Limmy’s Show

Now, this is something you MUST see :)

 

Mother Language Day

 

Today UNESCO is celebrating International Mother Language Day so I’ve decided to introduce you to my native language which is Polish.

For a start, this is its genealogy:

 

* This is just a simple sketch, hundreds more languages are not included

 

As you can see, Polish is an Indo-European language. Probably 99% of its vocabulary is European with the remaining 1% being comprised of, above all, Arabic and  Turkish words which can be found in English, for example.

 

Here’s some facts:

• it is spoken by more than 41 million people around the world
• it is one of the 25 most widely spoken languages
• it is a Slavonic language, most closely related to Czech, Slovak, Kashubian and Sorbian
• it is written using the Latin alphabet (with some modifications to adapt it to the many sounds Latin didn’t have)
• it utilises diacritics (ą, ę, ó, ł, ż, ź, ć, ń) and digraphs (sz, cz, ch, dż, dź, dz)
• letters q, x and v appear only in foreign words
• it has seven grammatical cases
• it has three tenses but many verbs can have perfective and imperfective forms
• it is the only Slavonic language that still has nasal vowels (ą and ę, despite its appearance, the former is a nasal o)
• consonant clusters are quite common (eg. wszcznij)
• it is the official language of Poland and one of the official languages of the EU
• it was once considered the lingua franca of Eastern Europe
• stress is fixed on the penultimate syllable
• the first text in Polish dates back to the 14th century
• arguably the most famous Polish tongue-twister is this one: ‘W Szczebrzeszynie chrząszcz brzmi w trzcinie’
• for native speakers, it is very easy to read written Polish
• quite the opposite applies to writing it
• there is a huge number of rules regarding where to place commas, separating or joining compound words, capitalising or not, which is impossible to know them all
• Polish Language Council is responsible setting these rules as well as approving correct declination and conjugation
• there are strict rules on giving names to babies, one of these rules says that the name must indicate sex of the child
• despite the fact that it’s spoken over a relatively vast area, it doesn’t have many dialectal differences and accent variations
• Polish has borrowed words from many languages, mostly from Latin, Czech, German, Italian, Hungarian, Ukrainian, Turkish, Romanian, French, Hebrew, Yiddish, Russian and English
• like many other languages in Europe, Polish is now facing threat due to the dominant position or English
• foreign films are neither dubbed nor do they have subtitles, voice-over is used instead (the worst out of these three options, in my opinion)
• kurwa is the most widely used swear word
• the longest proper word in Polish is pięćdziesięciogroszówka which means fifty groszy coin
• ‘Pan Tadeusz’ is considered the national epic poem of Poland. It begins with the words: ‘Litwo, ojczyzno moja!’ (‘Oh, Lithuania, my fatherland’)
• and of course, it is the most beautiful language in the world :)

 

 

And what do the Poles think of their language? Here are the results of a poll conducted by the Polish Language Council and CBOS in 2005

In your opinion, why should we take care of the language we use?
1) because Polish is a value which holds the nation together and one should preserve it	35,4%
2) because I was taught at home that one should take care of their native language	19,4%
3) because cultured people should speak correctly	19,5%
4) because speaking correctly helps in communication	12,3%
5) because when one speaks incorrectly, others treat this person worse	4,3%
6) you just should, I cannot justify it well	8,4%
7) difficult to say	0,6%
8) because our language is beautiful	0,1%

#3 Students and the internet in the library

There are probably hundreds of desks for students to use their laptops in the main library and most of the time they are all taken. Yes, some need to use the internet to write an essay or whatever that is they are doing. But for heaven’s sake, most of them are not doing it. So, I’m asking, don’t they have broadband at home?

 

I went there today, because I, for that matter, don’t have internet at home (unless you count the connection you can sometimes get from the neighbours when you’re laptop is placed on the windowsill behind the sink). Having found an empty desk, I put my laptop on it and realised that I’d left the lead at home. Fuck. So, I went back home, got what I needed, came back to the library and it turned out I couldn’t get the internet working.

Now, here’s a curious thing.

It’s been ages since Windows Vista was released, yet the IT ‘services’ still haven’t taken off the note on their website which says not to buy Vista as it’s not supported and it won’t work on the university network. True, soon after I’d got my laptop it wouldn’t work but after some time the problem seemed to have been resolved. There’s been two occasions when I couldn’t connect to the internet; one of them was today.

Why is it so difficult for them fix this?

 

T. left on Tuesday :’(

 

 

And finally:

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