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Polish (język polski, polszczyzna) is the official language of Poland. It is the most spoken West Slavic language.
Today Polish language is the official language of Poland; it is spoken by most of 38 million inhabitants of Poland (census 2002). There are also some native speakers of Polish in western Belarus and Ukraine, as well as in eastern Lithuania. Because of emigration from Poland in various periods, millions of Polish-speakers may be found in countries including Australia, Brazil, Canada, the United Kingdom, United States, etc. The estimated number of Poles who live beyond the borders of Poland is 10 million. It is not clear, however, how many of them can actually speak Polish - the estimates range from 3,5 to 10 million[1]. This puts the number of native speakers of Polish all over the world between 40 and 48 million. According to Ethnologue, there are about 43 million first language speakers of Polish worldwide[2].
Polish has the second largest number of speakers among Slavic languages after Russian. It is the main representative of the Lechitic branch of the West Slavic languages. The Polish language originated in the areas of present-day Poland from several local Western Slavic dialects, most notably those spoken in Greater Poland and Lesser Poland. It shares some vocabulary with the languages of the neighboring Slavic nations, most notably with Slovak, Czech, Ukrainian, and Belarusian.
The precursor to the Polish language is the Old Polish Language.
Polish was once a lingua franca in parts of Central and Eastern Europe, because of the political, cultural, scientific and military influence of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Slav Origins: Most Scholars agree that the original Slav homeland lay within the boundaries of modern Poland in the Odra (Oder) and Wisla (Vistula) basins. The Slavs subsequently expanded into territories to the east, south and west and became increasingly differentiated until, by AD 800, three main geographical and linguistic divisions had arisen; the East Slavs inhabiting a large part of European Russia, the South Slavs who settled in the Balkan Peninsula, and the West Slavs who settled in what is now Poland, Czechoslovakia and East Germany. The West Slavs suffered different fates; the Lusatians and Veleti were absorbed by German expansion, the Czechs and Moravians merged to form the nucleus of the Czech Kingdom, whilst the Slovaks became part of the kingdom of Hungary. The remaining tribes, including the Polanie, Wislanie, Pomorzanie and the Mazovians, joined together (in time) to form the Polish State.
Foundation: 966-1138. The Polish Baptism of 966 came about as a result of the concerns of Mieszko, or Mieczyslaw I, chief of the Polanie, raised by the establishment of the German Empire of Otto I (962). He decided to marry Dobrava, the daughter of Boleslav I of Bohemia, and accepted Christianity for himself and his people, thus preserving their independence. In 1000, at the Congress of Gniezno an independent Polish Church organisation was set up with the agreement of Otto III, but formed according to the Czech, rather than German, system. Thus the Polish Church could turn directly to Rome, and the Pope, for protection and would not fall under the influence of the Germans. The Coronation of Boleslaw Chrobry (the Brave) As the first king of Poland, in 1024, established Poland's right as an independent kingdom.
Disintegration and Reunification: 1138 - 1370. In 1138 the Testament of Boleslaw III shattered the precarious unity of Poland by dividing the realm among Boleslaw's sons. This was the start of 150 years of dynastic struggle, in which the Church played a vital role in maintaining some semblance of national unity. In 1226, Duke Konrad of Mazovia invited the Teutonic Order to combat pagan Prussian tribes from the base a Chelmno, thereby introducing a much more formidable enemy on the crucial Baltic coast. In time the Order turned on the Poles and began to grab large chunks of Polish territory, finally invading Gdansk in 1308 and massacring its Polish inhabitants. At the same time, a steady influx of German colonists helped to consolidate the Order's wealth and power.
1241, 1259 and 1287 saw devastating Tartar invasions. During the consequent reconstruction many new urban centres developed whilst older ones expanded. As part of the process of repopulation large numbers of foreign settlers arrived and rural colonisation took place. Many of these new settlers were Germans and, whilst some were gradually "Polonised" others merely helped strengthen German political influence (especially in Silesia).
