LINGUISTICS

Quote: Polish and Chinese: Finding the Common Ground

When wondering how much Polish and Mandarin Chinese have in common, the first instinct is to assume they have absolutely nothing in common. After all, Polish is a Slavic language and Mandarin Chinese is, well, a Chinese language; Polish uses the Latin alphabet and Chinese uses a system of characters (which means that in this essay I will have to use a system of transliteration known as Pinyin to refer to Mandarin Chinese sounds and words); Chinese sounds sing-songy and Polish sounds like a tongue-twister; and of course China and Poland are about halfway across the globe from each other. So what could these two seemingly totally different languages have in common? The average reader would be surprised to find out that Polish and Mandarin Chinese have anything at all in common. However, both languages are a product of humanity, so one might think they must have something in common--and they do. To allow full appreciation of what these two languages have in common, it only makes sense to highlight their differences first.

Polish is a Slavic language and as a result has a lot of properties common to Slavic languages. One of these properties is what linguists call consonant clusters, which is just a fancy term for a lot of consonants unseparated by vowels, like in the English word strength for example. The word strength--when going by sounds and not letters--has the consonants s, t, and r together before the e vowel; and the consonants ng, k, and th together after the e vowel--a total of six consonants and one vowel. Polish has truck loads of these kinds of words ranging from brwi (three consonants, one vowel) to wstrząs (five consonants, one vowel) and even przestępstwo (nine consonants, three vowels). Mandarin Chinese on the other hand is very attached to the consonant-vowel pattern: da, chu, the consonant-vowel-vowel pattern: tai, bei, and at most the consonant-vowel-consonant pattern: mang, nan. Even in the most "daring" of consonant-vowel-consonant patterns, the last consonant can only be n or ng as in the words liang and chuan.

Chinese uses mostly tones to distinguish different words whereas Polish restricts itself to sound sequences. For example in Chinese, the same sound sequence shi with four different tones means old, ten, to be, or a swear word only one letter short of its English equivalent. The same tonal difference distinguishes mother (ma) from horse from yell from hemp. Polish on the other hand isn't tonal except to change a statement into a question which is common across many languages. In other words, while Polish uses tone on the sentence level, it doesn't use tone to change the meaning of a word the way Chinese does. This leads us to the larger trend of the tools Chinese and Polish use to express the same ideas.

Polish and Chinese have very different ways of expressing grammar. For the purpose of this essay, "grammar" doesn't just refer to the series of rules taught in grade school but rather the series of unspoken rules used in every day speech that most people aren't even aware of. For example in English saying I want to go to home sounds wrong but most speakers can't exactly explain why except to say that something doesn't sound right. That's because there are a series of inherent and unspoken rules that go beyond grade school grammar that tell speakers I want to go to home sounds wrong without having to be told. When taking this narrower definition of grammar into account, Polish and Chinese still use very different ways of expressing grammar. Chinese relies on the order of words, so Wo ai ni means I love you but Ni ai wo means You love me. The only aspect of the phrase that tells us who loves who is that the person doing the loving comes before the verb and the person being loved comes after the verb. In Polish, however, Ja cię kocham, Cię kocham ja, and Kocham ja cię all mean I love you (though the last option would sound awkward). The reason is because whether the person is doing the loving or is receiving the love are already embedded into the very meaning of the words ja and cię and even into the end of the word kocham. In short, the meaning of the sentence isn't dependent on the word order. If one wanted to say You love me, one would have to choose different words--Ty kochasz mnie, where Ty and mnie also have the meaning of who is loving who already packed into the words themselves. Chinese doesn't choose different words so Chinese relies on the order whereas Polish just uses different words and therefore eliminates the need for a set order.

The reason why Chinese depends on word order and Polish doesn't is because Polish is highly-inflected whereas Chinese has no inflection whatsoever. When talking about language, inflection has a more specific meaning: the form of a word changes depending on its function in a sentence. For example, in English the words I and me both refer to the speaker but I can only be used in some places whereas me can only be used in other places. Polish has a more advanced form of this property which is known as cases. English only has this property for words like I (I me, my, mine), she (she, her, hers), to be (am, are, is, was, were,) and to have (have, has, had) whereas Polish even has this property for words like tear, where łza, łzy, łzie, łzę, łzą, łzo, łzy, łez, łzom, łzami, and łzach are all different forms of the noun tear and even the expression he reads (czyta, czytywa, przeczyta)--where it's not the verb to read that's being conjugated, but the conjugation he reads that's being conjugated in and of itself. On the other hand, Chinese is on the other side of this extreme where do (in all its meanings from I do, you do, we do, they do), does, did (in all its meanings from I did, you did, he/she did, we did, you did, they did), done, and doing can all be expressed with the word zuo. Clearly, while most languages stand somewhere in the middle (including English), Chinese and Polish lie on the polar extremes. Not only are Polish and Chinese unrelated on many grammatical topics, but the their lexicon, or the very words that make up the two languages, are completely unrelated.

