"folk" with an L

[victor steinbok]

Not so fast--"l" is frequently palatalized and distinct in Slavic
languages. For example, the usually (LoC) transliteration of the
Russian is "pol'ka" both for the nationality (fem.) and the
music/dance, where the ' stands for the "soft sign" in the alphabet,
which is one way to achieve palatalization. L's are rarely, thought
not never, dropped. There are minimal pairs with l/l', although you
must look pretty hard to find them ("po pol'u" means on/through the
field; "po polu" means through gender, as in, you can distinguish them
by/through their gender). In Polish, there are two different
L's--don't know if there are any minimal pairs. In any case, given the
meaning (polka = Polish), the origin of the moves/tunes is rather
obvious. The word might be more complicated--the likelihood of Poles
initially referring to a dance as "Polish dance" are about as likely
as Brazilians referring to Brazil nuts as "Brazil nuts". But "polka
dot" does not mean "Polish dot"--this one AFAIK is an English
derivative. Among the languages I checked, only Dutch (stip), Swedish
(Storprickiga), Estonian (koma) and Hungarian (petty) have an exact
translation (as far as Google Translate is concerned--all reverse
translations seemed to match). In Russian AFAIK there is not
correspondence to "Polish" or polka--it's just a dot pattern, which is
probably why Google doesn't find other translations (except a few that
preserve "polka" and translate "dot").

VS-)

On Thu, Mar 18, 2010 at 6:38 PM, Wilson Gray <hwgray at gmail.com> wrote:
> ...
> How can anyone tell what language "polka" is from, since the word is the
> same in nearly every Slavic language? Historical dancistics, I suppose. ;-)
>
> -Wilson

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