Joel at Far Outliers posted excerpts from an article by Patryk Zakrewski titled Kapewu? A Guide to Old Polish Slang, and I’ll post some excerpts from his excerpts:
In Kraków, he was called an ‘ancymon’, while in Lembryczek (pre-war slang for the city of Lviv), a street urchin was a ‘baciar’ (from the Hungarian ‘betyár’ – a hoodlum or goon). A baciar spoke bałak, a Lvovian slang. Elsewhere in Galicia, such rascals and scoundrels were called, in the plural, ‘sztrabancle’ (from the German ‘strabanzen’ – to loiter), and in Poznań, they went under the names of ‘szczuny’, ‘zyndry’ or ‘ejbry’. There were, of course, many other similar terms, because Poland was also full of andrusy and wisusy.
In Warsaw, and especially in its riverside neighbourhoods of Powiśle and Czerniaków, a street urchin was simply an ‘antek’ – which is also a common diminutive of the name Antoni. […]
A birbant, a bon vivant, or a bibosz – somebody leading a riotous life, never one to avoid fun – was known to bradziażyć. In Old Polish, you could similarly say that such a person bisurmani się or lampartuje (all terms for partying). He would flanerować (roam) from pub to pub, often tempted to gamble. This usually made it easy for him to wyprztykać się z floty (run out of money)… but there’s no glik (luck) without risk!
As a result of bradziażenie, it’s easy to become a bradziaga. This word comes from Russian and designates a vagrant or globetrotter. Such a free-floating person was known in Lviv as a ‘makabunda’ (a distorted form of ‘vagabond’). In Silesia, a ragamuffin was a ‘haderlok’ or a ‘szlapikorc’, while in Poznań, he would be called a ‘łatynda’, ‘opypłus’ or ‘szuszwol’.
‘Menel’, a word for a ‘bum’, still used in all parts of Poland, has an interesting etymology. In one of his pre-war columns, Stefan Wiechecki described this dialogue, reportedly overheard in a courtroom:
‘He called me a “menelik”…’
‘But there’s nothing offensive about that. Menelik is the name of one of the kings of Abyssinia’, replied the judge.
‘Your Honour, it’s possible that it designates a king in Abyssinia, but here, in Szmulowizna, it’s something altogether different.’
The exotic dress of the Emperor of Ethiopia fascinated the Warsaw populace to such an extent that peculiarly dressed people began to be called by his name. Menelik II’s honourific was negus negesti (king of kings), and as a result, the slang term ‘nygus’ (loafer, good-for-nothing) became part of the Polish language.
The people of Warsaw also insulted each other (for no discernible reason) with the use of names such as kopernik and gambeta. While the former referred, of course, to the famed Polish astronomer and mathematician Nicolaus Copernicus, Leon Gambetta was a French statesman during the Second French Empire and the Third French Empire periods. […]
Questions like ‘Kapewu?’ can sometimes still be heard in Poland, but today, the phrase is mostly associated with the slang of the heroes of cult children’s TV series from the 1970s like Podróż za Jeden Uśmiech (A Trip for One Smile) and Stawiam na Tolka Banana (My Bet’s on Tolek Banan). Today, you’re more likely to be asked questions like ‘kumasz?’, ‘czaisz?’ ‘jarzysz?’, ‘kminisz?’ or ‘kapujesz?’. They all mean ‘do you get it?’ – and the last of them can teach us something about the etymology of kapewu.
The Polish ‘kapować’ probably came from the German capiren or Italian capire, meaning ‘to understand’. Forms of the latter, like ‘capito’ and ‘capisce’, are sometimes still present in Polish slang. For example, the rapper Włodi rhymed on the Molesta group’s debut album: ‘Źli i łysi to klima, kapiszi?’ (The bad and the bald are my squad, understood?).
Kapewu is a humorous, quasi-French form of the Polish ‘kapować’, created as analogous to phrases like ‘parlez-vous’ and ‘comprenez-vous’. Other examples of such French stylisation are two phrases present in an old Warsaw local dialect: ‘iść de pache’ (walk hand in hand) and ‘przepraszam za pardą’ (I’m sorry for interrupting or bothering you).
