think the sound exists in english but often 'yyyyyy...' in polish is used as 'ummmmm...' in english ą, ć, ę, ń, ś, ź, ż - good luck ;) One thing that makes polish a bit easier is that it's pronunciation is 98% consistent, you need to learn the sound of each letter or digraph once and it will never change so every polish person will pronounce even made-up words in the same way because there's only one way (you may write it incorrectly as in the open/closed u above, or ż/rz, but you will read it back correctly so just don't show anyone how you've written it :) )

felipelemos 5y ago
ż has the sound of soft g, as in germs
- ajuc 5y ago
  g in germs would be "dż" not "ż" in Polish. Same sound as j in English - for example in "jungle" (dżungla in Polish). As usual - English encodes it in many ways Polish always as "dż". Polish "ż" without "d" before it is more like French j for example in "je taim".
  - jgtrosh 5y ago
    Sorry but it's « je t'aime »
  - pomian 5y ago
    Żak = Jacques in French. Which is easier?
ajuc 5y ago
Yup Polish is actually quite regular in pronunciation, there are very few exceptions and only about a dozen rules to remember to be able to pronounce any word. The reputation comes from different conventions. In English letter+h is the escape code (gh, th, sh, ch) in Polish it's letter+z (rz,sz,cz,dz,dż,dź,dzi). Especially vowels are much easier than in English. Each vowel in Polish maps to exactly one sound and vice versa. > y - a vowel, I don't think the sound exists in english it's the English short i like in bIt. As is the rule- Polish has a special letter for that sound and English has 2 sounds encoded the same way and you have to remember which is which :) Another difference is that Polish j is English y. And English j is Polish dż (dżungla = jungle). ń is the same sound as the funny n in Spanish word for Spain: España > w is v [..] Always, no exceptions and never anything else There actually are exceptions, but they are regular as well - w before last syllable is often devoiced to f. Levandofski. But even most Polish speakers don't know that it's the rule, they just speak that way without thinking :) And if you ignore it you are fine, it sounds unnatural but it's still correct. Like saying "I am" instead of "I'm" in English. BTW I think all that additional complexity in English writing system is the reason you have to teach kids to read for so long. In Polish kids are usually taught reading in preschool or first class at school and they are expected to be able to correctly read any text after 6 months to 1 year. There are some gotchas the other way around (hear something and write it) because that way the mapping isn't unique (there are sounds that have 2 ways to write them), but reading is easy.
- ithinkso 5y ago
  >There actually are exceptions, but they are regular as well - w before last syllable is often devoiced to f. Levandofski. But even most Polish speakers doesn't know that it's the rule, they just speak that way without thinking :) Well, true, but I don't think devoicing w in 'Levandofski' is correct, sounds a bit sloppy but hard to hear the distinction to be honest so maybe There is though a clear devoicing not only before the last syllable but before 'sz' as in 'wszystko'(all), 'wszędzie'(everywhere). Not sure if there's a surname that that applies to.
  - mkotowski 5y ago
    Wszystko and Lewandowski both are subjected to the same principle, namely: in Polish consonant clusters, including across a word boundary, the obstruents are all voiced or all voiceless.[1] [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_phonology#Voicing_and_devoicing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_phonology#Voicing_and_d...
Kosirich 5y ago
For south Slavic last names: č- "ch" as in cheddar or the choose so same as "cz" in polish ć - "tj" ...this one is hard, and only some dialects pronounce it differently enough so using "č" is good enough ž - same as "J" in french names "Jeanne d'Arc" or Jean-Luc Picard dž - same as "J" in the word "John" or "Jordan" or G in "George" đ - just use dž š - "sh" as in short
- ithinkso 5y ago
  Do you guys also have the open/closed u distinction?
  - Kosirich 5y ago
    Nope. That is why people struggle with Danish o,ø,å,y,u and a,æ. But in reality, at least for Croatia, the differences in dialects mean that in some dialects some words with "o" are pronounced as "ø", or "a" as "æ"... Anyway, reading Slavic compared to English/Danish is a piece of cake. Grammar on the other hand...
wink 5y ago
What kinda gets me is the name Łukasz, because in German and English it is indeed an L and all the ones I know actually use the L (maybe unless talking to other native speakers).
- ithinkso 5y ago
  Yeah, Łukasz is the same name as Lucas and because ASCII and internet it's very common to just write it as Lukasz because no matter if you're talking to the native or not, they will know what you mean (it is very common for polish people to omit polish letter altogether when texting/writing informally online because the correct letters can be inferred from the context so why bother pressing that alt key). If you were to pronounce it correctly though it would be something like 'Wookash' (which looks ridiculous in written form but hey)
  - ajuc 5y ago
    > it is very common for polish people to omit polish letter Is it still common? It was popular when there were many encodings that always broke and when people wrote SMS by pressing number keys 5 times for 1 letter, now I don't see it that often. I'd say it's about as common as writting l8r in English :)
    - ithinkso 5y ago
      I think I rarely use polish letters when I write on whatsapp/signal etc. and I don't think I often see them written. I don't pay that much attention though so it may be that I'm the only one
