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[-] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 211 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

Be Polish. Live at the crossroads of three major continental zones. Incorporates traditions from Arabic, Latin, and Nordic languages into a unique synthesis. Everybody hates it. Nobody wants to speak it.

Be English. Live at the ass end of nowhere, and become a haven for vagrants, dissidents, pirates, and exiles. Incorporate traditions from Latin, Germanic, and Frankish languages into a unique synthesis. Everyone hates it. Nobody wants to speak it. Become worlds most spoken language anyway.

Moral of the story. People will have to learn your shitty incoherent language if you build a big enough navy.

[-] shalafi@lemmy.world 44 points 6 days ago
[-] UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world 27 points 6 days ago

glances at who builds all the processors and hardware components

Time to start learning Chinese and/or Korean.

[-] SpaghettiYeti@lemmy.world 13 points 6 days ago

See, those are essentially the raw goods now. Finished goods are entertainment and the internet.

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[-] Justas@sh.itjust.works 23 points 6 days ago

Be Lithuanian. Get culturally dominated by Poland. Refuse to speak Polish anyway. Refuse influence from any language. Remove loan words, replace them with newly made Baltic sounding ones. End up impossible to learn.

[-] twig@lemmy.dbzer0.com 22 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

Kinda weird to isolate Polish when Hungarian, Finnish and Basque are actually all their own distinct language families.

Polish actually isn't in a distinct language family and shares a lot with other western Slavic languages like Czech, and Slavic languages in general.

[-] Redfox8@mander.xyz 3 points 5 days ago

Yeah, my first thought was, isn't Hungarian far more complex/different. Also, Icelandic is meant to be very difficult to learn too!

[-] TAG@lemmy.world 12 points 5 days ago

Polish is a Slavic language written out using Latin letters.

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[-] fne8w2ah@lemmy.world 9 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

Grzegorz Brzęczyszczykiewicz z Chrząszczyżewoszyce powiat Łękołody.

[-] spamspeicher@feddit.org 9 points 5 days ago
[-] Slovene@feddit.nl 3 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

Did you see all the Zs in there? They're obviously talking in their sleep.

[-] MadBob@feddit.nl 21 points 6 days ago

I don't think you could get the speakers of all the European languages to agree on which one is normal.

but we can all agree hungarian isn't

[-] MehBlah@lemmy.world 10 points 5 days ago

Sure you can everyone in france know theirs is the only real language. Don't believe me? Just ask someone from france.

[-] Draedron@lemmy.dbzer0.com 11 points 6 days ago

You could if we had won. /s

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[-] dQw4w9WgXcQ@lemm.ee 23 points 6 days ago

We used to have a server at my university which a polish guy set up. It received the name brzeczyszczykiewich. We decided that the server was secure enough by name, so we only put a trivial password on it for remote connection.

[-] MrKurteous@feddit.nu 18 points 6 days ago

Are you sure it wasn't "brzeczyszczykiewicz" (difference in last two letters)? Otherwise it seems like a little typo, which, to be fair, would be a good idea to keep it safe from Polish people haha

[-] dQw4w9WgXcQ@lemm.ee 13 points 6 days ago

I'm completely sure, like 100%, fully positive without a single doubt... that I misspelled it and I would never be able to access the server again.

[-] loudWaterEnjoyer@lemmy.dbzer0.com 14 points 6 days ago

Can we also get some translation or something. This might shock you, but not all of us are polish.

[-] dev_null@lemmy.ml 13 points 6 days ago

There is no translation, it's just a hard to pronounce Polish surname.

[-] TempermentalAnomaly@lemmy.world 3 points 5 days ago

Whew. Good. I thought it was just me.

[-] lvxferre@mander.xyz 35 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

The orthography is OK. It spams ⟨z⟩ for the same reason why Romance and Germanic languages spam ⟨h⟩ - too few letters, too many sounds, got to use digraphs.

The phonetic and phonemic part is like your typical European language. As in, "WE NEED A NEW SOUND! OTHERWISE WE CAN'T REPRESENT THE KITCHEN SINK DRIPPING!!!!"

The morphology is complicated, but the alternative is to make the syntax become a hellish mess. Like Mandarin or English. Language is complicated, no matter which one.