It is during this period that the first Jewish settlers came to Poland where they were treated with more tolerance than in the rest of Europe, so-much-so that the Polish Synod was berated by the Papal Legate, in 1266, for allowing Jews to dress like anyone else and being able to live without restrictions in Poland, and for a royal charter having been granted them by Boleslaw the Pious in 1264.
A brief period of Czech rule from 1300 - 1305, under Vaclav II, reunited a main part of Poland, stimulating a national reconstruction led by Wladyslaw Lokietek. Then, in 1320, Wladyslaw I (Lokietek) was coronated; the first ruler of the reunited kingdom.
In 1333-1370 Casimir the Great (Kazimierz Wielki) built Poland into a major Central-European power, increasing her territory 2.5 times, bringing it's size up to 270,000 sq.kms. There is a saying that "he found Poland built of wood, and left her in stone," so great was his activity as founder and planner of towns.
Under Casimir, in 1346, the first Polish Legal Code was made, and in 1364 the foundations of Krakow University (the second oldest in central Europe) were formed. Trade also became important due to Poland's position on the commercial routes leading from East to West and from South to North.
The Jagiellonians, 1386-1572. Rise to Greatness. Casimir was the last King of a purely Polish state. Hence forward, dynastic problems provoked a series of unions with neighbouring states: Hungary (1370-84; 1434-44; 1576-86); Lithuania (1386-1795); Sweden (1587-1600); and Saxony (1697-1764). Only the Lithuanian union succeeded, creating a state which dominated east-central Europe until the seventeenth century (the Polish Commonwealth). In 1386 the marriage of Jadwiga, King (sic) of Poland, to Jogaila, pagan Grand-Duke of Lithuania, baptised as Wladyslaw Jagiello, initiated the Lithuanian union, inspired by the common purpose of resisting the Teutonic Order. Then, in 1410 at the Battle of Grunwald (Tannenburg), Wladyslaw Jagiello crushed the Teutonic Order. The Catholic Polish knights were a minority in an army made up of Lithuanian pagans, Orthodox Christians, Lithuanian Muslim Tartars and "heretical" Bohemian Hussites. This victory helped strengthen the bond between the Poles and the Lithuanians and, in 1413, led to the Treaty of Union at Horodlo.
In 1440 the Magyars offered Wladyslaw III (Wladyslaw Jagiello's son) the crown of Hungary; Poland's attention shifted to the plains of Hungary and the growing Turkish threat. In 1444, the combined Polish Hungarian forces were defeated by the Turks at Varna on the Black Sea and Wladyslaw was killed. For a brief period the Hungarian throne passed out of Polish hands. Wladyslaw III's brother, Casimir IV, started a prolonged war against the Teutonic Order in order to recover Pomerania and Gdansk. The subsequent victory in 1466, led to the Peace of Torun by which the Order was humiliated and Prussia was partitioned: Royal (West) Prussia came under direct Polish rule, the Grand-Master of the Order keeping Ducal (east) Prussia as a vassal to the Polish Crown. During the Reformation The Grand Master split with Rome, and by becoming a vassal of the Polish King was able to turn East Prussia into a Duchy.
In 1471 Casimir was elected King of the Czechs. His son, Wladyslaw became King of Bohemia and Hungary in 1490.
1490-1526 saw the Jagiellonian rule in Hungary, and the peak of Central European dominance. The dual realm now stretched from the Baltic to the Black Sea, and from the borders of Silesia to within 300 miles of Moscow. It contained a rich mixture of nationalities and beliefs; Poles in the west and centre, Lithuanians, Latvians and Estonians in the north, Lutheran Germans in Prussian and the western frontier, Orthodox Ukrainians and Byelorussians in the east, Moslem Tartars in the east also (these are the oldest Moslem communities in the Christian world) alongside the Karaites (a mixture of Khazar and Kiptchatska-Polovetska peoples, and practising a unique mixture of Judaism and Islam), and Jews scattered throughout.
This period saw some important developments in the government of Poland; in 1430 the law "Nieminem Captivabimus" (the Polish "Habeas Corpus"), in 1493 the establishment of a Parliament with two houses, the Senate (dignitaries, archbishops, and officers of the realm) and the Sejm (elected representatives). In 1505 the Statute of "Nihil Novi" enacted that nothing new could be decided without Parliament's consent.
