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0 pointsjacquesm2y ago0 comments

Interesting, 'wiele' seems to be a distant cousin to the dutch 'veel' by way of 'viele' (German). More so because 'w' is pronounced as 'v'.

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ajuc2y ago

Yup Polish has A LOT of loanwords. Most people don't realize how many. My favorite example is how Polish stole Latin, German and Czech words for color and now each mean different things :)

Kolor - color Farba - paint Barwa - hue

Also Polish is surprisingly similar to Sanskrit, for example only recently I realized that budzik (alarm clock) pobudka (waking up someone as a noun) and all related bud- words have the same word root as Buddha (the awaken one). Blew my mind :)

jacquesmOP2y ago

My favorites: adidasy (for generic gym shoes) and electrolux (for vacuum cleaner).

I'm not sure if those are still in generic use but when I lived there long ago these were Western brands that you simply could not buy in Poland and so the brand names became stand-ins for the objects themselves.

The Buddha reference is hilarious!

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