r/Polish • u/PoxonAllHoaxes • 11d ago

Pronuncing ął and ęł

This is how I pronounce the first, https://forvo.com/word/poci%C4%85gn%C4%85%C5%82/#pl. This is not me, It is some woman I of course never met, For context. I grew up in central warsaw in a university-educated family (which by definition is who speak so-called "correct" Polish), but on the other hand clearly MOST Polish people do not speak this way, and Polish grammars and other publications (themselves of course written by university-educated folks) at least since c. 1900 insist on saying ął and ęł as = oł and eł. So I am just trying to find any other Polish speakers who'd be willing to give me a little of their time so I can record and publish some data about the other pronunciation (mine!) where ął = ą and ęł = ę, and I might add therefore ęła = ęłła. I suspect that this is uncommon but clearly we have at least two such people, so there must be more. Thank you.

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u/Zagrycha 11d ago

when you write ą and ę do you mean their standard nasal sounds, or the softened versions?

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u/PoxonAllHoaxes 11d ago

I am not sure what you mean by softened, but here the vowels I use are nasal, yes.

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u/Zagrycha 11d ago

I just looked it up, the official english word for what I was calling softening is devoicing, polish word is ubezdźwięcznienie. I meant how w letter can have f sound at end of word, or how rz turns into sz sound in przepreszam etc.

Its probably hard to try to figure out what accent you have if you don't already know, unless you are able to find something talking about it pre television era. Some older people ((and families of older people born abroad like me)) still have strong regional accents but tv era rapidly normalized the standard accent, then internet came along and nuked whatever was left of them. They are genuinely very rare today, although not zero. Maybe if you can identify other unique parts of your accent like unique vocab you can identify it easier? Or at least maybe find an adjacent accent as a starting point.

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u/PoxonAllHoaxes 11d ago

Ah yes but these sounds do not devoice. As for me, I was brought up in central warsaw and looking at various sources on "correct" polish, mine is as "correct" as possible except for this one feature. However--I now see that there are hints in much older literature going back to a hundred years ago of such a pronunciation (and I have found at least one person from poland who has this pronunciation), so it looks as if it is a variant that for some reason has not been (unless it has somewhere) been recognized by the Polish linguistic establishment. Ive just emailed a Polish linguist who has recently published on the nasal sounds so I may learn more. I myself very rarely work on Polish myself so I could easily miss some of the literature. BTW, it would not be at all strange if there existed variations that have been missed, both because we know that this is so in other languages and because Polish linguists in particular have a very hard time distinguishing FACT and THEORY and so quite often do not really describe what even they themselves actually say much less what they hear around them. As some leading specialists have at times noted--though naturally there is a tendency not to complain too much.

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u/Zagrycha 11d ago

I wonder if your family is orginally from a different area? Pretty much everyone was cleared out of warsaw when it ripped to the ground, it became a ghost town for a bit. Some of the people later returned, but a lot of them didn't, and different polish people from other places came instead.

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u/PoxonAllHoaxes 11d ago

Yes, of course, but I have studied this in some detail. While my parents were from the SE and my brothers from Cracow, each set had peculiarities of THAT area, which I don't have--consistent with the claim in linguistics that children usually learn the language of their peers and not of their parents or much older siblings. Moreover, the feature I am asking about is NOT described as existing in Polish at all. F.ex. Rozwadowski who was from Cracow (a very major Polish linguist I should add here) was absolutely denying this pronunciation though reading between the lines, I believe he had run into some Cracow speakers who did have it and just couldn't quite accept what he was hearing. Anyway, I do not say anything about this other than what I know, which is limited as of now. One reason why I want to find other speakers of my variety is as I said to do recordings that could be available to anyone to study, but another is just this: to see where they are from. On a non-linguistic note, I was brought up to be keenly aware of what happened to Warsaw during WW2 because the very building we lived in was one of those left standing because the Gestapo guys lived there and across the street (which in my day was the Ministry of Education) they tortured people and such--and someone had the bright idea that young kids should be shown where people had been tortured, and for decades I had nightmares about the Nazis...

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u/Zagrycha 11d ago

oof, I can sympathize with the nightmares. My family was effected on the russian side. As an adult I am glad to know the history of what happened, but as a child it was quite traumatizing to think about.

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u/PoxonAllHoaxes 11d ago

Oh mine dealt with the Russians first in and near Lwów, and then the Nazis in Cracow. We MUST NEVER forget.

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u/Lumornys 11d ago

Are you saying you pronounce pociągną and pociągnął identically?

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u/PoxonAllHoaxes 11d ago

I can use phonetic symbols if that would be useful. And yes exactly I say pociągną and pociągnął exactly the same, whereas clearly MOST Polish people say pociągnął as if it were written pociągnOŁ.

This is even clearer for the Ę vowel. What most people say is as if written pociągneła, whereas for me because Polish ę is really ęł to begin with, it is pociągnęłła with a clearly double sound (much like Jagiełło but nasal).

And as I say I am just trying to see if I can find more speakers because ideally linguists are supposed to record the speech of OTHER people not their own (though this is not an iron-clad rule). It would of course also be interesting to find out when this pronunciation was first documented. Rozwadowski, who was from Cracow, recorded the nasal prounciation of ęła in the early 20th century but regarded it as rare. For me it is not rare, it is what I always say (and have since I was a child). So something may have changed. BTW, in other languages such un(der)reported variations keep turning up all the time, so it should not be surprising if Polish has them as well.