WARSAW – Polish language experts launched a campaign Thursday to preserve the challenging system of its diacritical marks, saying the tails, dots and strokes are becoming obsolete under the pressure of IT and speed.
The drive, initiated by the state-run Council of the Polish Language, is part of the UNESCO International Mother Language Day. The campaign’s Polish name is complicated for a non-Polish keyboard: “Je,zyk polski jest a,-e,.”
That is a pun meaning that Polish-language needs its tails and is top class. If the marks aren’t there, part of the meaning is lost and the pronunciation sounds wrong.
Computer and phone keyboards require users to punch additional keys to obtain Polish letters. To save time, Poles skip the nuances and sometimes need to guess the meaning of the message they have received. This is also true for IT equipment users of other languages with diacritical marks, such as Russian or Romanian.
In Poland, linguist Jerzy Bralczyk said diacritical marks are a visual, defining feature of the Polish language, and they carry meaning and enrich the speech.
The tails make “a” and “e” nasal, while strokes over “s,” “c” and “n” soften them and sometimes turn them into a whistling sound. A stroke across “l” makes it sound like the English “w,” and a dot over “z” makes it as hard as a metal drill.
Each change matters. “Los” means “fate,” but when you put a slash across the “l” and add a stroke over the “s” it becomes “elk.” “Paczki” are parcels, but “pa,czki” are doughnuts.
Foreigners who know Polish say diacritical marks are a visual sign that it is a tough language and that they add to the complexity of the grammar and vocabulary, which does not derive from Latin or from Germanic languages.
Russia has its own campaign to protect twin dots over the letter “e” — pronounced “yo” — that often fall victim to writers’ laziness. And in Romania, the tongue’s tails on “t” and “s,” circumflexes on “a” and “I” and hats on “a” are ignored even by state officials and institutes. Some Romanian words have up to four diacritical marks, and not using them changes the pronunciation and, in some cases, the meaning, to the point of no meaning at all.
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