Old Polish Words & Why They Matter
With the passage of time, some words are lost to history and others find new meanings. Looking back at the words of Old Polish offers insight into fundamental questions of love, beauty, fear, employment, and happiness.
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'Day ut ia pobrusa, a ti poziwai' – the first sentence written in Polish in the Book of Henryków around 1270 roku, photo: Wikimedia / CC
It came from Lower Silesia, of Polish-Czech parentage, had Latin neighbours, is approximately 750 years old, and reads as follows: ‘Day ut ia pobrusa, a ti poziwai’. It is the oldest-recorded sentence in Polish, spoken by Boguchwał the Czech to his Silesian wife. It was noted in around 1270 by the abbot of the Cistercian abbey in Henryków, in a chronicle called The Book of Henryków, which was written in Latin and was included in the UNESCO Memory of the World Register in 2015.
How would Boguchwał’s proposal sound today? The woman was milling grain with a quern, and her husband presumably wished to spare her this heavy task, as we can infer from a longer excerpt from the book. Yet some linguists note that brusić means ‘to sharpen with a whetstone’ and take the word poziwai to mean not poczywaj (‘have a rest’), but podziwiaj (‘watch/admire’). So, a loose translation might be ‘Watch how it’s done, woman’ (or ‘Let me sharpen it while you watch’). Whatever his original intention, Boguchwał’s proposal went down in linguistic history.
Polish contains many more souvenirs of the past. Some of them have never grown old and thrive in modern-day Polish, while others have had a facelift and survive in altered forms. But let’s examine some words to which time has been less kind, including ones that have dropped out of usage and remain only in Old-Polish literary texts. In the anthology Zapomniane Słowa (Forgotten Words), Michał Ogórek wrote:
Among all archaic words, the word ‘archaism’ itself is the worst of all. It is repeatedly obsolete, due to its content, meaning, sound, and even its context. Its very presence makes everything instantly older.
Trans. MB
Historicisms, known as material archaisms, are utterly innocent, since they perished along with the objects they once described. Anachronisms that straddle the past and present have fared somewhat better, as outdated words can still be heard in the speech of older generations.
Polish contains plenty of fossilised expressions, although we aren’t even aware of them, notes Agnieszka Piela, author of the Słownik Frazeologizmów z Archaizmami (Dictionary of Archaic Idioms). In the epigraph to her work, the linguist quoted Stanisława Bąba: ‘Contemporary phraseology is simply a scrap heap of languages, a sort of linguistic junkyard safeguarding the relics that have resisted all transformations of the language structure […]’.
To fear or not to fear?
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Tadeusz Łomnicki & Daniel Olbrychski in 'The Deluge' by Jerzy Hoffman, photo: Franciszek Kądziołka, Filmoteka Narodowa – Instytut Audiowizualny / fototeka.fn.org.pl
Many Old-Polish words are alive and well in idiomatic expressions but can be rather confusing if given their freedom. Perhaps they’re just strachy na lachy, or is that Lachy? It all depends on your point of view. As Adam Mickiewicz warned in Pan Tadeusz: ‘Suvorov was right when he insisted—never attack the Lachy without cannon!’. Like Mickiewicz, the first biographer of the Polish language, Samuel Bogumił Linde, defined the word Lach as a ‘Pole’ (the feminine form being Lachawka). As we know, the Poles are a brave nation who do not frighten easily.
The case would be closed, had it not been vetoed by Zygmunt Gloger (compiler of the Old-Polish Encyclopaedia), who wrote that the word Polak meant ‘a person who lives in the fields’, and lachy were ‘huge, dense, dark forests’. The expression strachy na lachy was once a kind of curse: ‘(May the) fearsome terrors go into the (dry) forests’, intended to ward off bad luck. Contemporary linguists tend to agree with the former interpretation.
Another idiom, duby smalone, also originated in the forests. In the past, most household equipment was woven out of wicker, for which not all types of trees were suitable. People tried scorching (smalić) oaken (dubowe) sticks over the fire to make them more supple, but to no avail. Consequently, pleść duby smalone (‘to weave scorched oak-twigs’) was officially translated as ‘to perform a fruitless task’. This archaism grew widespread and came to mean ‘nonsense’, ‘poppycock’, or ‘imaginary things’.
How much does luck weigh?
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A still from 'The Hourglass Sanatorium' by Wojciech Jerzy Has, 1973, pictured: Jan Nowicki (Józef) & Ludwik Benoit (Szloma), photo: Janusz Kaliciński / WFDIF / Studio Filmowe 'Kadr' / Filmoteka Narodowa – Instytut Audiowizualny / fototeka.fn.org.pl
A portion of luck is 1/32 of a pound, or approximately 12.8 g. That’s the weight of one łut – a unit of mass used in Europe from the Middle Ages until the 20th century. Even today, some people maintain that it’s better to have a little bit of luck than to be wise, as in the old proverb: ‘A łut of luck is better than a cetnar of brains’. In Poland, a hundredweight (cetnar or centnar) was equal to 100 kg, but weighed half that in America, Germany, and Denmark.