    - mkotowski 5y ago
      Less common than it used to be, but still happens. Mostly when writing in a hurry (of course without auto-correction turned on) or interacting with older systems and applications. Also, it is so rare to use Polish letters in a URL, that if you were to dictate one based on a Polish word(s) most people would simply spell it without them (ł → l, ą → a, etc.). By the way, never try to use Polish letters in a Windows username. It works, but every once in a while something third-party or rarely used breaks unexpectedly.
Markoff 5y ago
What about rz, is it same as ř in Czech? Good luck with this letter to any native English speaker. :-))
- ajuc 5y ago
  No, it's either the same as "ż" (in most cases) or the same as "sz" (after devoiced consonants). And there's like 3 words where it's pronounced as separate r and z letters (tarzan, marznąć, I don't remember the 3rd :) ).
- Vaphell 5y ago
  no, it traces back to the same thing pretty much, but in modern Polish it's indistinguishable from ż (ž?) I assume that long time ago it went like this r' -> ř -> řż -> ż, which effectively removed the foundational r-ness of the thing. Off the top of my head, the Polish language has lost the phonetic distinction between rz and ż -> ż, h and ch -> ch, u and ó (flat u vs long o) -> u In some regional dialects near southern/eastern borders you could still find some of these distinctions, but in modern Polish it's gone. at a glance shit looks unnecessarily confusing especially for non-slavic foreigners, but once you look more into it explains many things and helps greatly with writing of related words, declination and conjugation, eg where grammar mandates sound substitution (assuming you are Czech you are probably aware of this effect already) For example there are clusters of sounds that often change one into another. g/h/ż are one such cluster of closely related sounds noga (leg, noun) vs nożny (adjective) drugi (second) vs druh (friend, companion) drużba (guy helping the newlyweds with wedding) Sapieha (noble name of Ukrainian origin) vs Sapieżanka (daughter of Sapieha) rz/r: drzewo (tree) vs drewno (wood) ch/sz is another: mucha (fly) -> muszka (diminutive) ó/o/e is another: bóg (god) vs bożek (lesser god) pióro (feather) vs pierzyna (bed cover stuffed with feathers) It also helps seeing similarities between Slavic languages, as this stuff preserves a ton of the common roots. Any Slav seeing 'góra' will know what's up, not so much with phonetically equivalent 'gura'.
  - Markoff 5y ago
    there is still distinction between ř and ž in Czech and it would be noticable to native speaker, though I guess non-native speakers would not notice the difference, same can't be said about Slovak ä vs e unless you try to speak extremely clearly and pronounce very hard (which would look odd), for most of the people ä was completely replaced with e dřevo in Czech is actually drevo in Slovak noga, drugi, bog, you can in all replace g with H and you will have CZ/SK version, seems Polish is in this aspect way closer to Russian with overused G instead H
smcl 5y ago
> It's the same sound as in 'when'/'why'/'when' Note: this is ONLY applicable if your "wh" is non-aspirated. If you pronounce Łukasz as "Whookash" you're going to get some funny looks :) I'd have written this as "It's the same sound as in 'wise' or 'weather'"
- ithinkso 5y ago
  That's interesting, could you elaborate on the difference in 'w' between 'wise' and 'when'? I'd say 'Wookash' as in star-wars 'Wookie' is a good way (way, hehe) to say Łukasz. I'm not a linguist though so I'm curious
  - ajuc 5y ago
    Some English speakers pronounce "w" differently than "wh". They will say sth that sounds like "hwhen" instead of "when" for example. I think it's a dialect thing I only met like 5 people online who spoke like that but they were all native English speakers so it must be correct?
    - Veen 5y ago
      It’s “correct” but quite rare. The wh was originally a digraph pronounced with a voiceless labial–velar, but but most variants of English have undergone what linguists call the whine-wine merger so those words sound the same. Exceptions are Scots, Irish, and some Southern US varieties.
      - ajuc 5y ago
        The guys I met are from Canada.
    - blackshaw 5y ago
      Obligatory Family Guy link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMopBpOfv_E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMopBpOfv_E I'm not sure I've ever met anyone in real life who says "hwen", "hwere", etc., although you can hear it in some Johnny Cash songs. I'm not sure exactly where in America you can hear it - is it a southern thing? You'll never hear anyone say "hwen" in the UK.
mkotowski 5y ago
To elaborate on ⟨ł⟩ – there is quite a good reason for the way it is spelled. Originally, its pronunciation was /ɫ/ (“dark l” in English) so it was very close to /l/ in sound quality. It evolved to /w/ over time. During the first part of 20th century, it was already used only in dialects and by professionals such as actors and singers (because of it, it is also called “scenic ł” — „sceniczne ł”). Ironically, if I remember correctly the original sound quality of ⟨v⟩ in Latin was also /w/, so in some roundabout way you could say that English and Polish both swapped traditional pronunciation of their letters. ⟨y⟩ is often transcribed as /ɨ/ but it is in practice closer to English schwa. And to correct one thing: because of Polish orthography rules, ⟨w⟩ can also be pronounced: • as /f/ if preceding consonants are voiceless as in the second w in Lewando__w__ski, although I think one would still be understood if that rule was ignored • as /w/ if the word is an English loanword, as in „weekend” /wikɛnt/