This "Golden Age" saw many foreign scholars, writers, artists and architects attracted to Poland, especially from Renaissance Italy. It was also the age of Copernicus and of the first great figures in Polish literature; Mikolaj Rey (the first to write exclusively in Polish) and Jan Kochanowski (the "father" of Polish poetry).
This was also, in Europe, a time of religious diversion and persecution. When pressed to take sides in the dispute between Catholics and Protestants, the king, Zygmunt August, said: "I am the King of the people-not the judge of their consciences." This spirit of tolerance attracted many refugees from religious persecution throughout the history of Poland before the partitions; Jews in the 13th century, Hussites in the 15th, and Catholics from England and Scotland in the 16th and 17th centuries.
The Union of Lublin was a formal union of Poland and Lithuania; the "Rzeczpospolita Polska" (the Polish Commonwealth). This was formed in 1569.
The Elected Monarchy. With the death of Zygmunt, the last of the Jagiellonians in 1574, there was nobody who could legally convene the Sejm. An "interrex" (Regent), the Archbishop of Gniezno, was appointed by the Senate and a special "Convocational Sejm" was called which decided to let the "szlachta" (nobility) the elect a king in a free election. Prior to his coronation the king-elect had to swear to uphold the Constitution and all "szlachta" privileges. The first elected monarch was Henri d'Anjou, but he resigned half-way through the year in the hope of succeeding to the French throne instead. The second election winner was the Transylvanian Voivod (Prince), Stefan Batory, who became one of Poland's most celebrated rulers, great in both war and peace.
Batory carried out important reforms, encouraged further overseas trade and created the first regular Polish infantry by conscripting peasants from the Royal estates. In 1579 he created the University at Wilno (the eastern most outpost of Western European culture).
Between 1579 and 1582 Batory came to the aid of Inflanty (Livonia: modern day Estonia and Latvia) which has been attacked by the Muscovite Tsar, Ivan the Terrible. After a successful campaign and a brilliant victory at Pskov Batory accepted the Muscovite plea for peace; Livonia joined the Commonwealth and Poland was now recognised as the greatest power in Central Europe and only the Turkish Sultan ruled over more extensive territories.
After the unexpected death of Batory in 1586, the third election brought the Swedish crown prince, Zygmunt Vasa, to the throne. There would eventually be three Vasa Kings and the period would see long rivalry and wars between Poland and Sweden for the control of the Baltic. Under his reign the Polish magnates (great lords) rose to a position of power and would eventually destroy Poland through their greed.
In 1595 and 1596 the Synods of Brzesc (Brest) Litewski saw some of the Ruthenian (now Byelorussian and Ukrainian) Orthodox clergy recognise the supremacy of the Pope whilst retaining their distinctive religious rites and liturgy. The so-called Unia (Union) of the Orthodox and Catholic churches under the papal supremacy was recognized by less than a third of the Ukrainian and Byelorussian subjects of the Polish king and reuslted in a centuries-long schism.
King Zygmunt III Vasa decided to move the capital from Krakow to Warsaw, the junction of all major routes crisscrossing the Commonwealth. This was done in 1596.
From 1609 Poland became involved in a series of wars and was invaded by Swedes, Turks and Muscovites in such numbers that the country was almost submerged by enemy forces; this period became known as the "Deluge" (in the course of which Polish armies repeatedly invaded Russia and occupied Moscow, and the Polish king tried to impose onto Russia his son Wladyslaw as the new tsar). The devastation and loss of life were tremendous and Poland was only saved by a number of outstanding military commanders (Jan Zamoyski, Stanislaw Zolkiewski, Jan Karol Chodkiewicz and Stanislaw Koniecpolski) who archived some great victories (Kluszyn, 1610; Kircholm, 1605; Chocim, 1612).
