Preserving language – beauty and distinctiveness
The nuances in Polish language make it particularly beautiful, poetic, and musical. In addition, it allows for plays in language that are useful in conveying meaning and humor. It has helped Poland and Poles everywhere in standing up to countries and dictators.
From the Associated Press via Yahoo News: Poland campaigns to preserve its complex spelling
WARSAW, Poland (AP) — Polish language experts launched a campaign Thursday to preserve the challenging system of its diacritical marks, saying the tails, dots and strokes are becoming obsolete under the pressure of IT and speed.
The drive, initiated by the state-run Council of the Polish Language, is part of the UNESCO International Mother Language Day. The campaign’s Polish name is complicated for a non-Polish keyboard: “Je,zyk polski jest a,-e,.”
That’s a pun meaning that Polish language needs its tails and is top class. Part of the meaning is lost and the pronunciation sounds wrong if the marks aren’t there.
Computer and phone keyboards require users to punch additional keys for Polish alphabet. To save time, Poles skip the nuances, and sometimes need to guess the meaning of the message that they have received. This is also true for IT equipment users of other languages with diacritical marks…
As part of the new campaign, some radio and TV stations are playing songs with words stripped of diacritical pronunciation, making them sound odd to the Polish ear. A rap song concludes: “Press the right Alt sometimes” to obtain Polish letters, referring one of the keyboard buttons that Poles need to press to write characters with diacritical marks.
In Poland, linguist Jerzy Bralczyk said the diacritical marks are a visual, defining feature of the Polish language, and they carry meaning and enrich the speech.
“Today, the Polish language is threatened by the tendency to avoid its characteristic letters,” Bralczyk said. “The less we use diacritical marks in text messages, the more likely they are to vanish altogether. That would mean an impoverishment of the language and of our life. I would be sorry.”
The tails make “a” and “e” nasal, strokes over “s,” “c” and “n” soften them and sometimes make them whistling sound, a stroke across “l” makes it sound like the English “w,” and a dot over “z” makes it hard like a metal drill. And each change matters.
“Los” means “fate,” but when you put a slash across the “l” and add a stroke over the “s” it becomes “elk.” “Paczki” are “parcels,” but “pa,czki” are doughnuts.
Foreigners who know Polish say the diacritical marks are a visual sign that it’s a tough language and that they add to the complexity of the grammar and vocabulary, which does not derive from Latin or from Germanic languages.
…
In Romania, the tongue’s tails on “t” and “s,” circumflexes on “a” and “I” and hats on “a” are ignored even by state officials and institutes. Some words have up to four diacritical marks, and not using them changes the pronunciation and, in some cases, the meaning, to the point of no meaning at all.
It would be easier if Polish were written in Cyrillic. (DUCKING.) Seriously, good article and good point.
Hi Father,
I’d like to say something here about Polish and the PNCC. I’ve been in a number of conversations over the years about whether the Polish language keeps many people away from the PNCC. But a conversation I had today illustrated to me that sometimes the problem is not the amount of Polish in the liturgy, but the amount of Polish people *think* is in the liturgy (if they’ve never been to one).
Here’s an anecdote from someone in my parish: she had mentioned the mass to someone who had come to a fundraiser, only to have the other say “Oh, like we would go to a mass in Polish!” (This despite the fact that the sign in front of the church says that the mass is in English.)
This was an eye-opener for me. Keep in mind, it isn’t that I never think about the use of English/Polish in the mass; it’s just that when I think about it, I take for granted that it’s about 95% English. The anecdote reminded me that even if I take something for granted, there might be many other people who are completely unaware of it.
So I got to thinking about whether we might be doing things or saying things inadvertently that cause others to assume our mass is in Polish. I asked myself, among other things, is the problem that people hear the word “Polish” and automatically think of the language (forgetting about Polish culture, Polish ethnicity, Polish history, etc.)? Is the problem that we still have the word “Polish” in too many places – notwithstanding the fact that we have removed it from some places? For example, the top of our bulletin reads:
[Name] Parish
National Catholic Church of the PNCC
(where you’ll note that the word “Polish” has been removed from the second line).
But what I *didn’t* pay attention to right away (probably, again, an issue of being so accustomed to something as to take-it-for-granted) is the fact that those two lines are then repeated in Polish. Hmmm …
My hypothesis at this point (and perhaps you or your readers can provide some evidence for or against this) is this: Speaking English to people during the mass may not do much good if you speak Polish to them in the bulletin.