
A Linguistic Enclave in Central Europe - jxub
https://culture.pl/en/article/central-europes-most-mysterious-language
======
lkrubner
Poland was a frontier country during the 1100s, 1200s, 1300s and into the
1400s. People poured into Poland from all over Europe. Especially before 1492,
Poland was the great frontier where people could go and get rich. Merchants
criss crossed the territories. And after the Union with Lithuania, the
territory was immense. So it is all together believable that Flemish merchants
might have started this community. I was just recently reading a good history
of Poland and I posted my notes, and some excerpts, here:

[http://www.smashcompany.com/philosophy/poland-was-
shockingly...](http://www.smashcompany.com/philosophy/poland-was-shockingly-
liberal-in-the-1400s)

~~~
deltron3030
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uerdingen_line](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uerdingen_line)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benrath_line](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benrath_line)

Seems related, those isoglosses stretch from Belgium to Poland.

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anvandare
Translated trying to use approximating modern Flemish-Dutch words ("slaap-
voerde af" isn't really an existing word, but its meaning should be obvious).

    
    
      ny ołys ej gułd, wos zih fynklt, glanct oba łiöeht?
      Niet alles is geld, wat zo fonkelt, glanst vol{?} licht
      All that glitters is not gold
    
      Fylón yr wełt an ganc ałłán
      Verloren in de wereld en gans alleen
      Lost in the world and quite alone
    
      ząs ych óm mjer óf hóhym śtán;
      zat ik aan zee op een hoge steen
      I sat down by the sea on a high stone.
    
      der mond kąm raus hyndróm gybjég,
      de maan kwam van ginder om de berg
      the moon came up behind the mountain
    
      szłyfyt myjch áj, wi s kynt yr wig.
      slaap-voerde mij af, als een kind in de wieg
      he puts me to sleep like a child in a cradle

~~~
deltron3030
Nicht alles ist Geld, was funkelt, glänzt im Licht

verloren in der Welt, ganz allein

saß ich an der See, auf einem hohen Stein

der Mond kam hinter dem Berg hervor

wog mich in den Schlaf, wie ein Kind in der Wiege

~~~
dahauns
I'd go with:

der Mond kam raus hinterm Gebirg, schläfert mich ein, wie's Kind in der Wieg'.

(the latter being a rhyme in many Austro-Bavarian dialects)

~~~
singularity2001
also "ząs ych óm mjer" = "saß ich am Meer"

why unnecessarily divert from original?

It's more about orthography/dialect than being a truly different language.

~~~
Koshkin
Looks like it... I wonder if the same can be said about Yiddish.

~~~
singularity2001
It sure can.

One fascinating feat of Yiddish is that you could often interpret words as
either German or English (given two plausible mappings of their signs)

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akrasuski1
From the listed words only two have immediately obvious Polish connotations
(dźjada (grandpa), and dziadek is grandpa in Polish; śpjelik (sparrow), where
śpiewać is "to sing"). Most words have German-ish sound to them, somewhat
similar to Silesian subdialect of Polish (though Silesia was occupied by
Germany, which is the reason for its influence). The spelling is mostly
Polish-like, perhaps from older centuries though; except for some umlauts
which clearly originate in German and similar.

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jagger11
I wonder if modern Dutch speakers can understand any of this?

[https://youtu.be/lfg3jHV1TzE?t=246](https://youtu.be/lfg3jHV1TzE?t=246)
[https://youtu.be/9bfgEgFKccw?t=3](https://youtu.be/9bfgEgFKccw?t=3)

~~~
pvg
I speak (Austrian) German and it sounds a lot more like a German dialect than
Dutch to me (there are so many of them, though, this is not really saying an
awful lot). Like the Dutch speakers who've chimed in, I don't understand much
of it but can pick out enough words to tell where the other, incomprehensible
words are.

~~~
bipson
I agree, I have no idea how to pronounce the words unfortunately, but lots of
it resembles bavarian, or even allemanic dialect.

E.g. "s’błimła (‘flower’)" \- "s'Blüamle" (allemanic)

Obviously this comparison would benefit from using a phonetic scripture.

