Comments on: When Diminutives Aren’t Diminutive

By: thomas westcott

thomas westcott — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 16:53:22 +0000

I did not have that warning. That sounds like good advice now.
However In the past I have tryed to listen to Polish cds and cassets. The music is very catchy – one could dance to it. More disco like. Several of the tapes are of children singing. I have attended church were the songs and sermon were in Polish. I have listened to the Polish radio station in Chicago. I was listening for words that I could identify. I was also trying to get a sense of the patterns of the language.
Unfortunately I only made a match for the complete sound. The diminutive sounds different therefore to me it is a different word.
With so much spoken Polish in the diminutive no wonder that I have not be able to follow Polish conversations. The vocabulary that I have been learning is mostly all wrong compared to what I was hearing.

I think that as I learn more vocabulary that I will need to learn as many of the different forms for each word at the same time as i learn the basic word.

Another observation about diminutives since they are spelled differently is that they are not always shorter words (number of letters used in spelling the word)

By: Lori

Lori — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 01:14:48 +0000

When I first took some Polish language classes, the instructor warned us that in Polish everything is a diminutive even a table! So from the beginning I expected this

By: russ

russ — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 22:58:33 +0000

I had a Polish teacher who said she and some other Poles are sometimes frustrated or embarrassed by the Polish obsession with cute diminutives, as if the language is degenerating into baby talk.

Indeed it seems very odd to me as a learner when grown adults are always offering each other “herbatka” instead of “herbata”, etc, or when in a supposedly serious business context, people talk about a “rachuneczek” instead of “rachunek”, etc. It’s funny to me that I know Poles who hate this baby-talk, yet catch themselves doing it also by habit, since it’s so ingrained in the language/culture.

Diminutivizing a word that’s ALREADY diminutive (e.g. “chusteczka” etc) is also kind of… odd! It’s like, “Hey, let’s make it even MORE cute!”

By: lida

lida — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 16:57:28 +0000

another good example is
prosze please
and
prosie little pig
which has a slight difference in pronounce

By: Basia Lomnicka

Basia Lomnicka — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 13:28:23 +0000

ok, I’m game, although I will probably only scratch the surface:

Anna: Ania, Anusia, Aniula, Anulka, Anka, Aneczka,
Hania? Hanka? (remember my mom calling a little girl by Hanka)

Any more, and I will probably die of “sugar” overload.