Competition Beaters: 8 Superlative Polish Words
What is the shortest word in the Polish lexicon? And the longest? How about the most difficult to write, and most difficult to translate? And the most beautiful? Using our new book 'Quarks, Elephants & Pierogi: Poland in 100 Words' as inspiration, Culture.pl looks at eight superlative Polish words that truly take the crown.
What is the shortest Polish word? We’re inclined to think it must be i, self-evidently the smallest and simplest of Polish vowels. Conveniently, its meaning is also that of a very simple logical relation, as it means: ‘and’. And...
What would be the longest Polish word then? The usual answer to such question, with which the native speakers of Polish become acquainted in pre-school, is Konstantynopolitańczykowianeczka. It purportedly means ‘a small female inhabitant of Constantinople‘. At 32 letters, it’s likely the longest, but its structure is somewhat dubious and it only ever appears in the answer to the above question.
3. The most difficult word to write
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The illustration for 'Gżegżółka' from the book 'Quarks, Elephants & Pierogi: Poland in 100 Words'; illustration and book design: Magdalena Burdzyńska; published by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute, 2018; photo: Magdalena Burdzyńska / Culture.pl
But there are bigger problems than length when it comes to writing Polish. The language has some pretty elaborate spelling rules which reflect the historical development of the language. This is called ‘orthography’ and wouldn’t be all that tricky if not, as with every rule, for exceptions.
One such exception is gżegżółka. This linguistic creature (it means ‘cuckoo’) defies some of the most orthodox orthographical rules of Polish, which means you have no choice but to learn its graphic form by heart (in this case, remember that it’s gżegżółka and not *grzegrzółka or *gżegrzułka). As such gżegżółka is one of a handful of orthographical monsters that haunt Polish children in their dreams and a reason they break into a sweat at Polish spelling bees.
4. The most difficult word to pronounce
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The illustration for 'Chrząszcz' from the book 'Quarks, Elephants & Pierogi: Poland in 100 Words'; text: Mikołaj Gliński, Matthew Davies, Adam Żuławski; illustration and book design: Magdalena Burdzyńska; published by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute, 2018; photo: Magdalena Burdzyńska / Culture.pl
Polish has a reputation as being especially difficult on a foreigner’s tongue. Don’t worry at times it’s hard on Poles’ tongues too. This is especially the case with sequences of hissing sibilant sounds, which often come amassed in consonant clusters, like in the famous tongue twister, devised by Jan Brzechwa: W Szczebrzeszynie chrząszcz brzmi w trzcinie (‘In Szczebrzeszyn, a beetle buzzes in the reed’).
As a result of the poem’s popularity, the small town of Szczebrzeszyn has become the semi-official capital of the Polish language. Would that make the eponymous chrząszcz (beetle) its honorary citizen? Anyway, we feel that chrząszcz and Szczebrzeszyn are certainly apt symbols of the many phonological difficulties of Polish.
5. The most beautiful word
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The illustration for 'Filiżanka' from the book 'Quarks, Elephants & Pierogi: Poland in 100 Words'; text: Mikołaj Gliński, Matthew Davies, Adam Żuławski; illustration and book design: Magdalena Burdzyńska; published by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute, 2018; photo: Magdalena Burdzyńska / Culture.pl
Finding the most beautiful word in a given language is certainly fraught with almost philosophical difficulties. For one, who’s to decide what’s beautiful? Foreigners learning Polish are certainly bad judges when it comes down to picking beautiful words – we’ve heard of one Italian who was in love with the word cielęcina. Our problem is that we know it means ‘veal’.
Quite arbitrarily, how about the word filiżanka? Its sound evokes something tiny and delicate, elegant and filigrane. So much more beautiful than its English equivalent ‘teacup’ or ‘coffee cup’. And what’s the ugliest? Picking the ugliest word is surely just as difficult as picking the most beautiful: completely arbitrary and probably also of little use.
6. The most confusing word
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The illustration for 'No' from the book 'Quarks, Elephants & Pierogi: Poland in 100 Words'; text: Mikołaj Gliński, Matthew Davies, Adam Żuławski; illustration and book design: Magdalena Burdzyńska; published by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute, 2018; photo: Magdalena Burdzyńska / Culture.pl
While languages should be about communication, they often end up in confusion. One example: the Polish word ‘no’ has a range of meanings depending on the context .. one of them being that of an expressive ‘yes’.
In this confusing capacity, it’s part of the wider interlinguistic phenomenon known as ‘false friends’. The term refers to words in two languages that look or sound similar, but differ significantly in meaning – something anyone who has ever learned a foreign language will be familiar with. Popular false friends between Polish and English include such Polish words as but (‘shoe’), bat (‘whip’), brat (‘brother’), fart (‘good luck’) and adverbs like aktualnie and ewentualnie (which as you can guess don’t mean ‘actually’ and ‘eventually’).
7. The most ‘Polish’ word
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The illustration for 'Solidarność' from the book 'Quarks, Elephants & Pierogi: Poland in 100 Words'; text: Mikołaj Gliński, Matthew Davies, Adam Żuławski; illustration and book design: Magdalena Burdzyńska; published by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute, 2018; photo: Magdalena Burdzyńska / Culture.pl
What is the most ‘Polish’ of the Polish words? Some people like to say it’s żółć. It is allegedly the longest word built exclusively of letters specific to the Polish alphabet. But the joke is that this word also happens to mean ‘bile’ – which makes the claim ironically self-deprecating.
When it comes to Polish words and national traits (or social desiderata), perhaps the most ‘Polish’ of Polish words is... Solidarność. Like probably no other word from Poland, Solidarność has had an international career. In the 1980s, following the formation and the subsequent delegalisation of the anti-communist labour union of that name (founded by the workers of Gdańsk's Lenin Shipyard), the word started to appear on the lips of many celebrities around the world – it accustomed global audiences to some unique Polish characters and their pronunciation. Perhaps less frequently heard these days, it still stands for some very universal values – those of social justice, equality and freedom, which remain as important today as back then.
8. The most untranslatable word
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The illustration for 'Żal' from the book 'Quarks, Elephants & Pierogi: Poland in 100 Words'; text: Mikołaj Gliński, Matthew Davies, Adam Żuławski; illustration and book design: Magdalena Burdzyńska; published by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute, 2018; photo: Magdalena Burdzyńska / Culture.pl
What about the Polish words that give Poles a hard time when trying to translate them into another language? Words that one feels just cannot be communicated properly? One notorious contender is kombinować. This verb can be said to mean ‘to fix, sort out, arrange’, often in a way involving some resourcefulness which might also include some shady business that isn’t fully legal.
Hence, we’d rather go for Fryderyk Chopin’s pick: the noun żal. For the composer, who was forced to live a life in exile, far away from his homeland and friends, this Polish word covered a whole range of emotions that come with intense regret: from hatred to repentance. He claimed it was a feeling he had never been free from, and which might almost be said to form the ‘soil of his heart’. Fortunately he did succeed in ‘translating’ its essence into his music – perhaps you can ‘hear’ the word in the emotion of his nocturnes.
For more about these words and other quirks of the Polish language, see Culture.pl’s book Quarks, Elephants & Pierogi: Poland in 100 Words, available now from several online retailers.
Written by Mikołaj Gliński, May 2019
Tytuł (nagłówek do zdjęcia)
Quarks, Elephants & Pierogi:
Poland in 100 Words
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