- narag 5y ago
  the original sound quality of ⟨v⟩ in Latin was also /w/ IIRC, there wasn't a U letter in Latin, so the vowel was written as V. I guess it tended to souns like W when starting a syllabe, as in versus.
  - ajuc 5y ago
    > there wasn't a U letter in Latin Yup they used V for both. This is probably why German (and then Polish) uses W instead of V - to distinguish it from U.
    - squiggleblaz 5y ago
      When the Latin alphabet was first used in Old English, Latin w had already come to be pronounced v. The was no need for it in English at that stage, because v was just considered a variant of f. But English made good use of w, and there were two ways of writing the w sound: either as two u's (because that way you can indicate the consonantalness of it, even before consonants as in writan) or using the old rune wynn. The uu approach spread to the continent and Old High German (which still used the English sound) adopted it. Old High German also didn't have a v sound at that time, and v was considered a variant of f - which it still is in modern German (e.g. Vater = father, pronounced fah-ta). Meanwhile, uu fell out of use in England, and the runic wynn dominated. But the English spelling system was gradually replaced following the Norman invasion, which led w to dominate over wynn. And v was now considered its own sound, so the letter began to be used for a v sound. So even though English seems to be a bit of a exception, with w=/w/, it's a practice that came from England and came back to England and was a medieval norm. But the w sound changed to v in German too. They didn't have such a radical interruption to their orthographic tradition as the English did, so the idea that V=F remained, and the letter w just come to be used for the new v sound. It spread from there. So it's not really w instead of v to distinguish /v/ from /u/. It's more w instead of v to distinguish /w/ from v=/f/. The crazy thing about that is it wasn't until several centuries after all that transpired that v and u became separate letters. So the Germans were using u for the sound of Buch and the sound of Uater (=Vater), and a different letter w for the sound of Wasser, when W and U=Buch were very similar and U=Buch and U=Vater were very different.
narag 5y ago
'w' - it's a hard 'v' as in 'very', 'vary'. Always, no exceptions and never anything else I've been interacting with a Polish web and got very confused because what happens with stand-alone w, that seems to mean in. Indeed Google Translate pronounces it as a v. First time I see a word in any language that consists only of consonants :-m
- mkotowski 5y ago
  It is quite funny, because when I was learning English, it was so bizarre that the first-person pronoun was only one letter (putting aside the required capitalization). On the other hand, having to write and instead of i still seems quite unwieldy to me.
  - ajuc 5y ago
    Well in English it's actually 2 sounds (a+i) they just have them mixed into one letter :) Not unlike Russian where the reversed R is the same sounds just in reversed order (i+a) and it also means I. Polish prefers to have sounds separated so it's "ja". And it's never capitalized, English is very egocentric about it's pronouns :)
- ajuc 5y ago
  > First time I see a word in any language that consists only of consonants Polish is quite tame with these as far as Slavic languages go. "Strč prst skrz krk" is a proper sentence in Czech and Slovak :)
  - tsimionescu 5y ago
    Romanian has the opposite oddity: we have whole words made up of vowels, with a proper sentence like that: "Aia e o oaie" ("that is a sheep", pronounced roughly 'ah-ya ye awe wa-ye').
  - carlob 5y ago
    Except in most Slavic languages r can work as a vowel. (if you are confused think about how the y in year is a vowel sound but works as a consonant in the syllable)
m12k 5y ago
Also, in Polish a regular 'c' is pronounced approximately like an English 'ts'
blackshaw 5y ago
> pronounced as in 'put'/'dude'. FYI: "put" and "dude" have a different vowel sound in most dialects of English.
- ithinkso 5y ago
  Yeah, that's why you can hear 'polish/slavic accent' because it's hard for us to say it differently
aasasd 5y ago
Now practice: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jaMcIbIWt_4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jaMcIbIWt_4
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
OldOneEye 5y ago
Thank you very much for this summary! I have a lot of polish colleagues in my work, and I always feel bad for not knowing how to start pronouncing their names aside from memorization (which I will promptly forget). This will definitively help me.
- ithinkso 5y ago
  > and I always feel bad for not knowing how to start pronouncing their names No worries, give it your best approximation and if it's way off or if someone cares a bit too much they will correct you, use the corrected version since then and you're golden. We know it may be hard, no problem whatsoever and no one cares, don't worry about it one bit and definitely don't feel bad about it. I think poles actually prefer if you say their name in 'english way' rather than super-correctly in polish because it sounds more natural instead of being suddenly jerked back into polish for a millisecond and then back into english. Just remember the 'w'->'v' and you will get a lot of street cred for free
skipants 5y ago
I took a Ukrainian class but this also applies to Polish: The tip they gave English speakers for pronouncing "szcz", was that it sounded like the sh-ch connection between the words "Fresh Cheese". Ironically, I didn't know how to pronounce it properly until then and it's in my last name! I always anglicized its pronunciation to "sha".

