Anyone got any checklists for moving?

[Mary Fisher]

Your wife will have.

[Owain]

"Mary Fisher" wrote | "MM" wrote | > Checklists for 2 weeks before the move, then 1 week, 3 days, | > The Day, that sort of thing. | Your wife will have.

"Now which box did I pack her in?"

Owain

[MM]

Indeed.

MM

[Stefek Zaba]

Dead right. And watch your languate - do *not*, under any circumstances, use the "m****y* word.

Sto lat (that's Polish for 'cheers') - Stefek

[Andy Hall]

Oh. Last time I went, people were saying Na zdrowie. Is that another?

[Owain]

"Stefek Zaba" wrote | ... And watch your languate -

Is that the fluid produced by a languishing librarian?

Owain

[raden]

Nastrovia last time I heard

[Stefek Zaba]

Yes, "na zdrowie!" is the commonest drinking toast. "Sto lat" literally means "a hundred years"; it's the first words and running theme of the birthday/he's-a-jolly-good-fellow song, along the lines of "may s/he live a hundred years". So you'd toast "Sto Lat" more often when re-united with a mate you hadn't seen for a substantial period of time.

Where our West Country's most prolific fantasy author came across it I don't know - and a momentary Google on '"sto lat" Polish Pratchett' doesn't reveal any accounts of Terry getting wildly drunk in Bristol's Polish Club while he was working on the Bristle Een Poes / Wessun Daily Press a couple of decades ago. Though I suppose we could always start a rumour ;-)

Stefek

[MM]

What gets me is, why is Polish so hard? I know German backwards, but even if I didn't, there are many words that are similar in English. But Polish doesn't permit one to guess ANYthing! Such a shame, as Polish girls are so pretty, and Polish lager is fantastic.

MM

[Stefek Zaba]

'S a different family of Yurripian languages - Slavic. Polish, Czech, Serbo-Croat, Russian, Ukranian to my certain and personal knowledge are all closely related; some are even mutually intelligible between native speakers of goodwill - I remember managing to hold a "conversation" with a Serbo-Croat speaker which felt a bit like reading Chaucer - clearly "sort of" the same language, but some words didn't make any sense, while plenty of others were a bit of a leap away - as if someone you were talking to (in English, natch ;-) called a "door" a "portice", say: for a moment you'd be flummoxed, then you'd think "oh, portice, that's almost like portal, which is an old/weird word for an entrance-way/doorish sort of thing".

Polish has quite a lot of Latin-derived words in it, what with the major cultural influences over the last thousand years being the Church, Italy, and France; for much of the Middle Ages, French was the "aspirational" language for the educated clarses. There's a smattering of German-root words, more frequently used in the Western part (closer to Germany, right?), some of which were flushed out (with only partial success) by a "linguistic purity" movement in the 20s and 30s when Poland regained independence/existence. So, f'r example, spuds were widely known as "kartofle", clearly derived from German "kartofflen", in the Western parts; but in the Eastern bits were more usually "ziemnaki", basically meaning "earth things" ("ziema" being "earth"), and this usage was Encouraged in the interests of "deGermanification" (a response to Polish being banned/discouraged for the previous 120-or-so years of national non-existence). Same kind of idea as the French Academy, and about as succesful in influencing language-as-actually-spoken...

These days, Polish is adopting lots of English words too - from the worlds of entertainment and business particulary, e.g. 'biznes' (from 'business' has more or less replaced 'przedsiebiorstwo' - and mutating meanings of the Latin-derived words to come closer to the English. For example, "ewentualnie", which is "like" the English word 'eventually', used to mean *only* what 'eventuell' still does in German, meaning 'possibly', 'contingently', 'under certain (unspecified) circumstances'; but more recently has come to be widely used (if not Accepted Among Those Who Consider Themselves The Best Speakers ;-) as also being usable to mean what 'eventually' does in English - i.e. will happen given merely the passage of time.

Anyway, the majority of the gorgeous young Polish women you'll come across will talk pretty good English (Russian used to be the compulsory school foreign language, but oddly enough has dropped out of favour since the end of Communism ;-). As for the lager - each to their own; if you're going to drink that kind of beer, Zywiec and similar are pretty good examples. Me, though, I'd much rather a good dark ale or a mild, though they're not at readily available here in the Wesvinglun as they were Oop Noorth where I learnt to drink!

