Polish

[Donald S. Cooper]

     The inquiry about Old Polish raises interesting general questions about
mutual intelligibility of related dialects of a given language. First, one
may address the question on a practical level. A modern Pole transported
 into 12th century Poland would find a language partly intelligible, from
which his own speech differed approximately to the same extent as modern
Ukrainian from Modern Great Russian, or a Scots rural dialect does from the
informal speech of South Carolina. The modern Pole would have to learn a number
of phonological/phonetic correspondences, he would have to learn some vocabula
ry which differed from modern Polish, and he would find some forms rather baffl
ing, because they are not retained in Modern Polish, such as finite past verb
forms. These he would have to learn with a certain degree of real labor, and
initially they would be quite unintelligible.
        His position would be similar to that of a Russian-speaker set
down in a Ukrainian village - at first he would understand a certain amount,
he would improve rapidly as he learned sound correspondences, and it would take
a year or two for him to learn to converse fluently with his interlocutors.
    The situation of English is quite different because of the flood of foreign
words, mostly French and Latin, which followed the Norman invasion. The modern
speaker would have no way of dealing with earlier Germanic lexicon which has
been replaced, apart from the moderate degree of phonological change which has
taken place in English since the 12th century.
    The author of your novel has made his life easier because actually we
have only fragments of the Polish of the 12th century, such as the glosses and
proper names contained in the "Golden Bull" (Polish: zlota bulla) issued by
Pope Innocent II in 1136. We do not have a Polish text until the 13th century,
if I recall correctly. A good deal can be learned from the study of Polish form
s in Latin manuscripts,as was done quite early by the great Polish linguist Jan
Baudouin de Courtenay in his master's thesis published in Leipzig in 1870
(in Russian) "On the Old Polish Language up to the 14th century". Of course,
such work is not very much in style now, and even Baudouin de Courtenay later
commented about this meritorious thesis that he "wondered that such an
occupation did not damage a young mind".
    The broader context of the degree of mutual interaction between speakers
of different dialects, and possibility of spread of linguistic changes across
other existing major isoglosses, of course, relates to broader questions
regarding the assumptions of comparative linguistics. The Slavic written
tradition began with the creation of translations into the Macedonian Slavic
dialect called Old Church Slavonic in the 9th. c. One of my teachers, Horace
Lunt, author of the first major modern linguistic study of modern Macedonian,
commented after a couple of glasses of sherry once "It's really Bulgarian";
 wars have been fought over these issues. The Old Church Slavonic texts
were intelligible to the residents of Moravia in the mid-9th century, to the
extent that OCS was adapted as a literary language of which we have traces,
such as the Kiev and Prague Folia; this is described in a classic form in
the monograph of Milos Weingart "The Czechoslovak Type of Church Slavonic"
(in Slovak). Traces of such linguistic usage are found in the broader set
of Old Church Slavonic manuscripts whiich reflect primarily the dialectal
forms of Macedonia (e.g. Codex Zographensis and Marianus, Assemanianus, etc.)
and those of Bulgaria (the Savvina kniga, Codex Suprasliensis).
      In the modern period the degree of mutual intelligibility of
Slavic languages can be startling. At a medical meeting in Prague in 1989, I
listened to a Serbian physician describe her hospital work on electrophysiology
in Serbo-Croatian, to Czech speakers who did not know Serbo-Coatian. A couple
of years later, at a medical meeting in Kiev, I listened at one point when
a Bulgarian physician from Sophia was discussing modern Balkan history with
another physician from Belgrade. Each spoke his own language, with good
understanding. Neither, of course, was a linguist or professional polyglot;
they simply followed a path of least resistance. Of course political factors
may intervene; at a medical meeting in Cairo, the present writer noted that
a Polish physician in converse with a Czech one preferred to speak German, the
common cultural language of Central Europe.
    Without extending this discussion, such practical phenomena illustrate
the complexity which may lie behind the lines demarking linguistic change,
both in the modern world and in earlier reconstructed stages of language.
Speakers of different closely related forms of language do learn to
communicate fluently, although the process may differ in its nature and
complexity in different situations.
                                      Sincerely,
                                                Donald S. Cooper
                                                Dept. of Speech/Language
                                                Pathology and Audiology
                                                University of South Carolina