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Introduction
The following grammatical sketch of Polish, designed for use on the Internet, attempts to covermany of the important points of Polish sounds and spelling and morphology, plus selected points in theareas of syntax and usage. It is neither complete nor designed for a sophisticated linguistic audience.Rather than use IPA (International Phonetic Association) or scholarly symbols, standard Polishorthography has been used wherever possible in discussions of the sound system. Nevertheless, I havetried to make all statements accurate, while deviating, in some respects, from traditional school grammars.For example, the morphological discussion of cases according to Roman Jakobson's morphologicalstudies: nominative, accusative, genitive, locative, dative, instrumental--in preference to the olderordering of nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, instrumental, locative. Jakobson’s ideas have alsoinfluenced the presentation of the Polish verb, which is based on the notion that the entire verbal paradigmcan be derived from a single stem. Although these Jakobsonian ideas are already found in many scholarlytreatments of Polish and other Slavic languages, they are still somewhat rare in presentations designed forgeneral audiences. Thus, this grammatical sketch tries to occupy a middle ground, not attempting to becomprehensive, but aiming at accuracy in its descriptions. While not a substitute for a textbook, it mightprovide a useful review of the sound system and Polish inflection.Let us now briefly touch on some of the facts about the Polish language of today. Polish, of course, is the official state language of the Polish Republic (
Rzeczpospolita Polska
), which, according tothe 1994 census, had a population of slightly under 40 million. The vast majority of the population isethnically Polish (98.7%). Ukrainians constitute slightly more than half of one percent, while other ethnicgroups make up the rest. Many Poles (referred to as
Polonia
) also reside outside the borders of Poland.Significant numbers can be found in the United States, Canada, and Australia, as well as in theneighboring countries of Lithuania, Ukraine, and Belarus.The Polish language belongs to the West Slavic branch of the Slavic language family. Other WestSlavic languages are Czech, Slovak, and Upper and Lower Sorbian. The earliest written records of thePolish language date back to the end of the 13
th
century A.D. Earlier Polish writing exists, but only in theform of individual Polish words within Latin texts. The very important cultural and religious connectionto Latin is related to the fact that Poland, though geographically in Central Europe, is Roman Catholic.While the Orthodox Slavs (Russians, Ukrainians, Serbs, Bulgarians, and Macedonians) use the Cyrillicalphabet of the older Church Slavonic texts, the Roman Catholic Slavs chose the Latin alphabet. The 16
th
century marks the period of the ascendancy of the Polish language as a written language in its own right.Polish uses the Latin alphabet to this day, but since it has many sounds which were lacking in Latin, manyspecial symbols and combinations of symbols have had to be devised to render them. In the realm of grammar, Polish is marked by a complex inflectional morphology: a large inventory of grammaticalforms and a significant number of stem alternations, conditioned by a wide variety of grammaticalendings. While Polish is perhaps the most complex Slavic language in terms of its consonant and vowelalternations, its accentual system is one of the simplest, with a regular stress on the next-to-last syllable of the word and no distinction between long and short vowels.Poland has had a turbulent history, several times losing and then regaining its national autonomy.The Partitions of 1772, 1793, and 1795 divided Poland among Prussia, Austria, and Russia. Obviously,
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Thanks so much for posting this.There is so little guidance available to learn Polish correctly and this is a great help!
I am the author of this manuscript and it is a Polish grammar, NOT a Macedonian language grammar, as the description seems to say.