Posted by Anna Ikeda
My favorite politician, Nicholas Sarkozy went to Poland a few weeks ago and chatted with the Polish honchos in charge, namely, with one of the ducks - Lech Kaczyński. (The surname “Kaczyński” comes from the word “kaczka” which means “a duck” in English.)
While in Poland, my favorite politician made the announcement of opening the French job market to the 10 countries that joined the EU in 2004. And that also includes Poland.
This immediately made me think of the mythical Polish plumber. You see, the French are very afraid of Polish plumbers. Not sure exactly why. Maybe they have a phobia of Slavic men brandishing pipes and plungers. But when Poland joined the EU, there was much concern in France over Polish plumbers heading west.
Unfortunately, the French forgot that their difficult language is not as popular among Slavic plumbers as it used to be, and worried needlessly. The plumbers spoke mostly English and went to Ireland and the UK instead.
Read More »
Posted by Anna Ikeda
Poland has had a complicated history. And that’s a boring historical fact. What’s not boring is how that history affected the names of all sorts of places. In certain regions of what is now Poland, people sometimes lived in three different countries, all within the span of a lifetime, and without ever leaving their home town. Each time when a place got new sovereign overlords, the first thing the new honchos did, was to impose a new national language. That in turn resulted in a change of the local name.
Anybody, who’s ever tried to research their Polish genealogy, knows how annoying this whole name changing business can be.
For example:
Hirschberg – Jelenia Góra
Allenstein – Olsztyn
Breslau – Wrocław
And the most infamous of them all: Auschwitz – Oświęcim.
Read More »
Posted by Anna Ikeda
Because Polish nouns have seven (yep, you read that right - SEVEN!) cases, covering all of them in just one entry would be a bit of an overkill. To make it easy for all (but especially for me!), we’ll do them on a case-by-case basis.
But first things first. What is a “case” anyway?
(Warning! Warning! Boring grammatical stuff ahead!!!)
In Polish, as in other Slavic languages, certain words such as nouns, adjectives and pronouns change their endings. And just how a certain word changes is not random, but depends on its role in a sentence. This complicated process is called declension, because the words “decline” to show “case”. Confused yet? I am! I never liked grammar…
So, let’s start with the easiest case of all – the NOMINATIVE case (in Polish - MIANOWNIK). That’s the basic noun, just as it appears in a dictionary. And that’s the case you use when a noun is the subject of a sentence.
Read More »
). And young people often use it's shortened form "nara" (just like you said) 