In most languages that are closely related, the same word is often similar in each language. For example, Spanish, French, Italian, and Portuguese are all very closely-related languages which explains why the word letter (both the piece of paper and the character) is so close in all of them: la letra, la lettre, la lettera, and a letra. Languages that are less related use unrelated words and even have two different words for the two different meanings of letter, such as Russian bukva and pis'mo or Persian harf and maktub (which both actually derive from Arabic). If you pick any word in Polish and Chinese you'll find that the vast majority of them are unrelated and only a handful are somewhat similar such as coffee--Chinese kafei and Polish kawa. However coffee is very similar across all languages as can be easily seen when comparing the word coffee in various languages ranging from Arabic qahwa to French and Spanish café, Italian caffè Russian kofe, German kaffee, Dutch koffie, Japanese kohi, and even Hindi kafi (pronounced just like coffee). There are just a handful of words like coffee that have made international status, and those are the only words that are reliably similar in Chinese and Polish. Even the word bank, which shares a close variant in the vast majority of languages is completely different in Chinese: yinhang. The vocabulary that makes up Chinese and Polish is just as different as the writing systems they use.

Since it's already been established that Chinese has no inflection and Polish has high inflection, it should be noted also that Chinese and Polish have vastly different writing systems to accommodate their inflection levels. Since Polish has high inflection, it needs a writing system that is flexible to the easy change in form of words. For example the Polish word cudowna is pronounced tsoo-doh-vnah. The c refers to the ts sound, the u to the oo sound, the o to the oh sound, the d to the d sound, the w to the v sound, the n to the n sound, and the a to the ah sound. In Polish, c always denotes ts, u-oo, d--d, o--oh, etc., all the way through to the end of the word. Apart from a few spelling conventions, each of these letters consistently represent the same sound, hence, a phonetic writing system. On the other hand, since Chinese has no inflection, it can afford to use an iconographic writing system. Chinese characters derived from symbols used to indicate the meaning of a word. Some characters have a "phonetic" component, where part of the character will allude to its sound. For example, the Chinese for horse is ma. The Chinese for mother is also ma, but with a different tone. However, the character for mother combines the characters for woman and horse. The horse component is considered the phonetic component since its there to tell the reader the character is pronounced the same as horse (tone aside). The woman component of the character is considered the semantic component (or the component that alludes to its meaning) since the woman component is there to allude to the fact that the character means mother, and all mothers are women. However, when the Chinese government decided to simplify its writing system to make it more available to the common people, in the process of simplification, many of the characters lost their phonetic components. As a result, the vast majority of Chinese characters have absolutely nothing about them that tell the reader about how they are pronounced.

Polish and Chinese both have a lot of sounds that they don't share with each other. Some are pretty common across languages such as z (same as in English), and w (like English v) which Polish has but Chinese doesn't. Others aren't common at all which is why it's easily explained that only Polish or Chinese have them. For example, Polish has ź or zi (similar to the s in English pleasure but not the same), ą (identical to Portuguese ão and similar to the on in English long), ę (halfway between the e in bet and the ain in French main), y (which is a common sound among Slavic languages, similar to the English i in bit), and ń (which is common in many Slavic and Romance languages, identical Spanish ñ French and Italian gn, and sounds like the ni in onion). Chinese has the vowel ü which is identical to the German ü and French u. Chinese also has the vowel e which is identical to the u in English but. After describing the vast differences between Chinese and Polish, it's hard to believe there is anything they have in common. However just as there are a handful of words the two languages have in common, there are just a handful of linguistic properties the two languages have in common.

