"folk" with an L

[Paul Johnston]

Since "pole" or something like it--and yes, that would be a soft
(palatalized)/l/ originally--means "field", would not a "pol'ka" be a
"country dance" rather than a Polish one?

Paul Johnston
On Mar 19, 2010, at 1:57 PM, victor steinbok wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       victor steinbok <aardvark66 at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Re: "folk" with an L
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> 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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