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Battle of Hodów: When 400 Poles repelled 40,000 Tatars in 1694

tvpworld.com

31–40 of 58 posts

Re: Battle of Hodów: When 400 Poles repelled 40,000 Tatars in 1694

#31
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s a rarity. Wikipedia sometimes has IPA pronunciations and even – once in a blue moon – audio snippets that I trust far more when I don’t know the language. YouTube has content farms that produce 30s clips for “how to pronounce ”. YT used to be a good option before the content farms took over, now I hear some ridiculous pronunciations just for the sake of the clicks and the ad views and can’t recommend it any mo…

Polish is almost completely phonetic. You can put any polish word there and 99.99% of the time it will read it correctly.

Well except when it doesn't, I guess. All combination of consonants may unpredictably get rounded down to f (wszystko) ą pronunciation at the end of the word has a wide range of sounds depending on regional accents, ę is the same but worse because it's usually ignored even in common words (część), you have all the usual Ci Cy Ca rules for palatal consonant, except these characters can also be part of longer sequences that are hard coded to a specific sound like szcz that is pronounced like "an untuned FM radio sound"

Re: Battle of Hodów: When 400 Poles repelled 40,000 Tatars in 1694

#32
post #2

As a Polish guy - I would not trust a single thing shown in the national propagandist TVP television. It's really weird to see this on Hacker News.

I recently enjoyed reading Henryk Sienkiewicz’s Trilogy,[1] which are rooted in history but with a thread of fervent nationalism running through them. Maybe it’s more palatable if it’s presented as fiction? [1] https://standardebooks.org/collections/the-trilogy

According to literary historian and critic Kazimierz Wyka the Trilogy follows conventions known from... westerns.

Sienkiewicz himself went to the US in 1876 and spent two years there, which had an influence on his writing.

Overall his works purposefully had a "feel-good" narrative since Poland wasn't an independent state at the time, losing the status in the late 18th century.

Re: Battle of Hodów: When 400 Poles repelled 40,000 Tatars in 1694

#34
post #2

As a Polish guy - I would not trust a single thing shown in the national propagandist TVP television. It's really weird to see this on Hacker News.

Yes, TVP is generally extremely biased and only presents the government's side of things. Similarly to TVN, another popular TV station in Poland, which is biased but interprets facts in favor of the opposition. It's just how things are in Poland, it's not too different from what you can find in the US.

However, TVP World (an branch of TVP publishing in English) is actually not too bad. It's still biased but not dumbed-down, I would say.

Re: Battle of Hodów: When 400 Poles repelled 40,000 Tatars in 1694

#35
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For additional context, Polish words are always pronounced with emphasis on the second-to-last syllable. So `HO-doof`.

Grzmot? How about surnames? Jóźwiak -> yoo-ZHVI-ak or YOOZH-vi-ak?

YOOZH-viak

grzmOt

Re: Battle of Hodów: When 400 Poles repelled 40,000 Tatars in 1694

#36
post #2

As a Polish guy - I would not trust a single thing shown in the national propagandist TVP television. It's really weird to see this on Hacker News.

Well, questionable original source aside, just went on a rabbithole in wikipedia reading about it. Or do you consider wikipedia also propagandist?

> Or do you consider wikipedia also propagandist?

The Wikimedia Foundation itself is not, but there are absolutely cliques of editors pushing propaganda.

Re: Battle of Hodów: When 400 Poles repelled 40,000 Tatars in 1694

#37
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Polish is almost completely phonetic. You can put any polish word there and 99.99% of the time it will read it correctly.

Well except when it doesn't, I guess. All combination of consonants may unpredictably get rounded down to f (wszystko) ą pronunciation at the end of the word has a wide range of sounds depending on regional accents, ę is the same but worse because it's usually ignored even in common words (część), you have all the usual Ci Cy Ca rules for palatal consonant, except these characters can also be part of longer sequences…

I would not be so optimistic to say 99%, but I think a lot of things like that could be actually assigned to some rules that are, well, actually applied pretty consistently. E.g. isn't devoicing of 'w' in 'wszystko' just the case of clusters of voiced and voiceless consonants? Similary 'Hodów' shows devoicing consonants at the end of a word.

I'm not sure about 'ą' - some examples would handy, but if we are talking about differences due to regional accents then following rules would be perfectly fine. With 'ę' - how do you pronounce 'część' actually? Again, I think the worst that can happen normally would be to be judged as 'ą ę'* ;)

I think that in general Polish pronunciation is fairly 'regular' and with applying just a few rules you would be almost always OK. Obviously I haven't try to learn Polish as my second language.

* For non-Polish speakers - if someone is 'ą ę' it means that (among others) he/she tries to be overly 'correct' in pronunciation.

Re: Battle of Hodów: When 400 Poles repelled 40,000 Tatars in 1694

#38
post #2

As a Polish guy - I would not trust a single thing shown in the national propagandist TVP television. It's really weird to see this on Hacker News.

I second that it is weird to read this from TVP source. I highly recommend to read Noam Chomsky's article on Eastern European dissidents [1]. Really hits home what exceptionalism is, by just showing in contrast to what happens in other parts of the World.

Also, highly recommend "The Last Of The Just" by André Schwarz-Bart. It is soo good that there is nothing else for me to say than to just read it. I've read it once Chomsky stated in one of his interviews that it was one of the best (if not best) books written on Jewish history.

[1] https://chomsky.info/19960123/

Re: Battle of Hodów: When 400 Poles repelled 40,000 Tatars in 1694

#39
post #14

Please forgive my ignorance, but how do you pronounce Hodów?

For additional context, Polish words are always pronounced with emphasis on the second-to-last syllable. So `HO-doof`.

One exception would be words loaned from Greek, like 'matematyka' or 'fizyka'. But I think they are being 'assimilated' so one can say that they do not count anyway.

Polish has also a fairly rich system of prefixes and suffixes and I think some of them would result in stressing some other syllable than the second to last (penultimate).

Re: Battle of Hodów: When 400 Poles repelled 40,000 Tatars in 1694

#40
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Polish is almost completely phonetic. You can put any polish word there and 99.99% of the time it will read it correctly.

Well except when it doesn't, I guess. All combination of consonants may unpredictably get rounded down to f (wszystko) ą pronunciation at the end of the word has a wide range of sounds depending on regional accents, ę is the same but worse because it's usually ignored even in common words (część), you have all the usual Ci Cy Ca rules for palatal consonant, except these characters can also be part of longer sequences…

There are rules to devoicings, it's just that nobody bothers to remember them because you know what sounds good and what doesn't "by ear".

Sz/cz etc are just your regular dyphtongs, like English sh/ch/th etc - they are perfectly regular and phonetic. The only tricky one is rz, but it's also regular - there's a rule saying when you read it as ż and when you read it as sz depending on the preceding letter. And there's like 3 exceptions when you read it as separate letters - in words like "tarzan" :)

As for regional differences - all versions are correct usually. People in Kraków even accent on the first syllable and read "trzy" as "czy" :)

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