At first I thought it was related to yiddish...

~~~
bipson
Having listened to the above youtube video, I think resemblance to allemanic
might be coincidental, as it is so often.

Judging from the pronunciation, I would also put some "idioms" of this dialect
in Dutch/Flemish regions (there is maybe a distinct polish influence in there
that throws one off?).

As so often for me, the written word it seems is way more understandable than
the spoken word. I had the same experience with Swedish. Weird how some
languages kept similarities in writing longer than similar pronunciation.

~~~
pvg
There are also a lot of strange tricks personal perception and familiarity
play on you. I found this easier to listen to first and then listen and look
at the text together later. I similarly find myself thrown for a loop whenever
I see Viennese/Bavarian written. 'Wir sind' \- easy to read and hear, 'mia
san' easily matches up with the former when heard. 'Mia san' written down and
for a moment I have no idea what I'm looking at. Feels weird to even type it
out.

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twelvechairs
Theres plenty of linguistic oddities across Europe. On the opposite side of
this (Slavs in Germany as opposed to Germans in Slavic countries) there's the
Sorbs. Other isolated languages/peoples include the Cimbrians (German dialect
in Italy), Istriot and Istriot-Romanian (Romance language in Croatia),
Italiot-Greek, Arbëresh (Albanian dialects in Italy), Gagauz (Turkic dialect
in Moldova), etc.

~~~
emodendroket
Basque is a language isolate.

~~~
singularity2001
I liked the possible paleolithic stratum of adze, axe, Erz(ore) ... in Basque

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_emacsomancer_
I had a former student who wanted to work on Wymysorys.

~~~
neonate
Please say more.

~~~
_emacsomancer_
He is interested in Polish and German (and, I suppose, Slavic and Germanic
more generally) and he had wanted to do field work on Wymysorys. He did an MA
with me (not on Wymysorys), and now is doing a PhD (at a different university
on another continent). I've sent him a link to the 'parent' article; I"m not
sure if Wymysorys is still something he plans to work on or not.

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nathell
I’ve personally listened to Tymoteusz Król giving a seminar lecture on
Wilamowian. Lots of historical background in there. This guy is a heck of a
geek, of the rarely-encountered kind.

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mmjaa
It seems to me that Europeans will use any excuse under the sun to fork
language, branch and create a new dialect. If one Austrian village has brown
goats, and the other white, or if there is a lake between them, or maybe a
mountain, or if maybe there's an apocryphal tale of a farmers daughter going
off to live with a shoe-makers son, across a few days of travel - well then,
its time for a new dialect ...

And I honestly think its not productive, in the sense that dialects are
intentionally propagated in a fashion as to cause one "in-group" to have its
detractors. It really seems to me that the forces driving us to create new,
unintelligible dialects, are the same forces which allow us to justify heinous
crimes against others - just at a different scale. Speaking in such a way as
to differentiate oneself from others, I believe, is a root cause of so much of
humanities stress.

But the quandary is, I also believe we should not let these odd languages die.
As an Australian, I find it a terrible shame that we've lost 70,000 years of
this factor, in the genocides against the Australian aborigines. But, on the
other hand, I think Europeans have taken the tribalism just a little too far.
Its a contradiction that I haven't quite resolved, although I've come close:
perhaps the solution is to continue to encourage the creation of dialects, as
long as there are tools such as the Internet around to assist with overcoming
the confusion that results when two dialects clash...

~~~
simias
These forks (for the most part) occurred organically, not just in order to
sound different. After the fact they became a matter of pride, culture and
nationalism, but originally they were not. People just spoke in the way that
felt the most convenient and pleasing to them, at the time there was no
widespread long distance communication and the vast majority of the population
never left a relatively small radius around where they were born. Languages
diverged because there was no external force unifying them (like, say, the
roman empire). Eventually due to the lack of contact languages drift apart and
become mutually unintelligible.

Imagine a world where there's no TV, radio or internet and you could only
travel by horse and most people use the language mainly in its spoken form (if
they can even read at all). How long do you think the Australian language
would remain unified in these conditions? One generation? Three? Ten?

~~~
gpvos
To add to this: the Australian aborigines actually split their languages a
lot, and on purpose. Groups of young people would split off from their tribe
and form a new group, and deliberately changed their language (as young people
are wont to do to express difference to their parents).

So it's actually opposite to what mmjaa claims: Europeans didn't split their
languages on purpose, while non-Europeans did.