In the above-quoted book about schoolchildren’s slang from the late 1930s, Ignacy Schreiber lists several words for joy and approval. These include words like ‘byczo’, ‘morowo’, klawo’, but also a mysterious exclamation: ‘sikalafą!’. This stemmed from the French ‘si qu’a la font’, which is itself a slang term which means ‘that’s the way it goes’ or ‘that’s life’ (I’m tempted to write here: ‘that’s c’est la vie’ to preserve the spirit of other French loans in Polish slang).
The slang is fun, but take the etymologies with a grain of salt; there is, for example, no “French ‘si qu’a la font’” (as an inquiring mind discovered in this Wiktionary discussion — scroll down to I need your help :)).
On reading the words “Old Polish Slang,” I thought of Polish slang from the tenth century to the sixteenth (the period of Old Polish) but on seeing the examples realized that Polish slang of yesteryear (say, from the early or mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth) was probably meant.
Yes, I had the same double-take reaction.
Since there was no “Third French Empire,” I assume that was supposed to refer the Third Republic.
@M: I also thought that was odd. Clearly, what was meant was “old Polish,” not “Old Polish.” And that reminds me that “polish” is the only word in English whose pronunciation can be changed by capitalization.
Job
Blob (the last name rhymes with, well, Job)
Higher up on that user talk page: “Aha, ok??? Emm, like, ok? This is the most epic national anthem like EVER??????:” – followed by a link to the anthem of Tıva, which is, indeed, on the epic side of things.
MMcM: That’s another one, it appears. Check out the the alt-text here for a related reference. (Beret Guy’s business is my favorite topic in xkcd.)
That’s a 19th century spelling; the current spelling is kapieren.
Beret Guy’s business
Yes indeed.
“Our company is agile and lean with a focus on the long tail. Ok, our company is actually a polecat I found in my backyard.”
Essentially, he has a Taoist business model, I think. (Zhuangzi is definitely a preferable blueprint to Sunzi.) He may be a Taoist Immortal. That might explain the hat.
All time favourite (blame Brett, he started it):
https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1997:_Business_Update
Don’t English speakers in general have trouble explaining what Old English refers to?
it’s mediocre as malt liquor, but distills surprisingly well!
@Lars:
The ineffably self-satisfied fantasist* George Borrow wrote “Old Irish” when he meant modern Irish. Though, given that he floruit in the mid-nineteenth century, I’m not sure if the modern terminology for the periodisation of the Irish language had actually been invented yet. Zeuss’ Grammatica Celtica only came out in 1871 (posthumously.)
* I’m not a fan. How did you guess?
English speakers in general have trouble explaining what Old English refers to
Yeah sometime after I left school, the academics did a bait’n’switch and decided ‘Anglo-Saxon’ wasn’t a thing. They also abolished the ‘Dark Ages’. So those not paying attention have been left in a state of nervous cluelessness.
OTOH would the average duine on the Dún Laoghaire omnibus fare any better at explaining ‘Old Irish’? (Likewise ‘Old French’, ‘Old Spanish’, ‘Old German’, I suspect.)
there’s always both the very vague common usage, and the perhaps overly constraining technical sense – i’m remembering reading somewhen that at some point the u.k. legally defined “time immemorial” as the reign of richard lionheart.
realized that Polish slang of yesteryear (say, from the early or mid-nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth) was probably meant
Made sense to me. „Slang“ itself strikes me as a modern concept. You can’t have slang much older than 18th century. At that point it‘s jargon, cant, argot or just „vulgar speech“.
We also have limited amounts of data the further back in time you go, making it hard to distinguish ephemeral „slang“ from regional or class based mesolects or basilects.
rozele already mentioned https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olde_English_800, but consider also https://www.groupon.com/articles/what-is-kraft-old-english-cheese-sprea.
And how could I have forgotten https://oldenglishoil.com/? Truly Old-Englishness was a polyvalent concept in the U.S. of my younger years.
Re sikalafą, this final syllable is found in strefą and katastrofą, which could be borrowings from German “Streife”, “Katastrophe” in some accent where the final e was nasalised.
So sikalafą = sika (=”pee”) + ala (= adjectival suffix)+ fą could be a jocular exclamation of pleasure or admiration. Compare (Holy) Shit! in English.
Clearly, what was meant was “old Polish,” not “Old Polish.”