One historic episode during the "Deluge" was the defence of Czestochowa, Poland's most sacred shrine containing the picture of the Virgin Mary (the "Black Madonna"), by a small force led by the Prior and his monks against a besieging army of 9,000 Swedes. This defence actually changed the course of the war.
A particular danger came from within as the Cossacks (a Turkish, word meaning "freebooter" - rather, a "free man, not a serf, dare-the-devil, rolling stone"), a people of mixed origin but mainly Ruthenian and Pole, constantly changed sides, breaking their oath of allegiance to the Polish King. In 1648 the Cossack Hetman, Chmielnicki (educated in Polish universities, well-read in Latin and holding an office with the Polish crown on the eve of the uprising, which started after his 13-year old son had been beaten to death by a Polish nobleman), led a great uprising which was put down. Chmielnicki now used the Ukraine as a pawn between the powers of Poland, Muscovy and Turkey which resulted in further wars. In 1658, at Hadziacz, an agreement between the King and the new Cossack Hetman, Wyhowski, was to enable Ruthenia to join the Commonwealth on equal terms with Poland and Lithuania but a further Cossack rebellion, in 1659, instigated by Muscovy (herself attempting to annex the Ukraine, in spite of the fact that its budget was almost empty and Ukrainian representatives had had to appeal to the tsar repeatedly for military assistance which was granted only after the tsar had to convene a nationwide assembly (Zemski Sobor) to raise funds necessary for another war with Poland) and Polish involvement in war with Sweden, meant that the agreement bore no fruit and in 1667, by the treaty of Andruszowo, the Ukraine was divided evenly along the Dnieper between the Commonwealth and Muscovy. For the Polish Commonwealth this was a disaster since it weakened an important frontier area and left a discontented people open to manipulation by Poland's enemies (the "manipulators" received a lot of assistance from the Catholic Polish landlords, owners of Orthodox Ukrainian villages, who repeatedly abused Orthodox priests imposed unbearable taxes on the Ukrainian population and humiliated their Orthodox serfs).
Following a stormy election, Michal Korybut Wisniowiecki, called "Piast" (referring to Poland's earliest dynasty) was elected in 1669. He proved to be largely ineffective and became a tool of the magnates.
Later, in 1672. the Turks invaded the Commonwealth and imposed the treaty of Buczacz on the Poles by which Turkey occupied Podolia and the southern part of the Kiev region. In 1673, Hetman Jan Sobieski scored a splendid victory over the Turks at Chocim which, though not changing the provisions of the treaty, enabled Sobieski's election to the throne.
1674-1696 heralded the reign of Jan III Sobieski, a great military leader who had virtually annihilated the Turkish forces at Chocim and had been given by them the nickname of the "Fearful Lion of the North." Unable to break into Europe through Poland, the Turks invaded Hungary and Austria in 1683 and swept all before them. 130,000 Turks besieged Vienna and threatened to overpower Europe. Sobieski, at the request of the Pope, marched on Vienna, sent the "Hussaria" into their last great charge and took the Turks unawares. It was a turning point in history.
The Polish language is the most widely spoken of the Slavic language subgroup of the Lechitic languages which include Kashubian (the only surviving dialect of the Pomeranian language) and the extinct Polabian language. These three languages, along with Upper and Lower Sorbian, Czech and Slovak, belong to the West branch of Slavic languages.
Polish is mainly spoken in Poland. Poland is one of the most homogeneous European countries with regard to its mother tongue; nearly 97% of Poland's citizens declare Polish as their mother tongue, due to the WWII German expulsions, and suppression of foreign languages by Communists during the Cold War. After the Second World War the previously Polish territories annexed by the USSR retained a large amount of the Polish population that was unwilling or unable to migrate toward the post-1945 Poland and even today ethnic Poles in Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine constitute large minorities. It is by far the most widely used minority language in Vilnius County (26% of the population, according to the 2001 census results), but it is also present in other counties. In Ukraine, Polish is most often used in the Lviv and Lutsk regions. Western Belarus has an important Polish minority, especially in the Brest and Grodno regions.