Is the weight of boredom also measurable? Since we say nudy na pudy (‘boredom by the pound’), that state of indifference and lack of interest has to weigh more than one pood, or 16.38 kg. The adjective nudny (boring), still found in the expression nudny jak flaki z olejem (‘as dull as ditch water’), used to mean ‘nauseating, sickening, mawkish’, so food described as nudne was tasteless. The Old Polish had their own way of dealing with boredom: gambling. The most popular game was chetno i likho, where people had to guess if their opponent was hiding a chetno (even) or likho (odd) number of objects in their hands.
Time has stood still in expressions such as przed laty (‘years ago’, which should be przed latami, according to modern-day grammar) and we dnie i w nocy (‘day and night’, which is now ‘w dniu i…’), or ze wszech miar (‘by all means’) and po wsze czasy (‘for all eternity’), which are archaic forms of the word wszy[stek] (‘all/every’, derived from the obsolete pronoun wiesz/wsza/wsze). When reading Old-Polish texts, you must recall that the word miesiąc (month) used to mean the moon, November (listopad in modern Polish) used to be grudzień (which now means December), zaraz (now ‘immediately’) used to mean ‘all at once/suddenly’, and the verb zapamiętać (now ‘to remember’) formerly meant ‘to forget’.
Archaisms of grammatical inflection include the old form of the noun deszcz (‘rain’). In Old Polish, its nominative form was deżdż, which was conjugated dżdżu/dżdżem/dżdże, etc. Today, we may await, desire, or yearn for something jak kania dżdżu (‘like a kania craves the rain’), i.e., avidly or eagerly. Kania tends to mean ‘parasol mushroom’ nowadays, but an ornithological etymology is equally likely – according to folk tales, a kania (‘red or black kite’) would appear before rain, mewling and demanding to drink. Another wet-weather creature is the dżdżownica (earthworm), whose name retains the dżdż- prefix. In the past, people used the verb deszczyć (to rain), though modern Poles are more likely to say lać or mżyć (‘to pour down’ or ‘drizzle’). In Beniowski, however, Juliusz Słowacki wrote about Jan Kochanowski: Potem by, cicho mżąc, rozważał w sobie, / Że nie zapomniał mowy polskiej w grobie’ (‘And told him, as his happy dreams upsprung,/The grave had not destroyed his Polish tongue’, trans. Mirosława Modrzewska and Peter Cochran). Here, mżąc implied ‘dreaming’ or ‘daydreaming’.
Love in the olden days
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Stanisław Wokulski (Mariusz Dmochowski) & Izabela Łęcka (Beata Tyszkiewicz) in 'Lalka' (The Doll) directed by Wojciech Jerzy Has, 1968, photo: Stefan Kurzyp / Studio Filmowe 'Kadr' / Filmoteka Narodowa – Instytut Audiowizualny / fototeka.fn.org.pl
Love was apparently more complex in Old Poland, particularly in linguistic terms. Imagine this situation: tani galopant, nie bacząc na impedimenta, stroi koperczaki do herytiery, lecz dostaje arbuza. For Polish speakers, it’s probably easy to deduce from context that a man was rebuffed, though the individual meaning of each word might be less clear. Let’s break this down to understand what’s going on.
Here are the words in order: tani means ‘poor’ or ‘unworthy of respect’, while a galopant was a humorous term for a suitor (such a rival might also be known as an asystent or epuzer, from the French ‘to marry’). The verb baczyć meant the same as today: ‘to pay attention to something, perceive, or remember’. Although you might associate impedimenta with a spell that Harry Potter cast to slow down his victims, in Old Polish it used to describe any obstacles standing in the way of a marriage, and our herytiera (heiress) was a rich, unmarried woman. But what were these koperczaki? They’re advances, flirtations, and compliments. They were mentioned in an 18th-century Polish-language dictionary and arrived either from Hungary (according to Doroszewski, as a Polonised version of kópéság, meaning ‘trick’) or Germany (according to Sławski, derived from the word Kratzfüsse, ‘to shuffle one’s feet’), or perhaps even from the old verb kopertać się, ‘to flip’ or ‘do somersaults’ (Doroszewski and Brückner). Professor Miodek is also inclined to agree with the latter version, which brings to mind the modern Polish word wykopyrtnąć się (‘to fall over’).
Returning to our galopant who was given an arbuz. The Old Polish Encyclopaedia writes that courting mostly occurred in the autumn, and pumpkin (arbuz/harbuz in Old Polish, which now means ‘watermelon’) was served in order to reject a marriage proposal. Or the spurned suitor might be given duck-blood soup, a wreath of pea-flowers, or a grey goose instead.
Mirror, mirror, on the wall…
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A still from 'The Revenge' directed by Andrzej Wajda, 2002, pictured: Katarzyna Figura, photo: Vision / East News
People have long known how to appeal to the opposite sex. Men used to apply cosmetic fiksatuar to their moustaches and hair, while women whitened their faces (powdering them with white flour to lighten the skin) and coloured their lips with barwiczka (lipstick or rouge).