felipelemos 5y ago

ż has the sound of soft g, as in germs

ajuc 5y ago
g in germs would be "dż" not "ż" in Polish. Same sound as j in English - for example in "jungle" (dżungla in Polish). As usual - English encodes it in many ways Polish always as "dż". Polish "ż" without "d" before it is more like French j for example in "je taim".
- jgtrosh 5y ago
  Sorry but it's « je t'aime »
- pomian 5y ago
  Żak = Jacques in French. Which is easier?

ajuc 5y ago

Yup Polish is actually quite regular in pronunciation, there are very few exceptions and only about a dozen rules to remember to be able to pronounce any word. The reputation comes from different conventions. In English letter+h is the escape code (gh, th, sh, ch) in Polish it's letter+z (rz,sz,cz,dz,dż,dź,dzi). Especially vowels are much easier than in English. Each vowel in Polish maps to exactly one sound and vice versa. > y - a vowel, I don't think the sound exists in english it's the English short i like in bIt. As is the rule- Polish has a special letter for that sound and English has 2 sounds encoded the same way and you have to remember which is which :) Another difference is that Polish j is English y. And English j is Polish dż (dżungla = jungle). ń is the same sound as the funny n in Spanish word for Spain: España > w is v [..] Always, no exceptions and never anything else There actually are exceptions, but they are regular as well - w before last syllable is often devoiced to f. Levandofski. But even most Polish speakers don't know that it's the rule, they just speak that way without thinking :) And if you ignore it you are fine, it sounds unnatural but it's still correct. Like saying "I am" instead of "I'm" in English. BTW I think all that additional complexity in English writing system is the reason you have to teach kids to read for so long. In Polish kids are usually taught reading in preschool or first class at school and they are expected to be able to correctly read any text after 6 months to 1 year. There are some gotchas the other way around (hear something and write it) because that way the mapping isn't unique (there are sounds that have 2 ways to write them), but reading is easy.