[-] dejected_warp_core@lemmy.world 14 points 6 days ago

the alternative is to make the syntax become a hellish mess. Like Mandarin or English.

Now hang on just a second. English is fine. You just have to memorize or correctly guess the etymology of whatever word it is you're trying to spell/pronounce in order to get ... oh, okay, I think I see the problem now.

[-] lvxferre@mander.xyz 30 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

Ah, what you're saying is spelling. Syntax is word order, obligatory words, stuff like this. English syntax is a maze, or how programmers would call it, spaghetti code.

For example, here's how to ask a yes/no question in...

  • Latin - attach -ne after the relevant word. (Note: Latin has no word for "yes", but still has this sort of question.)
  • Spanish - why bother? Intonation is enough.
  • Polish - start the sentence with "czy".
  • German - shift the verb to the start of the sentence (first position).
  • English - if the verb belongs to a small list of exceptions, do it as in German. However most verbs refuse this movement to the first position, so for those you need to spawn a dummy support "do", then let it steal the conjugation from the leftmost verb, and then shift that "do" instead. Noting that semantic "do" also refuses the movement, so it still requires a support "do", yielding questions like "did you do this?"

Then there's the adjective order. In Latin for example it's just a "...near the noun? Whatever, just don't be ambiguous." Polish is probably like Latin in this. English though? Quantity or number, then quality or opinion, then size, then age, then shape, then colour, then material or place of origin, then purpose or qualifier, then the noun. And don't you dare to switch them - "your famous blue raincoat" is a-OK, but *"your blue famous raincoat" makes you sound like a maniac.

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[-] BakerBagel@midwest.social 12 points 6 days ago

Syntax is for nerds. I prefer a vibes based language.

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[-] Klear@lemmy.world 11 points 6 days ago

the alternative is to make the syntax become a hellish mess

The alternative is Czech.

[-] BeardedGingerWonder@feddit.uk 18 points 6 days ago

A Polish colleague of mine once accidentally picked Czech in an online work training exercise and then spent the next 30 minutes giggling to himself. I asked him afterwards what was up "Czech sounds like baby talk"

[-] Klear@lemmy.world 10 points 6 days ago

So I've heard. The feeling is mutual, oddly enough.

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[-] ytg@sopuli.xyz 22 points 6 days ago

Have you ever seen transcribed Georgian?

[-] Ezek@sopuli.xyz 7 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

I remember some video where somebody was showing an example of either a word or a sentence & showed: "mbrtskvni"

this language would make you think they have to pay a fee for using vowels

[-] Fleur_@lemm.ee 10 points 5 days ago

Me, a non European who only speaks english, so true

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[-] harcesz@szmer.info 16 points 6 days ago

This is outrageous! I will call all users of our Polish instance "SZMER" to... OK, I might be getting your point.

[-] Simulation6@sopuli.xyz 4 points 5 days ago

Doesn't Lithuanian have tonal components? That has to be worst then Polish.

[-] MrSilkworm@lemmy.world 7 points 5 days ago

*cries at Greek

[-] AbsoluteChicagoDog@lemm.ee 11 points 6 days ago
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[-] MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml 6 points 6 days ago

Ä, ö, ü, am i a joke to you?

[-] boonhet@lemm.ee 8 points 6 days ago

Ä, ö, ü, õ, š, ž are just there to allow for phonemic ortography, biatch!

Though then again, I'm fairly sure that the weird Polish letters.

Also if your native tongue DOES have phonemic ortography.... Well guess how difficult it was for 6 year old me in Estonia to start learning English where the words are clearly not written the same way they're spoken????

It gets worse hearing older people here speak English because most of them did NOT start learning the language at age 5 or 6 so uhhhh... Yeah they expect the words to be pronounced the way they're spelled. Makes your ears bleed.

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[-] BurnedOliveTree@lemmy.world 11 points 6 days ago

I wonder if we had ž etc like Czechs would it make it easier for foreigners to read

[-] Justas@sh.itjust.works 7 points 6 days ago

Fun fact: The Czech adopted š, č and ž to look less German. The Lithuanians adopted it to look less Polish.

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this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2024
964 points (100.0% liked)

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