(Untitled)

[sixtus_vi]

Doing some research on Kazimierz Dejmek's 1968 production of Forefathers Eve in Warsaw, I stumbled upon this little gem: a letter of support from one of his colleagues in Czechoslovakia, written in what the book described as "polsko-czeski brzmienie".

Pańska asystentka ale mluwila tragiczne wiadomości! Niebedeli W. Pan dyrektorem Narodowego Teatru

Comments

[veranillo]

I'm Polish and despite having never studied Czech, I can manage to understand the language pretty well. I have just come back from a week-long trip in Czech Republic and never encountered any communication problems. Despite that, one always has to remember that these are, all in all, two different languages - some words can be extremely tricky. There was once a powerpoint presentation wandering over the net which showed the most spectacular differences between these two languages pretty well.

The above text is, however, imho just a mix of Czech and Polish. Words are only put together so that the sentences are gramatically correct and I guess it's easy to understand to the speakers of both languages.

[bonaevox]

In our trip to the Czech Republic 4 years ago, my husband had a fairly easy time communicating with most of the people. They would speak Czech and he spoke Polish, between them, they could figure out what they meant to say. I should add that it seemed to me (i speak neither language) that understanding flowed much better with older Czechs than youths.

[caprinus]

It's so cute!

[pozorvlak]

Reminds me of Miles Kington's hilarious Franglais books.

But I love the word "brzmnenie". What exactly does it mean? "Mixture", or something more subtle?

[verrucaria]

Brzmienie may have some specific linguistic meaning in Polish, but literally it doesn't mean "mixture" or anything "fancy" like that. (Even if it has a specific linguistic meaning, I suspect that it's not being used "linguistically-correct" in this particular instance.) It simply means "sound" In fact, I'd consider the use of brzmienie in this instance slightly weird...

[verrucaria]

"linguistically-correctly"*

[ladysunflow]

It does not simply mean "sound" - it can also refer to the (verbal) content of something. Besides, think about English: you can also say that a sentence/passage sounds (good/bad/French/whatever).

"Brzmienie" is perfectly correct as used in the OP's sentence.

[verrucaria]

This excerpt sounds (or reads) much more Polish than Czech to me.

Sure, Poles and Czechs can understand each other to a certain degree, but there are some words that simply don't have a similarly sounding counterpart in the other language.

Some words have come to have very different meanings. What sounds like the adjective "present" (as in "I am present here") to the Czech ear actually means "conscious" in Polish. The Czech word for "fresh" sounds like "stale" in Polish.

And then there's the whole "to look for" vs. "to fuck" controversy. It is very easy for a Polish speaker to offend a Czech speaker (and probably vice versa).