What is language?

[qalanjo]

My mom sent me some scans of letters either to or from her grandfather who was from somewhere in the former Yugoslavia AFAIK. He died when he was young, so we don't know what his original name even was, ethnicity, or what language he spoke. I think these letters are Polish, but the handwriting is too hard for me to read to be able to make a better

Comments

[verrucaria]

Maranai did a good job.

I'm not sure I've ever seen such creative spelling, but the author largely gets his points across.

[verrucaria]

I feel bad now. I have older relatives who haven't gone through much formal schooling, and they resort to creative spellings sometimes but not quite this often. At the same time, it probably took the author a lot of effort to spell words as phonetically as he could.

[qalanjo]

That's why I had trouble recognizing whether it was Polish or not, since I know what Polish generally looks like, although I don't speak it : )

[manarai]

*comes to the rescue*
Well, I for one think the author did a fabulous job. There's no year given, but I'm fairly certain this was written over a hundred years ago, and it's still legible and, well, understandable - as long as you compensate for handwriting and the Galician dialect (which I've had some exposure to, so maybe that's why it's easier for me to understand than for an average Polish person). The author couldn't have had much of a formal education, and even if he had, I bet it was difficult to learn Polish properly at the time, even in Austria-Hungary. And still - this letter isn't much worse than what my beloved grandma creates even now (honestly, more often than not I have to read aloud in order to get through her spelling and handwriting), and she graduated from a high school a few years after WWII, loves to read and has thus constant exposure to contemporary literary Polish. So. Congratulations to whomever wrote this letter :)

[verrucaria]

No, no, no, I agree agree that the author did a superb job. I never had to pay as much attention to Polish phonetics as the author!

[verrucaria]

Yeah, I can write, too!