There are also significant numbers of Polish speakers in Argentina, Australia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Brazil, Canada, Czech Republic, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Israel, Ireland, Kazakhstan, Latvia, New Zealand, Norway, South Africa, Sweden, Romania, Russia, Slovakia, UAE, the UK, Uruguay and the United States.
In the U.S. the number of people of Polish descent is over 11 million, see: Polish language in the United States, but most of them cannot speak Polish. According to the United States 2000 Census, 667,414 Americans of age 5 years and over reported Polish as language spoken at home, which is about 1.4% of people who speak languages other than English or 0.25% of the U.S. population.
The Polish language became far more homogeneous in the second half of the 20th century, partly due to universal education, but also because of the mass migration of several million Polish citizens from the eastern to the western part of the country after the east was annexed by the Soviet Union in 1939, during World War II.
"Standard" Polish is still spoken somewhat differently in different regions of the country, although the differences between these broad "dialects" are slight. There is never any difficulty in mutual understanding, and non-native speakers are generally unable to distinguish among them easily. The differences are slight compared to different dialects of English, for example. The regional differences correspond mainly to old tribal divisions from around a thousand years ago; the most significant of these in terms of numbers of speakers are Great Polish (spoken in the west), Lesser Polish (spoken in the south and southeast), Mazovian (Mazur) spoken throughout the central and eastern parts of the country, and Silesian spoken in the southwest. Mazovian shares some features with the Kashubian language (see below).
Some more characteristic but less widespread regional dialects include:
The Polish alphabet is based on the Latin alphabet but uses diacritics, such as kreska (graphically similar to acute accent), kropka (superior dot) and ogonek. Unlike other Latin-character Slavic languages (apart from Kashubian), Polish did not adopt a version of the Czech orthography, but developed one independently.
Note that Polish , , , are laminal postalveolar and may perhaps be most accurately transcribed using the IPA retracted diacritic as , , , respectively. Also note that Polish ń (transcribed here ) is not palatal; it has the same articulation place as or . However, as the IPA does not have a symbol for a nasal alveolo-palatal consonant, it would perhaps be more accurately transcribed as .
Polish orthography also includes seven digraphs:
Note that although the Polish orthography is mostly phonetic-morphological, some sounds may be written in more than one way:
Two consonants rz are very rarely read as "r z", not , as in words "zamarzać" (to get frozen), "marznąć" (to feel cold) or in the name "Tarzan".
The pronunciation of geminates (doubled consonants) in Polish is clearly prolonged, as in Italian. For example, the word panna (young lady) is not pronounced the same as pana (man's). When pronouncing a word slowly and carefully, Polish speakers articulate and release each of the two consonants separately. The prolongation is therefore rather a repetition of the consonant. Thus, panna should be pronounced pan-na, with two n. This includes not only native Polish words (like panna or oddech), but also loan-words (lasso, attyka). In Polish, geminates may appear in the beginning of a word, as in czczenie (worshipping), dżdżownica (earth-worm), ssak (mammal), wwóz (importation), zstąpić (to descend; to step down), and zza (from behind; from beyond).
Polish is highly inflected and retains the Old Slavic case system with seven cases for nouns, pronouns, and adjectives: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, instrumental, locative and vocative. There are two numbers, singular and plural.
The Polish gender system is complex, due to its combination of three categories: gender (masculine, feminine, neuter), personhood (personal versus non-personal) and animacy (animate versus inanimate). Personhood and animacy are relevant within the masculine gender but do not affect the feminine or neuter genders. The resulting system can be presented as comprising five gender classes: personal masculine, animate (non-personal) masculine, inanimate masculine, feminine, and neuter. These classes can be identified based on declension patterns, adjective-noun agreement, and pronoun-antecedent agreement.