Yes, although it is true that the perceived discontinuity for Poles between the Polish world of 1938 and the Polish world after 1945 is almost inconceivable to Americans or even Brits.
George Borrow wrote “Old Irish” when he meant modern Irish
In grad school I knew someone who signed up for a course in Old Irish expecting a conversational course in Modern Irish. It was a bit of a shock …
To pick up on what Brett noted, one of the Old English brands I mentioned sells polish, not Polish.
When I went to the Institiúid Ard-Léinn Bhaile Átha Cliath (over fifty years ago) to study Old Irish, I was told I’d never really grasp the language unless I took a course in Modern Irish. It was a bit of a shock, but I did it, and I didn’t regret it.
@hat
That is interesting, I suspect it could have had to do more with the teaching, which might have assumed a familiarity with Modern Irish vocab and grammar. The teacher might put more emphasis on the “delta” with Old Irish, e.g., including lots of vocab sufficiently close to Modern Irish without giving the student unacquainted with Modern Irish time to absorb all these new words.
No, it wasn’t that, it was about the structure of the language. The example the teacher, Mícheál Ó Siadhail, gave was Thurneysen, who for all his immense erudition and immersion in the texts of Old Irish sometimes got the copula (is) and the substantive verb (tá) confused, something that would never happen with anyone who’d learned the modern language.
Thurneysen is the one who wrote the book on Old Irish. Also got a Gothic and an Italic sound law named after him.
Yes, of course, that’s why he was such a striking example.
Hat: I wonder whether your being directed towards a course in Modern Irish as preparation for studying Old Irish might have been a consequence of the student body at the Institiúid Ard-Léinn Bhaile Átha Cliath: I am guessing that back in the day (and perhaps today still?) the vast majority of students were Irish by nationality and (as a rule) familiar with Modern Irish. As a result I imagine that the teaching material was designed to highlight the similarities between Modern and Old Irish, and that this was what teachers were used to doing in class too (and when teaching a language like Old Irish, ANYTHING that eases the students’ and the teachers’ task will be used without hesitation!). So: for the minority of students who lacked any knowledge of Modern Irish, it may have been assumed (possibly correctly!) easier to have them acquire knowledge of Modern Irish than to have them take classes in Old Irish with teachers and pedagogical material which both assumed student familiarity with Modern Irish.
No, it wasn’t that either; even back in the day, most of the students had flown in from abroad, like me. He genuinely thought that the modern language was an extremely useful, if not strictly speaking necessary, background for studying the ancient one, and I think he was right. If you care about languages as languages, that is, and not as collections of forms.
Does anyone learn Hindi (or Punjabi, or Bengali, etc.) just to make it easier to pursue a primary goal of learning Sanskrit? Certainly traditional schooling in English-or-other-Germanic-speaking societies did not defer Latin instruction until a modern Romance tongue had been studied first.
And traditional schooling in Old Irish did not, and presumably does not, defer instruction until Modern Irish had been studied first. This was Mícheál’s thing, not some iron law of Celtic studies.
There have been those who assert that a knowledge of modern Mandarin is an actual handicap in getting to grips with Classical Chinese on its own terms. I know far too little about it to have any worthwhile opinion on the matter, though I suspect that a modern student of Classical Chinese would be hamstrung in getting beyond a very basic level if they couldn’t read modern Chinese works on the subject.
But turning to another case where the time gap is relatively short (a mere millennium, give or take) rather than on the scale of Chinese or Indic or even Romance:
There was presumably a period between the publication of Simon Evans’ Gramadeg Cymraeg Canol in 1951 and the appearance of the expanded-second-edition-in-a-different-language A Grammar of Middle Welsh in 1964 when those with no Modern Welsh would have been at a distinct disadvantage in studying Middle Welsh; moreover, there are quite a number of editions of Middle Welsh works where the introductions and notes are in modern (literary) Welsh.
But that’s rather different from asserting that modern (spoken) Welsh is in itself particularly useful, let alone necessary, for actually learning Middle Welsh. I doubt it.
On the other hand, I wonder how many non-Welsh-speakers have any actual interest in Middle Welsh anyway? It doesn’t feature to anything like the same extent as Old Irish in comparative work, for example (though maybe it should.)