ithinkso 5y ago
>There actually are exceptions, but they are regular as well - w before last syllable is often devoiced to f. Levandofski. But even most Polish speakers doesn't know that it's the rule, they just speak that way without thinking :) Well, true, but I don't think devoicing w in 'Levandofski' is correct, sounds a bit sloppy but hard to hear the distinction to be honest so maybe There is though a clear devoicing not only before the last syllable but before 'sz' as in 'wszystko'(all), 'wszędzie'(everywhere). Not sure if there's a surname that that applies to.
- mkotowski 5y ago
  Wszystko and Lewandowski both are subjected to the same principle, namely: in Polish consonant clusters, including across a word boundary, the obstruents are all voiced or all voiceless.[1] [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_phonology#Voicing_and_devoicing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_phonology#Voicing_and_d...

Kosirich 5y ago

For south Slavic last names: č- "ch" as in cheddar or the choose so same as "cz" in polish ć - "tj" ...this one is hard, and only some dialects pronounce it differently enough so using "č" is good enough ž - same as "J" in french names "Jeanne d'Arc" or Jean-Luc Picard dž - same as "J" in the word "John" or "Jordan" or G in "George" đ - just use dž š - "sh" as in short

ithinkso 5y ago
Do you guys also have the open/closed u distinction?
- Kosirich 5y ago
  Nope. That is why people struggle with Danish o,ø,å,y,u and a,æ. But in reality, at least for Croatia, the differences in dialects mean that in some dialects some words with "o" are pronounced as "ø", or "a" as "æ"... Anyway, reading Slavic compared to English/Danish is a piece of cake. Grammar on the other hand...

wink 5y ago

What kinda gets me is the name Łukasz, because in German and English it is indeed an L and all the ones I know actually use the L (maybe unless talking to other native speakers).

ithinkso 5y ago
Yeah, Łukasz is the same name as Lucas and because ASCII and internet it's very common to just write it as Lukasz because no matter if you're talking to the native or not, they will know what you mean (it is very common for polish people to omit polish letter altogether when texting/writing informally online because the correct letters can be inferred from the context so why bother pressing that alt key). If you were to pronounce it correctly though it would be something like 'Wookash' (which looks ridiculous in written form but hey)
- ajuc 5y ago
  > it is very common for polish people to omit polish letter Is it still common? It was popular when there were many encodings that always broke and when people wrote SMS by pressing number keys 5 times for 1 letter, now I don't see it that often. I'd say it's about as common as writting l8r in English :)
  - ithinkso 5y ago
    I think I rarely use polish letters when I write on whatsapp/signal etc. and I don't think I often see them written. I don't pay that much attention though so it may be that I'm the only one
  - mkotowski 5y ago
    Less common than it used to be, but still happens. Mostly when writing in a hurry (of course without auto-correction turned on) or interacting with older systems and applications. Also, it is so rare to use Polish letters in a URL, that if you were to dictate one based on a Polish word(s) most people would simply spell it without them (ł → l, ą → a, etc.). By the way, never try to use Polish letters in a Windows username. It works, but every once in a while something third-party or rarely used breaks unexpectedly.

Markoff 5y ago

What about rz, is it same as ř in Czech? Good luck with this letter to any native English speaker. :-))