Wind in your hair? For Maria Dąbrowska, it was unthinkable for her characters to have wisps of hair sticking up on their heads, so Tomaszek from Nocy i Dnie (Nights and Days), ‘suddenly raised his head, brushing away an unruly lock of hair from his left temple’ (trans. MB). In Nad Niemnem (On the Niemen), Eliza Orzeszkowa penned a colourful description of a lady’s hairdo, ‘Piled high on [Domuntówna’s] head, above an even more unusual dress, towered a coiffure, swaying, soaked in pomade and bedecked with brightly coloured ribbons and glittering hairpins’ (trans. MB). Pomades, the hair conditioners of their day, were also used by a character in Mickiewicz’s Pan Tadeusz: ‘Telimena, from her Petersburg stores, pulled out flasks of perfume, jars of pomade; she sprayed Zosia with a scent that allures’ (trans. Leonard Kress). Such literary pearls abound in the Słownik Wyrazów Zapomnianych, czyli Słownictwo Naszych Lektur (Dictionary of Forgotten Words, or the Lexicon of What We Have Read), edited by Krystyna Holly and Anna Żółtak. It even contains a rather odd definition of the word jagoda ([bil]berry): ‘one of two parts of the face located symmetrically on either side of the nose; a cheek’.
As far as clothing is concerned, the sight of a girl walking around in her bielizna (underwear) was no shock to anyone in the 14th century. This noun, formed from the adjective biały (white), had much wider connotations than nowadays. Today, it means ‘underwear’, but it used to imply white dresses or various white fabrics. Someone could also be bieliznami pokropiony (‘covered in scars’). But seeing someone en déshabillé was certainly cause for embarrassment. As Professor Kłosińska explained in Zapomniane Słowa (Forgotten Words):
It is insufficient to state that a person is not fully dressed; yet simply too much to call them undressed or ‘en négligée’. […] The French term ‘en déshabillé’ aims to conceal the actual state of someone who has not managed to get dressed, or has just begun to undress.
Trans. MB
In Laments, Jan Kochanowski wrote of nieszczesne ochędóstwo, concerning his beloved daughter’s funeral gown. Ochędóstwo used to mean ‘clothes, paraphernalia’, as well as ‘cleanliness, tidiness, order’. Ignacy Krasicki regarded cleanliness not only an outward sign of good management and governance, but felt it also characterised a person’s true nature.
Who are you?
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Kazimierz Wichniarz in 'The Deluge' by Jerzy Hoffman, photo: Franciszek Kądziołka / Filmoteka Narodowa – Instytut Audiowizualny / fototeka.fn.org.pl
Extrovert, introvert, choleric, or sanguine? Old Polish had its own names for various personality types. If a person was wise, learned, occasionally too serious or even snooty, he was known as a sensat, borrowed from the Latin sensatus, someone ‘endowed with intellect’. Polish linguists only recently discovered a new definition of the word: someone who seeks the sensational in everything. A dumca was someone arrogant, similar to a fanfaron (braggart). The opposite of a sensat was a hebes – a dim-witted, dull wastrel. His semantic cousin was a gułaj – an ‘oaf, nincompoop, crybaby’, according to Doroszewski’s dictionary.
Especially during the Enlightenment, many literary works featured a świszczypała (trifler) character, combining the verb świstać (to whistle, e.g., the wind) and pała (an expressive term for the head; ‘stick’). Nowadays, we would call them playboys or unstable, but in the past, they were known as a wietrznik (air vent) or letki (superficial) person. The subtle-sounding word fines (finesse) meant both delicate and sly. As the word implies, a bezczelnik (impertinent) was insolent, while a gadatywus was a chatterbox. Anyone who wasn’t fond of work and always put things off until later (or at least tomorrow) was dubbed a dojuterek (‘till-tomorrower,’ a procrastinator). A lazybones was also called a piecuch (milksop). A work-shy person was known as a łuszczybochenek (lit. ‘loaf-flaker’; ’freeloader’), and if someone became a drunkard, he was labelled a dusikufel (‘tankard-strangler’).
If you ask, you won’t get lost
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A still from 'Pan Tadeusz: Last Foray in Lithuania', crowd scene, photo: Mirek Noworyta / Agencja SE / East News
Some old words can rebel, or ‘combine’ into unexpected meanings. Who would have thought that bigosowanie (‘sauerkrauting’) meant not cooking up a traditional dish, but ‘chopping up, hacking and quartering’ people? Rosół (broth) formerly meant ‘problems, trouble’. Originally, imprezowanie (partying) once had a lot in common with zabawa (fun), according to their former meanings: an impreza was a military expedition, and zabawa – a task or obligation. Rozrywka (entertainment) implied quick-wittedness, while dowcip (joke) used to mean ‘intelligence, talent’. Before odmowa (refusal) came to imply disagreement, it simply meant odpowiedz (answer). If someone dziękował (thanked), they were giving praise, and if they zobaczył (saw), it meant they had forgotten something. So, sometimes it’s worth consulting the dictionary to avoid a dekonfitura (humiliation).
Originally written in Polish, translated by Mark Bence, Sept 2021
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