One property which is shared across many languages (not including English) is the T-V distinction. The T-V Distinction is what linguists use to refer to the two (or more) pronouns used to refer to one's interlocutor (the person someone is speaking to) and is so named because the informal pronoun starts with T across many languages (French, Italian, Romanian and European Portuguese tu; Spanish tú; Russian and Czech Ty; Bulgarian, Slovene and Macedonian ti; Estonian teie, Farsi to, Hungarian te) and the formal pronoun starts with V across many languages as well (French vous; European Portuguese você; Russian and Czech Vy; Bulgarian and Macedonian Vie; and Slovene Vi). Many other languages have the two forms that don't necessarily start with T and V, such as German Du and Sie or don't necessarily have both that start with T and V, such as Farsi to and shoma or Italian tu and Lei. Some languages have more than two variants, such as the Catalan tu, vós and Vostè as well as the Hindi ap, tu, and tum . Lastly, some languages used to have both forms where one of them has fallen out of usage, such as English thou and you (where only you is used nowadays) and Swedish Ni and Du (where only Du is used nowadays). Of course Chinese and Polish also fall into this pattern. Polish uses Pan and Pani (which literally mean sir/gentlemen/Mr. and ma'am/lady/Mrs. respectively) for the formal and Ty for the informal pronoun. Chinese uses ni for the informal and nin for the formal. It's worth noting that nin is represented by the same character as ni with the character for heart added beneath it, which denotes the respect that comes from the heart when using the pronoun nin. It doesn't seem too impressive that Chinese and Polish share the T-V Distinction when it's common across so many languages as was shown by the ridiculously long parenthetical lists earlier in this paragraph. More impressive are some of the sounds Polish and Chinese share.

Polish and Chinese have a good number of sounds in common. Some of them are common across many languages such as a (close to a in English father), i (like the ee in see) and u or ó in Polish (like the oo in food), n, m, f, l, and s. In fact these sounds are identical in Chinese and Polish. Although c (pronounced ts) and dz (pronounced dz and written z in romanized Chinese) are both often evaluated as two sounds, both Polish and Chinese treat each of these sounds like one sound. Other sounds such as o (like o in old), t, k, and p are negligibly different both in Polish and Chinese as well as across many of the world's languages. Some sounds occur in both Polish and Chinese that aren't widespread across languages but at the same time aren't that unusual. These sounds include h or ch in Polish and h in transliterated Chinese (similar to the English h), ł in Polish and w in Pinyin (pronounced like English w), and j in Polish and y in Pinyin (pronounced like English y in yolk). Other sounds don't occur often across languages at all, which is why it seems utterly surprising and random that Chinese and Polish share these sounds. Most of the world's speakers can't even distinguish these classes of sounds, however the Chinese and the Poles can. These include, ś or si in Polish and xi in Pinyin (similar to the sh in she), ć or ci in Polish and qi in Pinyin (similar to the ch in cheat), dź or dzi in Polish and ji in Pinyin (similar to the g in gee), sz in Polish and sh in Pinyin (similar to the sh in shoe), ż or rz in Polish and r in Pinyin (similar to the si in vision), cz in Polish and ch in Pinyin (similar to the ch in chew), and lastly dż in Polish and zh in Pinyin (similar to the J in Jew). This means that for example, while ci/qi and czy/chi might sound like chee to most of the world's speakers, ci versus czy is the difference between these and why in Polish, and in Chinese, qi versus chi might just be the difference between seven and food, but it might even be the difference between universal energy and weep.

The differences between Polish and Chinese are so numerous that an entire book could be written just highlighting their differences. However, Polish and Chinese do overlap on a handful of properties, sometimes because these properties are pretty universal, and other times out of the certain degree of random selection that happens when languages arise. Since the number of sounds that can be made by the human mouth, throat, and nose is enormous, each language has to choose which sounds to use and which sounds to throw away. The line between one sound and another is often psychological and consequently, the line between one sound and another has to be chosen randomly to create a set of discrete sounds. Through this process of random selection, Polish and Chinese have chosen a good portion of the same sounds as well as a good portion of the same discrete units to convey language. It may seem sometimes that there couldn't be anything in common between two cultures and their people, but even when taking the most different of cultures and people, there is always some common ground, namely, being human. Even when the casual observer assumes there couldn't possibly be anything more different than Polish and Chinese, there are still those areas of overlap that show the common ground in being human, or in this case, the common ground that arises by the fact that both Chinese and Polish are the result of human creation.

JohnDillinger43 wrote: Interesting paper. The real question is, can you pronounce an ejective lamino-alveolar fricative?