Cheers (na zdrowie, sto lat, spotkamy sie pod stolem...) - Stefek

[Andy Hall]

At least one can read place names etc.

Try Russian. You have to learn the alphabet as well.

[Andy Hall]

So does this explain the large amount of French business influence, do you think? Last time I went to Warsaw, the numbers of Carrefour (and even Castorama) stores was noticeable. Mind you, there was a Marks and Sparks and a Tescos as well, so there isn't a total gallic monopoly.

That would be a shame if it becomes as polluted with English as most other languages have become. I was reading a survey recently that covered the percentage of IT technical words that had been coined in the language vs. borrowed from English. In French, German and Italian it was in the 50-60% range, whereas the Finns had managed over

90%.

If MM thought that Polish was hard then it would be a doddle compared to Finnish. The language is on the same root as Estonian and Hungarian, but only distantly so. Added to this, there is virtually zero body language - until after a few beers that is..... :-)

[Owain]

"Stefek Zaba" wrote | MM wrote: | > What gets me is, why is Polish so hard? I know German backwards, | > but even if I didn't, there are many words that are similar in | > English. But Polish doesn't permit one to guess ANYthing! Such | > a shame, as Polish girls are so pretty, and Polish lager is | > fantastic. | 'S a different family of Yurripian languages - Slavic. Polish, Czech, | Serbo-Croat, Russian, Ukranian to my certain and personal knowledge are | all closely related; some are even mutually intelligible between native | speakers of goodwill

So, if MM wants to speak Polish, he shouldn't start from English!

Owain

[Owain]

"Andy Hall" wrote | Last time I went to Warsaw, the numbers of Carrefour | (and even Castorama) stores was noticeable. Mind you, | there was a Marks and Sparks and a Tescos as well, so | there isn't a total gallic monopoly.

Tescos are supposed to be doing well in Poland (and a lot of other places). Several years ago the chief exec promised transferring Polish skills, eg bakery, back to the UK. As this hasn't happened yet, still have to rely on Lidl for interested imported things.

Owain

[Stefek Zaba]

Any influence is marginal - French companies might be a tiny bit more warmly received at first, but the inward investment process - and the usual support mechanisms for it from the host administrations, both overt (tax concessions) and covert (bribes, unfortunately) - are as you know decided on colder, financial factors than vague memories of Napoleon's armies having been a source of hope during independence struggles 180 years ago!

Casual reading of the occasional Google hits suggests the web-writing Polish geek prefers the English-derived term even when there's a 'pure' Polish term more or less available, other than for those words where there's a well-established pre-existing usage. To some extent it's just a matter of pragmatic survival - if you're compiling from source (lots of Linux hackers in Poland!) or using recent versions of commercial apps, their routine/variable names and menu entries respectively will typically be in (American) English. The survey you mention sounds like an interesting starting-point, but to be informative you'd need to count the usage of the English-derived vs r/nationally-reconstructed terms, rather than the mere existence of the latter and its use in the odd school textbook...

(Though on the topic of the Polish Linux culture, there's a hilarious T-shirt slogan doing the rounds - "Nie rzucim ziemi skad nasz root". It's a bilingual pun on a famous patriotic song - but explaining it in detail would be tedious and unfunny when done).

I'll take your word for that one - I understand all three are classified as 'Uralic' languages, hailing from the far edge of Siberial.

[raden]

In message , Andy Hall writes

The greek alphabet at least helps you take a stab at it

[MM]

MM

[Mary Fisher]

Indeed. But does it answer the question about moving? I mean - you weren't intending moving to Poland, were you?

Mary

[Mary Fisher]

That's not difficult.

Some letters are the same as English. Some or the same but different. Only the rest are not like anything else and one or two are so much like Greek that there's not much new to learn.

Mary

[Mary Fisher]

I wondered if it were Welsh.

A daughter, who already knows quite a bit of it, started formal Welsh lessons last night and practised them on me today.

I told her to wash out her mouth with soap.

Oh dear, that reminds me of John Peel again :-(

Mary