The gender classes are characterized by the following inflectional properties (with rare exceptions):
Polish verbs are inflected according to gender as well as person and number, but the tense forms have been simplified through elimination of three old tenses (the aorist, imperfect, and past perfect). The so-called Slavic perfect is the only past tense form used in common speech. In Polish, one distinguishes between three tenses (present, past and future; however, when considering the aspect of the verb, one could detect five tenses, not six, since present perfect forms do not exist in Polish), three moods (indicative, imperative and conditional) and three voices (active, passive and reflexive). Aspect is a grammatical category of the verb, and almost all Polish verbs have two distinct forms, one imperfective and one perfective. A few verbs have two imperfective forms, where the imperfective aspect subdivides into either the indeterminate and determinate aspect (chodzić - iść - pójść (to go)) or the actual and frequentative aspect (pisać - pisywać - napisać (to write)). The perfective verb form is usually an imperfective verb changed with prefixation (robić - zrobić (to make; to do)), suffixation (kichać - kichnąć (to sneeze)) or stem alternation (oddychać - odetchnąć (to breathe)). A few verbs show suppletion in their aspect formation, like brać - wziąć (to take).
The tenses include:
Movable suffixes (those of the past tenses) are usually attached to the verb or to the most accented word of a sentence, like question preposition.
The fifth Polish tense, the future imperfective, is an analytic form, and consists of the simple future form of the auxiliary verb być ‘to be’ (będę, będziesz...), and either infinitive or past participle (imperfective). The choice between będziecie robić and będziecie robili is free, and both forms have the same meaning.
Sometimes the sentence may be emphasised with a particle -że- (-ż).
So what have you done? can be:
All the above examples show inflected forms of the verb "zrobić" for the subject "you" informal plural ("wy"). However, it is worthy of notice that none of the above examples includes the subject itself. The inclusion of the subject is not necessary here because Polish is a pro-drop language. This means that with an inflected verb the subject does not need to be mentioned. Instead, the reader or listener can tell, by the ending on the verb, which is different for each person, singular and plural, what is the implied subject. Because the subject can be dropped, using it with an inflected verb signals emphasis. Of the above three examples, a native speaker would not include the subject in the middle sentence and would be unlikely to include the subject in the last one. The examples below show how the subject could be included in such sentences, where possible:
The past participle depends on number and gender, so the third person, past perfect tense, can be:
Basic word order in Polish is SVO, however, as it is a morpheme rich language, it is possible to move words around in the sentence, and to drop subject, object or even sometimes verb, if they are obvious from context.
These sentences mean more or less the same ("Alice has a cat"), but different shades of meaning are emphasized by selecting different word orders. In increasing order of markedness:
However, only the first three examples sound natural in Polish, and others should be used for special emphasis only, if at all.
If a question mark is added to the end of those sentences they will all mean "does Alice have a cat?"; an optional 'czy' could be added to the beginning (but native speakers do not always use it).
If apparent from context, the subject, object or even the verb, can be dropped:
Note the interrogative particle "czy", which is used to start a yes/no question, much like the French "est-ce que". The particle is not obligatory, and sometimes rising intonation is the only signal of the interrogative character of the sentence: "Ala ma kota?".
There is a tendency in Polish to drop the subject rather than the object as it is uncommon to know the object but not the subject. If the question were "Kto ma kota?" (Who has a/the cat?), the answer should be "Ala" alone, without a verb.
In particular, "ja" (I) and "ty" (you, singular), and their plural equivalents "my" (we) and "wy" (you, plural), are almost always dropped, much like the respective Spanish pronouns.
Conjugation of "iść" ("to go, walk" in the present tense):
In Polish, the use of personal pronouns to mark the subject is not necessary. Therefore, one may omit the personal pronouns as follows, while retaining the same meaning:
Polish has, over the centuries, borrowed a large number of words from other languages. Borrowed words have been usually rapidly adapted in the following ways:
Depending on the historical period, borrowing has proceeded from various languages. Recent borrowing is primarily of "international" words from the English language, mainly those that have Latin or Greek roots, for example komputer (computer), biznes (business), produkcja (production), korupcja (corruption) etc. Slang sometimes borrows and alters common English words, e.g. luknąć (to look), but these borrowings are usually short lived, going out of fashion after several years. Concatenation of parts of words (e.g. auto-moto), which is not native to Polish but common in e.g. English, is also sometimes used.
