Tag Archives: Polish

O mnie

Cześć!

Mam na imię Marcel. Jestem z Brazylii i mieszkam w miasteczku w stanie Sao Paulo. Jestem zamężny żonaty i mam dwóch synów.

Mam też pięć kotów, które się nazywają Pandora, Adis Abeba, Otto, Bastet i Bakhita.

Mój język ojczysty to portugalski, a ja także mówię angielski po angielsku, którego się uczę odkąd miałem skończyłem dziewięć lat. Lubię uczyć się języków obcych, ale obecnie nie mam na to niestety czasu. Języki, którymi aktualny aktualnie się interesuję, są polski, niemiecki, bułgarski, walijski i japoński.

I tak oto jest powstał mój pierwszy „artykuł” po polsku!

Journaly

The purge (aka just tidying away)

I’ve taken the past couple of days to (re)organise my languages (regarding both materials and in my head) – there often is way too much clutter to deal with!

Gone are Armenian, Bengali, Cantonese, Finnish, Hebrew, Icelandic, Indonesian, Irish, Romanian, Russian, Tamil and Vietnamese; Swedish, which had made a quick but astounding comeback, was sent home as well (but I just couldn’t help dubbing it my ‘European Thai’ before, for its ability to regularly return from the Great Beyond). Although they were more like appendices, I’ve also had Faroese, Konkani and Marathi materials out too.

Despite, to all intents and purposes, existing in limbo, I’m keeping all things (Mandarin) Chinese, Esperanto, (Ancient) Greek, Hindustani, Latin, Polish, Turkish and Welsh, because the necromancer in me still feels way too attached to all the possibilities they offer, and I may always choose to spin the wheel of life and bring them back. For now.

Marasmo

So much linguistic apathy and stagnation in my life right now, and I’m not used to it at all. The thing, however, is that ‘real life’, so to speak, is taking a heavy toll on me versus languages these days – even though I’m also to blame for being so bad at organising myself any efficiently.

It’s been basically me and Polish for a while now. But gosh, do I miss Arabic! And Japanese! And German! And the step-by-step movement away from Portuñol towards Rioplatense Spanish! And the never-ending task of consciously polishing my British-oriented English! And French! And Italian!

Not that I’m not tempted by other languages that have always appealed to me – from Thai and Swahili to Hungarian and Welsh, with even Faroese and Old Tupi sprinkled somewhere in between –, but I had to learn how to be practical and realistic at some point. Having lost all my digital language materials when my HDD was fried by lightning / a power surge (and I had no useful recent backup whatsoever) did certainly help with that.

There are also the languages I used to love deeply, but that for this or that reason have lost the appeal they once held, the prime examples being Greek, Persian and Vietnamese.

And last but not least, there’s Bulgarian forever skulking below the surface – a language that I’ve loved from day one, so many years ago, even when it was absolutely impossible for me to even think about it, but that I’ve possibly mistreated all along.

To jest Agnieszka.

Just taken Wladysław T. Miodunka’s Cześć, jak się masz? and my paper Polish-Portuguese dictionary out of the closet, and they now keep company to my Bulgarian books. Let’s see what such a mix can lead to…

[ENG] World war

  • [BUL] световна война <svetovna voyna>
  • [CAT] guerra mundial
  • [CES] světová válka
  • [CMN] 世界大战 <shìjiè dàzhàn>
  • [DEU] Weltkrieg
  • [ELL] παγκόσμιος πόλεμος <pangosmios polemos>
  • [FRA] guerre mondiale
  • [GLA] cogadh mòr
  • [GLG] guerra mundial
  • [ITA] guerra mondiale
  • [JPN] 世界大戦 / せかいたいせん <sekai taisen>
  • [KAT] მსოფლიო ომი <msoplio omi>
  • [KOR] 세계대전 / 世界大戰 <segyedaejeon>
  • [LAT] bellum orbis terrarum
  • [NLD] wereldoorlog
  • [PES] جنگ جهانی <jange jahâni>
  • [POL] wojna światowa
  • [POR] guerra mundial
  • [RON] război mondial
  • [RUS] мировая война <mirovaya voyna>
  • [SPA] guerra mundial
  • [SRP] светски рат / svetski rat
  • [SWE] världskrig
  • [THA] สงครามโลก <songkhram lok>
  • [VIE] thế chiến <世戰>
  • [YUE] 世界大戰 <sai gaai daaih zin>

Slavisms

I’d told myself I’d alternate the languages, but here I am, with everything Czech ready for a second night in a row. It’ll keep me good company, and perhaps I shift to Dutch or Bulgarian by the early morning.

One thing I’ve come to enjoy in Slavic languages is deriving adjectives from nouns. It totally parallels what I like best about Germanic languages (except boring English), which is compounding. It seems Russian and especially Serbian and Bulgarian finally made it obvious for me that, if I want to say e.g. ‘night angel’ in Czech or Polish, I need to find the adjectival form of night first. Nothing having escaped me, that would be [CS] noční anděl and [PL] nocny anioł.