• twig@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    1 month 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
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      1 month ago

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

    • RunawayFixer@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      Maybe it’s because it was in the same language group as those others that polish got singled out. People who speak an Indo European language will expect to be lost when first trying to learn a language outside of the group, but might not expect to be so confuddled from a related language. Expectations basically.

  • Bob@feddit.nl
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    1 month ago

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

  • dQw4w9WgXcQ@lemm.ee
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    1 month 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.

    • Lemmilicious@feddit.nu
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      1 month 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

  • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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    1 month 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.

    • Justas🇱🇹@sh.itjust.works
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      1 month 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.

      • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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        1 month ago

        glances at who builds all the processors and hardware components

        Time to start learning Chinese and/or Korean.

      • Sabata@ani.social
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        1 month ago

        How long until internet slang/lingo snowballs out of control and becomes an actual language? I mean, it’s already constantly spawning words and a diverse enough environment.
        I notice sometime I lack an optimal word to describe a concept IRL that an internet term would fit perfectly but would be cringe or meaningless unless the listener was also terminally online. There’s also stealing terms from other languages that catch on, but that don’t work offline(IE. Zeitgeist, pantsdrunk, kawaii) that get spread around enough to be generally know, even if a bit odd.

        Yes, including brainrot. Especially brainrot. It’s not all pleasant.

    • boonhet@lemm.ee
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      1 month 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.

      • MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml
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        1 month ago

        Btw, there’s a mising phonetic letter in Swiss German, somewhere between ä and ö, kind of a aeo. But since it’s rarely written dialekt (personal chats), we work around this with Umlauts and context.

            • boonhet@lemm.ee
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              1 month ago

              Estonian actually. I’m having a hard time thinking of an English word for an example. I guess I’d write bone phonetically as bõun? Or own as õun as well. With the u in our language sounding much like u in bauen or rauchen in German if I’m pronouncing those right.

    • Ezek@sopuli.xyz
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      1 month 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

  • Lvxferre@mander.xyz
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    1 month 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.

    • Rinox@feddit.it
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      1 month ago

      Then there’s Italian. We have less letters than other European languages (we don’t have k,j,w,x,y) and we still manage to avoid shit like “thoroughly” or spamming letters. We have accents, but use them way less than in Spanish and no special accents or characters like ñ ç č ß å ø ö etc

      Once you understand the rules is probably one of the easier languages to spell and pronounce

      • Lvxferre@mander.xyz
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        1 month ago

        Italian is the exception that proves the rule. The orthography is well-designed (transparent, without too much fluff), but not even then it could avoid ⟨ch gh⟩ for /k g/ before ⟨e i⟩, so it could reserve ⟨c(i) g(i)⟩ for /tʃ dʒ/.

        It’s all related: modern European languages typically have a lot more sounds than Latin did, so Latin itself never developed letters for them. Across the Middle Ages you saw a bunch of local solutions for that, like:

        • Italian - refer to the etymology to pick a digraph, then solve the /k tʃ g dʒ/ mess with ⟨h⟩.
        • Occitan - spam ⟨h⟩ everywhere. (Portuguese borrowed from it.)
        • English - spam ⟨h⟩ too.
        • Hungarian - spam ⟨y⟩ instead.
        • Polish - spam ⟨z⟩, plus a few acute accents (Polish has the retroflex series to handle too, not just the palatal/palato-alveolar like the four above)
    • MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml
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      1 month ago

      Germanic languages spam ⟨h⟩

      ? English? German has way less h. Ok, more ch, but that’s for different reasons, same reasons as ck.

      • Lvxferre@mander.xyz
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        1 month ago

        I was kind of painting a broad stroke, but you’re right - German uses mostly ⟨ch⟩ and ⟨sch⟩. Should’ve said “English” alone.

    • Klear@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      the alternative is to make the syntax become a hellish mess

      The alternative is Czech.

      • BeardedGingerWonder@feddit.uk
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        1 month 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”

    • dejected_warp_core@lemmy.world
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      1 month 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
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        1 month 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.

        • tiredofsametab@fedia.io
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          1 month ago

          Think you this some kind of joke?

          (What do you mean you don’t want to sound like an Elizabethan or earlier?!)

          • Lvxferre@mander.xyz
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            1 month ago

            …my lizard brain is now confused, because it really your question word order as in German to interpret wants, thus still for the ending “is” waiting is.

            • tiredofsametab@fedia.io
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              1 month ago

              I think “think you that this is some kind of joke” is more grammatically correct (from a prescriptive POV, anyway), but I’ve seen similar sentences as the above before.

        • YTG123@sopuli.xyz
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          1 month ago

          In Latin for example it’s just a “…near the noun? Whatever, just don’t be ambiguous."

          It doesn’t need to be remotely close to the noun lol

          Though Latin syntax can get annoying sometimes (when do I use the subjunctive? What’s the correct negation? Perfect or imperfect… maybe pluperfect? Which noun is this random genitive modifying?), it does make sense eventually. I guess that is also true for English, but I still mess up the tenses sometimes.

