h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Entry: Handy Polish Phrases - A2900242
Author: Aina - U198095

Entry: Handy Polish Phrases - A2900242
Author: Aina - U198095

Basic Polish phrases to insure survival in Poland. This is my first entry, so I'll be very grateful for your comments.

Very good, especially for a first entry.

“The examples in pronunciation refer to Standard British English.”

What part of British English uses French words? Are there any more domestic examples, or do we just not use our tongue that way?

Any reason why Emergencies and Qualifiers don’t have the table cell padding around them?

I enjoyed this. I made noises I've never heard myself make before.

There are no nasal sounds in English, so I had to look for ones in other languages. Luckily most people, even if they don't speak French have an idea what its nasal sounds sound like

There's really no reason for the lack of padding, so I might as well change it to be consistent.

Thanks for the comments, I appreciate it

Nice entry This could be quite useful Possible worth adding links at end to other handy language entries eg A329942 Handy Mandarin Phrases.

While I found some of the examples easy to follow, others (mostly lacking as many vowels as I would expect) were quite tricky. It might be useful to take a couple of the vowel-challenged examples and provide a rough phonetic pronunciation showing where the syllables are (and prevent constant scanning back to the top of the entry to find out how each consonant pairing is pronounced):
eg Excuse me - Przepraszam - is said "pr'zep-ra-sham" (if that's right )
or forty-two - czterdziesci dwa - ch'ter-ji-ezsh dwa (ditto - you can't get the accent over the 's' in a PR thread posting)

typo in numbers: Forty not Fourty

Pimmsaloonie

Just a suggestion. There's a mention of the Polish-American community. Either you could add the Polish-Australian community, the Polish-Canadian community, and so on, or you could change this to refer to 'the large Polish-speaking communities that exist outside Poland, and indeed outside Europe'. (Or words to that effect...)

Ivan.

I've now done a couple of phonetic examples in Evereyday Phrases, for Excuse me and Thank you. Do they help? If you think it's clearer with them I'll make more. But to me the phonetic versions look like transliterated Chinese!

I think it is helpful. What does anyone else think?

It is the unfamiliarity of the letter combinations which indicate phonemes that makes deciphering consonant-rich words into sound elements difficult. So the footnotes provided by someone who *knows* how to pronounce the words is invaluable.

Pimms

Very good

I have had a few trips to Poland, although never long enough to cement any vocabulary in place, unfortunately. Next time I go, I'll print this out!

sprout

Have changed 'Polish American community' to 'immigrant communities outside Europe'. Does that phrasing encompass also the descendants of immigrants?

sprout

It would be wonderful if this entry was tangibly useful to someone.

A lot of new pronunciation footnotes added. Are they helpful, and are there too many?

It's such a pity we don't have audio. Polish words written in English sounds look pretty intimidating. I'm just afraid it will scare people away

Yep v. helpful to me - mumbling away in a Polish-sounding way much more than was possible when I was flicking back up to the top of the entry to guess what the next syllable is

Appreciate the effort that has gone into the footnotes - is it worth creating a third column to the tables with the rough pronunciation? Just a suggestion

P'mm'sh L'ti'j'ch

I'd rather leave the phonetics 'hidden' in the footnotes as they are so very rough and not the correct way to speak Polish. This way you use them only if you need to use them, but they're not in front of you all the time giving a *slightly* wrong idea.

It was a very good point that the phonetic translations were needed. You made so many mistakes writing the words phonetically that I knew I had to do something!

Well written and the pronunciations were easy to follow. Need to bookmark this for when the kiddies grow. My new last name starts with Trz...

Any other comments?

Wow I checked out your GML and became confused. I was going to suggest you used 'named entities' rather than 'entity tags' for your special Polish characters, and then found that they aren't listed in the <./>GuideML-Characters</.> list at all

It took me some searching to find a site where they are listed at all - which shows how much I use other character sets I suppose

For more information on Polish language you might consider adding a link to http://www.wordiq.com/definition/Polish_language. The downside of that would be that my browser at least doesn't show numerous of the characters used

However you could add a bit more of the idiosyncrasies and pitfalls of Polish for the non-native speaker from this site, such as the tidbit that there are five genders - neuter, feminine and three masculine genders (personal, animate and inanimate)

Pimms

Aina - re: post 9 - Thanks. Sorry I took so long to get back here to say that... The wording you chose does cover the children of immigrants, in my opinion.

Ivan.

Then the immigrant reference stays.

Pimms, thanks for the useful link. My browser didn't show hardly any of the phonetic symbols, but all of the Polish ones. The IPA ones aren't that important since every sound has got pronunciation examples as well, so I don't think there would be a problem adding the link...

It's just that the writer in question seems to enjoy intimidating readers with the difficulties of Polish. I didn't understand the five genders reference at first although I have studied Polish grammar. The way it was taught to me was that there are three: feminine, masculine and neuter. Sometimes the masculine class is divided into animate and inanimate, sometimes to personal and non-personal. But you really, really do not need to know that to get by with Polish. You'll be understood even if you inflect all nouns the same way. That's why I'd rather leave the idiosyncrasies out of the entry. They are interesting for the person just randomly reading something in the Guide, but it might frighten away the ones who might have real use of the entry. 'Uh, that looks astoundingly difficult. Maybe some other time. I'll just speak English.'

I love boasting about how difficult the languages I know are, but I think this time it would be unwise.

In that case Aina I'd suggest putting the link in a References section at the end where you can offer the link as, say, "an alternative view of Polish pronunciation, which might clarify some pronunciations that for any reason remain unclear. Try and ignore the tortuous grammatical detail - you don't need it to be understood"

Pimms

Reference added. I might change the wording but right now I'm just pleased h2g2 stopped crashing on me for a second.