| About the Polish language |
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Stran 1 od 5 Introduction Andragoški zavod Maribor - Ljudska univerza is the author and the coordinator of the Language Festival project. Together with the partners from the Netherlands, Germany, Check Republic, Slovakia and Hungary we applied for financing with EU programme Socrates - Lingua 1. The project received positive feedback and was accepted by European Commission to be implemented between October 2003 and October 2005. In the project we prepared and organised the Language Festival in Maribor from 29th September to 2nd October 2004, held book exhibition of minor European languages, produced a web site and books on chosen languages. The Festival hosted many experts who introduced 24 European languages to general public in 4 days not only at AZM-LU but also at many schools and other institutions. In April 2005 we held book exhibition where we presented books and other materials on 17 minor European languages at Maribor Faculty of Education. We finalised the activities by producing the web site you're using at the moments. Here you can find some information regarding language connected culture, basic characteristics of relevant languages and language survival kits. Website language is Slovenian. Also German and English versions are available. In time we hope to achieve English, German and Esperanto descriptions for all languages. This website is still very much alive and constantly expanding. We plan to add new languages as well. Promotionally the project enjoyed great success. In cooperation with Mediamix we created an innovative way of attracting the public and received many awards at advertising festivals. Socrates Lingua declared the Language Festival project one of 50 best examples of promoting languages. Info regarding promotion of the Festival is available on: http://www.mediamix.si/slo/News/2005junij02.html Melita Cimerman and Zlatko Tišljar. Author: Aneta Szczepankiewicz It is estimated that nowadays while Poland has a population of about 38 million inhabitants, Polish is spoken by some 55 million people throughout the world. It is interesting to note that the second largest Polish-speaking city is Chicago in the USA with over a million Polish immigrants. The language itself is very dynamic and together with Polish society is at present undergoing many changes to its culture and civilization.
Polish is one of the West Slavic languages, along with Czech, Slovak and Pomeranian (represented nowadays by the Kashubian dialect). The West Slavic group also includes also Upper Sorbian, Lower Sorbian and the extinct Polabian. All these languages find their origin in the Indo European language family. Firstly, Polish had most in common with Kashubian and Polabian, subsequently with other languages of the West Slavic group. Slightly weaker ties ensued with the remaining Slavic languages. As for languages from other groups of the Indo-European family, there are more differences than similarities between them and Polish. Polish — historical background Almost all languages of Europe and West Asia descend from one common source, the Proto Indo-European language, which was spoken by the primeval Indo-European community before the turn of the 3rd and 2nd millennia BC. Numerous tribal contacts and wanderings resulted in the split of Indo-European community into several ethnic groupings. Various tribes belonging to the Balto-Slavic community occupied the territory between the Baltic Sea, the Carpatians, the Oder and the Dnieper Rivers. It was probably about 1500-1300 BC when those groups diverged to such an extent as to form separate Proto-Slavic and Proto-Baltic entities. In the Proto-Slavic language all closed syllables became open. This resulted in vowel nasalization and differences in vowel length. The opposition of palatalised and non-palatalised consonants was also set up then. In the period between the 3rd and 6th century the Proto-Slavs has divided into three distinct ethno-linguistic groups: West Slavs, East Slavs and South Slavs. Those groups continue to occupy the areas they settled in the 6th century AD. Polish as the West Slavic language belongs to so called Lechitic group together with two other dialects, Polabian and Kashubian. The West Slavic group also contains the Czecho-Slovak and Sorbian dialects. The formation of the Polish language of the preliterate period (before the 12th century) was influenced by two important facts: Christianisation of Poland in 966 (as a result of the adoption of Christianity from Bohemia) and the establishment of the State. Tribal dialects spoken by the inhabitants of ancient Poland were becoming more and more similar to one another thanks to commonly shared and frequently used vocabulary in official and religious spheres of life. Both the State and the Church were interested in standardising the language finding it helpful in furthering their interests. In a long process of a state consolidation (reinforced by a religious constraint) both institutions made significant contribution to the creation of a universally comprehensible common language. Christianity introduced Latin , which for a considerable time (until the second half of the 18th century) assumed the role of the elite language of the literate as it did in other European countries. Latin brought with it an alphabet which was subjected to various modifications to accommodate the needs of the Polish sound system. Christianity introduced not only Latin but first Czech terminology into Polish. As we can easily guess those were loanwords taken from religious life (anioł ‘angel’, msza ‘mass’, kosciół ‘church’, chrzest ‘baptism’, ewangelia ‘gospel’). From the 12th century onwards Polish can be defined in a more precise way thanks to the first written documents, the earliest of which is the Latin Bull of Pope Innocent II sent to James, the Archbishop of Gniezno. It contains about 400 Polish personal and place places. Polish was then a conglomerate of tribal dialects out of which a universally comprehensible supra-dialectal language was gradually growing. Its formation was influenced mainly by two dialects predominant in the Polish territory at that time: the Wielkopolski dialect (Greater Poland dialect) and the Małopolski (Lesser Poland dialect). In the 14th century, Poland and Lithuania formed the union which was developed into the vast, multinational Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. It was during the Renaissance that Polish language underwent particular enrichment . In the 16th century it started to be used in the Polish Parliament (Sejm) and gained the status of official state language - the first legal documents were issued in Polish at that time. However, it was still considered to be less cultured and far less elegant than Latin. For this reason Polish absorbed many loanwords. Latin was by far the language which enriched Polish most. An especially great intensity of “macaronism” was witnessed in the middle of the 17th century. Obviously at that time Latin was a traditional source of vocabulary for all the European languages. The first loanwords emanating from French and Italian had their origin in journeys to France and Italy undertaken by Poles. They were related usually to court life (from Italian: fraszka ‘a trifle; an epigram’, gracja ‘grace’, karoca ‘a carriage’, splendor ‘splendour’, kredyt ‘a credit’; from French: dama ‘a lady’, fryzjer ‘a hairdresser’, gorset ‘a corset’, szarża ‘a charge’, kadet ‘a cadet’). The French influence lasted longer than the Italian and was dominant during the whole of the Enlightment continuing on and into the 19th century. From the East there were coming loanwords from Russian and Ukrainian. Germanisms were also numerous (chwila ‘a while’, kubeł ‘a bucket’, izba ‘a room’). |