When borrowing international words, Polish often changes their spelling. For example, Latin suffix '-tion' corresponds to -cja. To make the word plural, -cja becomes -cje. Examples of this include inauguracja (inauguration), dewastacja (devastation), konurbacja (conurbation) and konotacje (connotations). Also, the digraph qu becomes kw (kwadrant = quadrant; kworum = quorum).
Other notable influences in the past have been Latin (9th-18th century), Czech (10th and 14th-15th century), Italian (15th-16th century), French (18th-19th century), German (13-14th and 19th century, Hungarian (14th-16th century), Turkish (17th century), Old Belarusian, Ukrainian, and Russian.
Many words have been borrowed from the German language, as a result of being neighbours for a millennium, and also due to a sizeable German population in Polish cities since the medieval times. Examples include:
Latin was known to a larger or smaller degree by most of the numerous szlachta in the 16th to 18th centuries (and it continued to be extensively taught at secondary schools until World War II). Apart from dozens of loanwords, its influence can also be seen in somewhat greater number of verbatim Latin phrases in Polish literature (especially from the 19th century and earlier), than, say, in English.
In the 18th century, with rising prominence of France in Europe, French supplanted Latin in this respect. Some French borrowings also date from the Napoleonic era, when the Poles were enthusiastic supporters of Napoleon. Examples include ekran (from French écran, screen), abażur (abat-jour, lamp shade), rekin (requin, shark), meble (meuble, furniture), bagaż (bagage, luggage), walizka (valise, suitcase), fotel (fauteuil, armchair), plaża (plage, beach) and koszmar (cauchemar, nightmare). Some place names have also been adapted from French, such as the two Warsaw boroughs of Żoliborz (joli bord=beautiful riverside) and Mokotów (mon coteau=my hill), as well as the town of Żyrardów (from the name Girard, with the Polish suffix -ów attached to point at owner/founder of a town).
Other words are borrowed from other Slavic languages, for example, sejm, hańba and brama from Czech.
Some words like bachor (an unruly boy or child) and ciuchy (slang for clothing) were borrowed from Yiddish, spoken by the large Polish Jewish population before their numbers were severely depleted during the Holocaust.
Typical loanwords from Italian include pomidor from pomodoro (tomato), kalafior from cavolfiore (cauliflower), pomarańcza from l'arancio (orange), etc. Those were introduced in the times of queen Bona Sforza (the wife of Polish king Sigismund the Old) who was famous for introducing Poland to Italian cuisine, especially vegetables. Another interesting word of Italian origin is autostrada (from Italian "autostrada", highway).
The contacts with Ottoman Turkey in the 17th century brought many new words, some of them still in use, e.g. jar (deep valley), szaszłyk (shish kebab), filiżanka (cup), arbuz (water melon), dywan (carpet) etc.
The mountain dialects of the Górale in southern Poland, have quite a number of words borrowed from Hungarian (e.g. baca, gazda, juhas, hejnał) and Romanian from historical contacts with Hungarian-dominated Slovakia and Wallachian herders who travelled north along the Carpathians.
Thieves' slang includes such words as kimać (to sleep) or majcher (knife) of Greek origin, considered then unknown to the outside world.
Direct borrowings from Russian are extremely rare, in spite of long periods of dependence on tzarist Russia and the Soviet Union, and are limited to few internationalisms as sputnik or pieriestrojka.
Question Jaka jest dzisiaj pogoda? (What's weather like today?) Answer Dziś jest ... (It's ...)
Question Jaką pogodę lubisz? (What weather do you like?) Answer Lubię, gdy jest ... (I like ...)
First strophe and refrain of The Polish National Anthem:
"Jeszcze Polska nie zginęła, Kiedy my żyjemy. Co nam obca przemoc wzięła, Szablą odbierzemy.
Marsz, marsz Dąbrowski, Z ziemi włoskiej do Polski. Za twoim przewodem Złączym się z narodem."
"Poland is not dead Whilst we live, What others took by force, With the sword will be taken back.
March march, Dabrowski, From Italy's soil to Poland! Through your leadership We will reunite the nation."
()ольская мова