Polish – Refers to the culture of the modern nation of Poland, or more generally to the cultures that inhabited the same area of central Europe south of the Baltic Sea.
As a language spoken in Poland, Polish belongs to the western division of the Slavic languages and forms the Lechnian group with Kashubian-Slowinz and the extinct Polabic. In Polish the Old Slavonic nasal vowels are preserved: q (equivalent to French on), Q (French in). In all other Slavic languages, these have passed into non-nasal vowels. Furthermore, 1 almost sounds like the English w. Striking is the strong molding of d, t, s, z and n before e, i and iotized vowels (vowels preceded by a j sound), which then form a kind of dzj, tj, zj and nj (French gn in Champagne) become. Modern Polish has the stress on the penultimate syllable.
Furthermore, all vowels are short, or rather: there is no difference between long and short vowels, such as, for example, German or Czech. Old Polish also had long vowels and still had symptoms of a free accent, similar to Russian. Later the difference in length in the vowels was eliminated, but the originally long vowels were pronounced more closed than the short ones. Thus one had a (originated from long a), which sounded somewhat like o; é approached i; ó (today still preserved in the civilized language) sounds like the Dutch oe. A disappeared from civilized written and spoken language at the end of the 17th century, and after the first half of the 19th century. In many dialects, these nuances have been preserved.
Like in Czech, Polish has passed before an i-sounds into a vibrating zj (written rz), which however lost its vibration in the course of the 19th century and became equal to z (zj). The formal theory of Polish is very similar to that of Czech, but the Czech written language is more conservative. The Polish vocabulary is purely Slavic; of the foreign elements, the most important are the Latin words, which are relatively more represented here than in other Slavic languages. Furthermore, one finds German and French loanwords.
List of Acronyms Related to Polish
