Browsing the stacks of my former university's library, I came across this enlightening book of essays by Robert A. Rothstein which I think will be of interest to anyone fascinated by the Polish language.
This volume (which has a successor, More Words to the Wise) contains seventy short essays collected from the author's column in the Boston-based biweekly Biały Orzeł (White Eagle) beginning in 2004. Rothstein earned a Ph.D. from Harvard in Slavic Languages and Literatures and is currently professor of Polish and Director of the Slavic Studies program at Umass Amherst.
Here, Rothstein explores Polish language and culture through detailed examinations of words, phrases and proverbs as well as poems and songs. In fact, there are so many examples of the latter two in here that it could serve as a mini-anthology of Polish verse. He frequently draws etymological and phrasal connections between Polish and and its linguistic neighbors/influences (French, German, Latin, Italian, Russian) and manages to work in a few tangential facts about those languages, such as how the English terms "genitive" and "dative" derive from Latin misinterpretations of the original Greek words (see p. 137, "Cases").
Some interesting things I learned from this book include:
- the word płaz (amphibian) is related to pełzać (to crawl, creep, slither).
- the word zima (winter) is related (via Proto-IE) to the Latin word hiems (winter), from which the English word "hibernation" eventually derived. Likewise, ząb (tooth) is distantly related to English "comb" (a 'toothed' object).
- the rather curious term for "moon," księżyc, used to mean "son of a ksiądz (now, priest; formerly, prince/ruler)", and stems from a 15th ct. association with the moon as a "lesser prince" in comparison to the "greater prince" of the sun. This term is curious because it breaks with the moon/month association found in most (possibly all?) Indo-European languages (e.g. English, German (Mond/Monat), Russian (месяц (miesyats)) and every Slavic language except Bulgarian), arising from the ancient usage of lunar phases to measure time.
- Polish words beginning with h (e.g., hałas noise, hodować raise/cultivate) are usually, but not always, of Ukrainian origin. Some exceptions are historia (Latin), hala (Slovak; mountain meadow), herb (Czech, coat-of-arms), hejnał (Hungarian, trumpet call), modern English borrowings. Non-initial h Ukrainian borrowings include jar (ravine, orig. Turkish) and krynica (water spring).
- the word deszcz (rain) is the modern form of the earlier deżdż, stemming in turn from a Proto-Slavic root. This earlier form survives in such current fun-to-say words as dżdżysty (rainy, drizzly) and dżdżownica (earthworm).
- There exists a rhyming couplet to tease those who have trouble rolling their Rs, or test children trying to master it: Czarna krowa w kropki bordo / Gryzła trawę, kręcąc mordą ("A black cow with claret-colored spots / Was chewing on the grass, shaking its face").
- the word tlen (oxygen) was coined by a student of the physician and chemist Śniadecki (1768 - 1838), who himself coined other words for elements based on Polish/Slavic roots, such as wodór (hydrogen), węgiel (carbon; coal), krzem (silicon) and siarka (sulphur). I've always found tlen interesting because the tl- phoneme is quite rare, at least among European languages, and calls to mind Meso-American languages like Nahuatl. Rothstein here tells how it was derived from the verb tleć/tlić się (to smoulder, burn without flame). Outside of related words in these contexts, the tl- phoneme only appears elsewhere in Polish (so far as I can tell) in the locative singular of tło, such as in, Widziałeś tę postać w tle? (Did you see that figure in the background?).
I like that this text serves an under-serviced niche, that is of popular philology, detailed language exposition for the layman. It can easily be enjoyed by a non-Polish speaker, just as an insight into the language and culture while not being too technical or dense. Rothstein is clearly passionate about Polish and inspires the reader to embark on his own research. I absolutely cannot recommend this book highly enough, check it out!
Awesome suggestion. Thank you!
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