Omniglot - the blog

Where might you see a sign like the one on the right?

The answer, according to an article I found last week, is in Cheshire, England. The sign reads “DIVERSION A49 for Whitchurch and nearby places” and was erected by the Cheshire County Council, who claim that it is needed due to the large numbers of Polish people in the area.

The local police have received many complaints about Polish drivers getting lost and disrupting traffic, and the council believe the signs are a practical measure to improve road safety. Other people complain that the signs are a case of the council “pandering to political correctness”, and the local MP is quoted as saying that the signs are “It’s absolutely bonkers”.

As I mentioned last week, I’ve been learning the Polish version of Silent Night (Cicha Noc). While trying work out how to pronounce the Polish, I noticed that some of the the Polish consonants are similar to those found in Mandarin Chinese.

For example:

• Polish c [ts] = Mandarin c, as in 次
• Polish ć & c+i [ʨ] = Mandarin q, as in 七
• Polish cz [tʂ] Mandarin ch, as in 吃
• Polish sz [ʂ] = Mandarin sh, as in 十
• Polish ś & s+i [ɕ] = Mandarin x, as in 西

Comparing the pronunciation of one language to another isn’t always helpful and can be misleading. In this case though, it gives me a better understanding Polish phonology.

Today’s word, uśmiechnięta, means ’smiling’ in Polish, and appears in the Polish version of Silent Night:

Cicha noc, święta noc,
pokój niesie ludziom wszem,
A u żłóbka Matka święta
czuwa sama uśmiechnięta,
Nad Dzieciątka snem.
Nad Dzieciątka snem.

The singing group I go to at the Hammersmith Irish Centre in London will be performing (for charity) at Hammersmith tube station a week next Monday. One of the things we’ll be singing will be Silent Night and we’ve decided to try to sing it in Polish and Irish, as well as in English.

We can cope with the Irish version as there are at least five Irish speakers, including myself, in the group, but the Polish version is proving more of a challenge. This week a Polish friend of one of the group members came along to help us with the pronunciation, so we now have a rough idea of what it sounds like. I also found a recording of the Polish version on YouTube.

We’ll probably just sing the first and last lines of the Polish and the rest in English as we’re not sufficiently confident to sing the whole of it.

I found translations of Silent Night in many different languages here, and plan to put some of them on Omniglot in my songs section. Do you have any suggestions for other multilingual songs I could include?