ajuc 5y ago
No, it's either the same as "ż" (in most cases) or the same as "sz" (after devoiced consonants). And there's like 3 words where it's pronounced as separate r and z letters (tarzan, marznąć, I don't remember the 3rd :) ).
Vaphell 5y ago
no, it traces back to the same thing pretty much, but in modern Polish it's indistinguishable from ż (ž?) I assume that long time ago it went like this r' -> ř -> řż -> ż, which effectively removed the foundational r-ness of the thing. Off the top of my head, the Polish language has lost the phonetic distinction between rz and ż -> ż, h and ch -> ch, u and ó (flat u vs long o) -> u In some regional dialects near southern/eastern borders you could still find some of these distinctions, but in modern Polish it's gone. at a glance shit looks unnecessarily confusing especially for non-slavic foreigners, but once you look more into it explains many things and helps greatly with writing of related words, declination and conjugation, eg where grammar mandates sound substitution (assuming you are Czech you are probably aware of this effect already) For example there are clusters of sounds that often change one into another. g/h/ż are one such cluster of closely related sounds noga (leg, noun) vs nożny (adjective) drugi (second) vs druh (friend, companion) drużba (guy helping the newlyweds with wedding) Sapieha (noble name of Ukrainian origin) vs Sapieżanka (daughter of Sapieha) rz/r: drzewo (tree) vs drewno (wood) ch/sz is another: mucha (fly) -> muszka (diminutive) ó/o/e is another: bóg (god) vs bożek (lesser god) pióro (feather) vs pierzyna (bed cover stuffed with feathers) It also helps seeing similarities between Slavic languages, as this stuff preserves a ton of the common roots. Any Slav seeing 'góra' will know what's up, not so much with phonetically equivalent 'gura'.
- Markoff 5y ago
  there is still distinction between ř and ž in Czech and it would be noticable to native speaker, though I guess non-native speakers would not notice the difference, same can't be said about Slovak ä vs e unless you try to speak extremely clearly and pronounce very hard (which would look odd), for most of the people ä was completely replaced with e dřevo in Czech is actually drevo in Slovak noga, drugi, bog, you can in all replace g with H and you will have CZ/SK version, seems Polish is in this aspect way closer to Russian with overused G instead H

smcl 5y ago

> It's the same sound as in 'when'/'why'/'when' Note: this is ONLY applicable if your "wh" is non-aspirated. If you pronounce Łukasz as "Whookash" you're going to get some funny looks :) I'd have written this as "It's the same sound as in 'wise' or 'weather'"

ithinkso 5y ago
That's interesting, could you elaborate on the difference in 'w' between 'wise' and 'when'? I'd say 'Wookash' as in star-wars 'Wookie' is a good way (way, hehe) to say Łukasz. I'm not a linguist though so I'm curious
- ajuc 5y ago
  Some English speakers pronounce "w" differently than "wh". They will say sth that sounds like "hwhen" instead of "when" for example. I think it's a dialect thing I only met like 5 people online who spoke like that but they were all native English speakers so it must be correct?
  - Veen 5y ago
    It’s “correct” but quite rare. The wh was originally a digraph pronounced with a voiceless labial–velar, but but most variants of English have undergone what linguists call the whine-wine merger so those words sound the same. Exceptions are Scots, Irish, and some Southern US varieties.
    - ajuc 5y ago
      The guys I met are from Canada.
  - blackshaw 5y ago
    Obligatory Family Guy link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMopBpOfv_E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMopBpOfv_E I'm not sure I've ever met anyone in real life who says "hwen", "hwere", etc., although you can hear it in some Johnny Cash songs. I'm not sure exactly where in America you can hear it - is it a southern thing? You'll never hear anyone say "hwen" in the UK.

mkotowski 5y ago

To elaborate on ⟨ł⟩ – there is quite a good reason for the way it is spelled. Originally, its pronunciation was /ɫ/ (“dark l” in English) so it was very close to /l/ in sound quality. It evolved to /w/ over time. During the first part of 20th century, it was already used only in dialects and by professionals such as actors and singers (because of it, it is also called “scenic ł” — „sceniczne ł”). Ironically, if I remember correctly the original sound quality of ⟨v⟩ in Latin was also /w/, so in some roundabout way you could say that English and Polish both swapped traditional pronunciation of their letters. ⟨y⟩ is often transcribed as /ɨ/ but it is in practice closer to English schwa. And to correct one thing: because of Polish orthography rules, ⟨w⟩ can also be pronounced: • as /f/ if preceding consonants are voiceless as in the second w in Lewando__w__ski, although I think one would still be understood if that rule was ignored • as /w/ if the word is an English loanword, as in „weekend” /wikɛnt/