          • Lvxferre@mander.xyz
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            1 month ago

            It doesn’t need to be remotely close to the noun lol

            You can, but it isn’t that common, it’s even considered a form of hyperbaton (messing around with word order).

            Note that those distinctions that you mentioned (subjunctive vs. indicative, the right negation, perfect vs. imperfect) are all handled through the morphology in Latin, not the syntax (as in English). And yes Latin morphology can get really crazy, just like Polish or any other “old style” Indo-European language.

    • Justas🇱🇹@sh.itjust.works
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      1 month ago

      Just come up with new letters, Lithuanian has 9 (ą, ę, ė, į, ų, ū, č, š, ž) extra letters. If a small language can do it, so can English.

      • Lvxferre@mander.xyz
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        1 month ago

        It’s actually easier to come up with a decent orthography for a language with a small number of speakers, as it depends on getting “everyone” (more like “enough people so the opposers can be safely ignored”) on the same page. Doubly true when it’s a language associated with a single government, because once you get 2+ governments into the bag they tend to force distinctions where there’s none.

        For English there’s an additional issue, the lack of any sort of regulating body like the VLKK. The natives also seem to have a weird pride against diacritics (kind of funny as English spams apostrophes, but OK, not going to judge it).

        • Justas🇱🇹@sh.itjust.works
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          1 month ago

          I mean, yes and no.

          You are assuming that Lithuanian language became formalised when Lithuania was united under one government. Instead, most of language formalisation happened between 1880s and 1920s, when Lithuanian speaking population was actually divided between Prussian and Tzarist Russian empires. While most of the people lived in Tzarist Russia, writing in Lithuanian in Latin script was forbidden there.

          Instead, books in Latin script were printed in Prussia and distributed in Russia illegally. A handful of people like J. Basanavičius and V. Kudirka ended up in charge of printing most of those books and it made it easy to set language standards. Achieving such a monopoly with a bigger language would be much more difficult.

          That is also why formal Lithuanian is based on one ethnic dialect that was spoken in Prussia.

          • Lvxferre@mander.xyz
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            1 month ago

            I’m not assuming when the formalisation happened. I’m saying that it’s harder to get everyone to agree on how the orthography is supposed to be, when 2+ governments and populations associated with them are forcing distinctions even when there’s none.

            You’re right that it is not impossible however, and your historical example shows it. Historically Lithuanian is the exception that proves the rule because

            • the local population didn’t see themselves as Prussians or Russians, but as Lithuanians, so there was a community even across borders; and
            • neither Prussia nor Imperial Russia were backing specific varieties of Lithuanian. They were backing German and Russian instead.

            And nowadays it’s simply not an exception. (I was referring mostly to modern times.)

            Instead, books in Latin script were printed in Prussia and distributed in Russia illegally. A handful of people like J. Basanavičius and V. Kudirka ended up in charge of printing most of those books and it made it easy to set language standards. Achieving such a monopoly with a bigger language would be much more difficult.

            That’s a great tidbit of info, and it’s related to what I’m saying: those Lithuanian speakers in Russia only accepted the books as suitable for their language, even if they were printed in Prussia, because they didn’t see it as coming from “those other guys”.

            [Thank you for the info, by the way! Across the whole comment, not just that paragraph.]

            • Justas🇱🇹@sh.itjust.works
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              1 month ago

              You’re welcome.

              If you want to read more about the history of Lithuania and surrounding countries and their nation formation, a great start would be Timothy Snyder’s book “The Reconstruction of Nations”, he’s the most popular historian of the region who is not from the region.

    • BlanketsWithSmallpox@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      English syntax hard?

      There’s a lot of issues with English. Most of them are for using loanwords without phonetically changing how they’re spoken in the English alphabet. Then people wonder why they’re spelled like Ledoux and sound like Lehdoo.

      Romance. Romance languages are the fucking reason you word slurring tongue twats.

      But hey, at least we’re not Turkik.

      • YTG123@sopuli.xyz
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        English syntax hard?

        Yes. Sequence of tenses. It’s harder than Latin. As in, what the hell does “future-in-the-past” mean?
        Or tenses (+aspect+mood) in general, I guess. You guys have too many of them.

        As for the orthography, you know what is to blame. The Great Vowel Shift.

      • Lvxferre@mander.xyz
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        English syntax hard?

        Yes, it is. It has 9001 rules for the allowed order of the words, 350 for each, and you have lots of those small words with grammatical purpose that don’t really convey anything, but must be there otherwise your sentence sounds broken. Refer to my examples with yes/no questions and *blue famous raincoat (instead of “famous blue raincoat”).

        That happens because any language is complex, there’s no way around. You can dump that complexity in the word order, like English does, or dump it in different word forms, like Polish; but you won’t be able to get rid of it.

        There’s a lot of issues with English. Most of them are for using loanwords without phonetically changing how they’re spoken in the English alphabet.

        That’s something else, the spelling. It’s a fair point when it comes to contrast with Polish though - sure, the ⟨z⟩ might look odd, but it is consistent, most of the time you can correctly predict how you’re supposed to pronounce a word in Polish.