Gack!

[fuzzyred]

My poor English brain does not like Polish. I just finished the lesson on determiners, and there are so many variations and interpretations on the words for "all, every, somebody, nobody, everybody, everything, something". Makes translation hard and picking out the pattern even harder. Plus, the word base word for all is "wszyscy". What the fuck even, Polish????

And after that, I started the lesson on numbers, which is ok, BUT Polish is a language that changes the ending of ALL their words based on grammatical case AND gender AND singular/plural. EVEN NUMBERS! So, "one" isn't just "jeden", it can be "jedna" (for feminine things) or "jedno" (for neuter things). And the word for two had even more variations.

I think my poor brain is melting...

Comments

[lithophiles]

Just remember, w and y are verbs in Welsh! That... might make it less intimidating, I dunno. (I'm not as sure about all the consonant clusters in Polish except that "sz" is sort of a "sh" sound. Slavic languages tend to be filled with a lot of sh and ch sounds, at least to my perception)

The Latin connection is really interesting. Usually I would expect to see more Germanic cognates in Scandinavian languages, but I'm probably talking out my butt about that.

-Helain

[ex_flameandsong751]

*waves hi*

There are actually a lot of Germanic cognates in Scandinavian languages, yes. I'm reverse engineering - usually people start with something like German, then one of the modern Nordic languages like Danish or Norwegian, *then* Icelandic if they get that far, and I went totally ass-backwards with Icelandic first, then Norwegian. 😂 And while Icelandic is closer to Old Norse than it is to the modern Scandinavian languages, there are still enough cognates where I was like "hey, I know that word, it's just spelled a little differently" in my Norwegian lessons. 😁

But the Latin influence is pretty interesting. And I actually didn't know "w" and "y" are verbs in Welsh! But then, I know next to nothing about Welsh except a lot of "ll" and "w".

[lithophiles]

Oops, I am a derp. I meant to say "they're vowels in Welsh," but our brain was like "Verbs? Vowels? Eh, they both start with V." But yeah, the W is sort of like an "oo" noise, with both short and long versions. (We do some conlanging and choosing your orthography can definitely be interesting, especially if you have sounds that don't exist in your native language.)

[ex_flameandsong751]

It's OK! My brain does things like that too. "They both start with that letter..." XD

I admire people who conlang.

[lithophiles]

Our conlang is a mess, haha. It's meant to be very different from anything Indo-European, but we started out by just kind of throwing stuff together to see what stuck. (The reason we decided to make it different wasn't because we wanted prestige or anything; it was just what we felt drawn to. When we took Spanish and Latin in school, we always liked the verbs that let you use one word to say what would take several words in English. There was just kind of a flow to it that our brain liked. So when we knew enough about agglutination and noun incorporation to try them, we immediately wanted to try to work with them in our conlang.)

-Istevia

[ex_flameandsong751]

we always liked the verbs that let you use one word to say what would take several words in English

Yes, there is an elegance to that. I also geek out on words that express sentiments the English language doesn't really have words for, like the Portuguese saudade, Finnish sisu, etc.

[fuzzyred]

Very interesting. I did not know "w" and "y" were vowels in Welsh. That probably makes things make a little more sense and trying to read words. XD

[fuzzyred]

There are a lot "sh" and "ch" sounds in Polish, and a lot of "jjuuuu" sounds (that happens to be my attempt at the "z" sound that is found in "treasure" in English.) It's not so bad once you get used to it, because Polish seems to be more phonetic than English.