narag 5y ago
the original sound quality of ⟨v⟩ in Latin was also /w/ IIRC, there wasn't a U letter in Latin, so the vowel was written as V. I guess it tended to souns like W when starting a syllabe, as in versus.
- ajuc 5y ago
  > there wasn't a U letter in Latin Yup they used V for both. This is probably why German (and then Polish) uses W instead of V - to distinguish it from U.
  - squiggleblaz 5y ago
    When the Latin alphabet was first used in Old English, Latin w had already come to be pronounced v. The was no need for it in English at that stage, because v was just considered a variant of f. But English made good use of w, and there were two ways of writing the w sound: either as two u's (because that way you can indicate the consonantalness of it, even before consonants as in writan) or using the old rune wynn. The uu approach spread to the continent and Old High German (which still used the English sound) adopted it. Old High German also didn't have a v sound at that time, and v was considered a variant of f - which it still is in modern German (e.g. Vater = father, pronounced fah-ta). Meanwhile, uu fell out of use in England, and the runic wynn dominated. But the English spelling system was gradually replaced following the Norman invasion, which led w to dominate over wynn. And v was now considered its own sound, so the letter began to be used for a v sound. So even though English seems to be a bit of a exception, with w=/w/, it's a practice that came from England and came back to England and was a medieval norm. But the w sound changed to v in German too. They didn't have such a radical interruption to their orthographic tradition as the English did, so the idea that V=F remained, and the letter w just come to be used for the new v sound. It spread from there. So it's not really w instead of v to distinguish /v/ from /u/. It's more w instead of v to distinguish /w/ from v=/f/. The crazy thing about that is it wasn't until several centuries after all that transpired that v and u became separate letters. So the Germans were using u for the sound of Buch and the sound of Uater (=Vater), and a different letter w for the sound of Wasser, when W and U=Buch were very similar and U=Buch and U=Vater were very different.

narag 5y ago

'w' - it's a hard 'v' as in 'very', 'vary'. Always, no exceptions and never anything else I've been interacting with a Polish web and got very confused because what happens with stand-alone w, that seems to mean in. Indeed Google Translate pronounces it as a v. First time I see a word in any language that consists only of consonants :-m

mkotowski 5y ago
It is quite funny, because when I was learning English, it was so bizarre that the first-person pronoun was only one letter (putting aside the required capitalization). On the other hand, having to write and instead of i still seems quite unwieldy to me.
- ajuc 5y ago
  Well in English it's actually 2 sounds (a+i) they just have them mixed into one letter :) Not unlike Russian where the reversed R is the same sounds just in reversed order (i+a) and it also means I. Polish prefers to have sounds separated so it's "ja". And it's never capitalized, English is very egocentric about it's pronouns :)
ajuc 5y ago
> First time I see a word in any language that consists only of consonants Polish is quite tame with these as far as Slavic languages go. "Strč prst skrz krk" is a proper sentence in Czech and Slovak :)
- tsimionescu 5y ago
  Romanian has the opposite oddity: we have whole words made up of vowels, with a proper sentence like that: "Aia e o oaie" ("that is a sheep", pronounced roughly 'ah-ya ye awe wa-ye').
- carlob 5y ago
  Except in most Slavic languages r can work as a vowel. (if you are confused think about how the y in year is a vowel sound but works as a consonant in the syllable)

m12k 5y ago

Also, in Polish a regular 'c' is pronounced approximately like an English 'ts'

blackshaw 5y ago

> pronounced as in 'put'/'dude'. FYI: "put" and "dude" have a different vowel sound in most dialects of English.

ithinkso 5y ago
Yeah, that's why you can hear 'polish/slavic accent' because it's hard for us to say it differently

aasasd 5y ago

Now practice: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jaMcIbIWt_4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jaMcIbIWt_4

deleted 5y ago

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OldOneEye 5y ago

Thank you very much for this summary! I have a lot of polish colleagues in my work, and I always feel bad for not knowing how to start pronouncing their names aside from memorization (which I will promptly forget). This will definitively help me.

ithinkso 5y ago
> and I always feel bad for not knowing how to start pronouncing their names No worries, give it your best approximation and if it's way off or if someone cares a bit too much they will correct you, use the corrected version since then and you're golden. We know it may be hard, no problem whatsoever and no one cares, don't worry about it one bit and definitely don't feel bad about it. I think poles actually prefer if you say their name in 'english way' rather than super-correctly in polish because it sounds more natural instead of being suddenly jerked back into polish for a millisecond and then back into english. Just remember the 'w'->'v' and you will get a lot of street cred for free

skipants 5y ago

I took a Ukrainian class but this also applies to Polish: The tip they gave English speakers for pronouncing "szcz", was that it sounded like the sh-ch connection between the words "Fresh Cheese". Ironically, I didn't know how to pronounce it properly until then and it's in my last name! I always anglicized its pronunciation to "sha".