The timescale makes quite a difference in many cases. Typologically, Sanskrit is much more similar to Latin (let alone Ancient Greek) than to modern Indic – it does probably share more vocabulary with modern Indic, but that’s distorted well beyond easy recognition (as in French from Latin) by a long list of phonological simplifications and redistributions. …which is exactly what the extremely conservative spelling of Irish (let alone Scottish Gaelic) hides.
That’s why I thought Welsh was a better comparandum. Modern Literary Welsh is in fact conservative enough that Evans doesn’t even see the need to routinely gloss his Middle Welsh examples in Gramadeg Cymraeg Canol. But learning Literary Welsh is itself a far from trivial task for a modern Welsh speaker, though certainly easier than for the di-Gymraeg.
I’ve previously mentioned an Englishman I once knew who was employed as a proofreader of Literary Welsh texts, who couldn’t actually speak Welsh. This is not as strange as it sounds.
I suppose typos are pretty easy to recognise in Welsh, or at least they generate suspicion easily enough to make you check a dictionary, because of its coherent orthography (as soon as you know the sound system reasonably well). Cases where accidentally a word or two are harder, but presumably become a lot easier once you have an idea of the grammar.
It actually might be easier if you can’t speak Welsh, I suppose, as there has been a great deal of levelling in the vowels of unstressed syllables in modern spoken Welsh. There are a few cases where you just have to know the correct spelling, too, because of the loss of the Middle Welsh contrast between u and stressed y; it’s worse yet if you’re a Southerner, and have merged them both with i. (I discovered that my local friends actually can’t hear the difference when northerners make
John Morris-Jones’ An Elementary Welsh Grammar, which is a wholly prescriptive account of Literary Welsh, pretty much ignoring syntax altogether*, gets very into the correct spelling of unstressed syllables, heavily leveraging cywydd couplets to this end (in the cywydd metres, a stressed syllable always rhymes with an unstressed.) The fact that he quotes so many gives the book a charm that it would otherwise completely lack.
* It would be of no use whatever to someone actually trying to learn Welsh from scratch, I think. Misleading title, to say the least.
To be fair, Morris-Jones actually wrote a treatise on Welsh Syntax specifically, which seems to be well thought of. I’ve never read it. It was unfinished at his death, but published posthumously.
[That should be “final-syllable y” rather than “stressed y“; it was a simple stress thing before word stress shifted from the ultima to the penult at some point in the history of Middle Welsh, but it isn’t now.]
Oh. Yes. I find English and French spelling a lot easier than native speakers of my experience because I learned the spelling and the pronunciation of each word at the same time (or even, of course, the pronunciation only after the spelling).
@Marjanović: Indeed. “Definately” is not a thing in our part of the world.
Very good example.
I even needed to see passed and past confused a few times before it really sank in that they’re homophones; /st/ and /sd/ are phonetically very similar, but still phonemically distinct, in my small part of the world.
The English translation of Stephen Williams’ Elfennau Gramadeg Cymraeg, which is actually quite a nice (largely prescriptive) grammar of Literary Welsh, talks of “debased modern usages.” I suppose you can’t be led astray by the depravities of spoken Welsh if you don’t know any.
Looking at the intro to the English version, I see that it really was partly envisaged as an introduction to Literary Welsh for people who had no actual plans to learn the spoken language.
And /sdː/ even, mwahah.
dialect : standard : English
/ʋɒnstɐ/ wenn du ein(e) “if you [verb] a”
/ʋɒnsdɐ/ wenn sie/es dir “if she/it/they [verb] [direct object] you”
/ʋɒnsdːɐ/ wenn du dir “if you [verb] yourself [direct object]”
Translations and Standard equivalents multiply because /dɐ/ is not only unstressed dir, but also unstressed der (both m. nom. sg. and f. dat. sg. as in the standard) and, for (presumably) some reason, the verb prefix er-.
A total tangent, but since the post mentioned Lvovian slang :)… I came across a Twitter thread about the old Soviet movie “Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors” and the fact that a lot of that movie was in the Hutsul dialect ( this itself is almost unbelievable given the Soviet struggle against Ukrainian independence in Western Ukraine) which is not very easy for many Russians and even Ukrainians to understand, and one of the comments mentioned the Molfar (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molfar) – which has a disputed etymology. Thought some commenters here may find it interesting.