Comment by rich_sasha | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rich_sasha | Hacker News Reader

Interesting that the creators of Esperanto and Toki Pona are both Polish. I wonder if there is something in Polish culture / "mindsphere" that encourages language creation.

Ironically, Polish, by comparison to some other European languages of comparably-sized nations, is very uniform and devoid of dialects / regional accents. There are a small few regions that speak a proper dialect (not mutually understandable with regular Polish speakers), but otherwise, with minor exceptions, you cannot tell at all where in Poland someone is from based on how they talk.

In the UK, by contrast, this is still a big thing. I believe German dialects are very diverse, heck, Dutch ones can pinpoint people to a village sometimes. French had very diverse language base before Napoleon. Spain still has regional languages that are very much alive and in use, Italian accents (dialects?) are too quite distinct.

Maybe Poland is compensating for this here, by inventing whole new languages?

EDIT my bad, the article mentions a Pole, Marta Krzeminska, but she is not the language's creator. It was a Canadian who created it. Oh well.

> but otherwise, with minor exceptions, you cannot tell at all where in Poland someone is from based on how they talk.

Not sure if that's what you had in mind by "minor exceptions", but there are certain shibboleths that can give away the area of Poland you're from (or at least causally associated with). For example, take the phrase "to go outside". In most of the country, it's "iść na dwór" (lit. "to go to court/manor"), but in the Lesser Poland voivodeship, especially around its capital city Kraków, we use "iść na pole" (lit. "to go to field") instead.

Additionally, a rough determination of origin can be gleaned from various verbs and nouns. Poland was partitioned[0] for over a hundred years by Austria, Prussia and Russia, with each of the historical empires performing their own attempt at assimilating the populations in their partition. In the process, Polish spoken in those partitions borrowed many of the words from their respective occupants' languages. As a result, the way you refer to many everyday things (like whether you call a garden hose "szlauch" or "wąż ogrodowy") can give away which of the three ex-partitions you're from.

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[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partitions_of_Poland

Yeah, that's kind of what I meant. Also, eastern Poland (countryside more than cities) has a drawn-out, more melodic accent.

By contrast, you talk to someone from East London, or Birmingham, or Leeds in the UK, and you're in no doubt as to where they are from, no need for special words. Never mind Scotland, West Country, Wales...

This is a little less obvious nowadays than it used to be, as people move around more, but still a big thing.

> speak a proper dialect (not mutually understandable with regular Polish speakers)

a language's dialects are mutually understandable by definition IMO, if they are not, then those are not one language's dialects but (dialects of) different languages.

A language is a dialect with an army and navy.

The broad Doric Scots I spoke as a child is, like a lot of regional linguistic variations in the UK, notoriously impenetrable to outsiders but I've never heard it described as anything other than a dialect.

e.g. I might have enquired of a visitor when I was a wee loonie "Far div ye bide?" - "Where do you stay?"

I have heard it called language but, notably, by people from outside the UK

My personal favourite silly example of Doric being "fit fit fits fit fit" - "Which foot fits into which foot" (talking about shoes, apparently).

Depends on the definition, and final decision of linguists. It's an ongoing controversy in Poland for two languages / dialects: Kashubski language and Silesian language. Both are strictly used only by regional minorities, both are not understood well by Poles from other areas, and both have German influences.

Kashubski is mostly called a language, even thought it's not officially recognized as a regional language (you can't expect to use it in for official matters).

Silesian is mostly called a dialect/subdialect, but there's a regional movement to elevate Silesian to a separate language through political means.

Mutual intelligibility is a gradual scale, not a binary. So where you draw the line on that scale is a rather arbitrary (and usually political) decision.

I feel the same way about Russian. Big country, large diaspora, but everybody's accents sound the same. If there are differences then they seem subtle. Can a native Russian speaker explain this?

If you mean Russian accent when speaking English, then it comes mainly from difficulties pronouncing sounds that have no direct equivalent in Russian (e.g. the sounds represented by R, W, TH), or those that do but where it's pronounced noticeably different (e.g. I/И). These are mostly the same for all dialects of Russian.

However, Russian itself has plenty of dialects that can be quite different from the language standard, and there are certain characteristic variations that can readily pin one's geographic origin. For example, standard Russian tends to pronouce unstressed О as А (or rather as shwa biased towards A), but this is most pronounced in southern dialects, and is missing from most northern ones. Similarly, Г in standard Russian is pronounced same as hard G in English, but in southern dialects it tends to become something more like GKH.

As with other countries, dialectal variety has been significantly reduced through universal education (that tends to enforce the standard and frown upon dialects as "uneducated speech") and mass media. The historical tendency for authoritarian and highly centralized governance, both during the imperial period and later in the USSR, exacerbated this.

Polish grammar is very complex.

To be fair, this goes for all Slavic languages.

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