POLISH LANGUAGE. Together with Polabian—a now extinct language spoken by the Slays of the Elbe before they became Germanized—Sorb or Wendish, and Czechoslovak, Polish belongs to the western branch of the Slavonic languages. The nearest relative of Polish is Polabian, with which it forms the Lech group, but in view of the fragmentary character of the re mains of that language (a few words and sentences inexactly recorded), it is difficult to state with any detail more than the purely phonological agreements. Those which are shared by the Lech languages and Sorb are : extreme palatalization of con sonants before front vowels, the absence of the vowels r and I, a particular development of or and o/ between consonants, and the tendency to lose the old distinctions of quantity. In all these points there is a contrast with Czechoslovak which to some extent bridges the gap between the western and the southern branches; but the characteristic features of West Slavonic are naturally common to Polish and Czechoslovak. The features which are generally considered as belonging to common West Slavonic are : the development of tj and dj to c and dz (Polish and Slovak still have dz, but in Czech the sound has become z) ; the pala talization of consonants before i, e, c and i (only partially carried out in Czech, but Slovak agrees more completely with Polish) ; passage of 1 before back vowels and consonants to a sound like that in English "wall" (preserved also in Slovak dialects and in Old Czech, but the German 1 prevails in the modern language) ; loss of between vowels, with compensatory development of a long vowel; shortening of long vowels which originally had a falling intonation; and the tendency to throw the stress away from the final syllable.
Polish is softer than Czech to the ear, owing to the predilec tion for palatal and sibilant sounds. The sentence melody, in spite of a regular accent on the penultimate, is in no way dis agreeable, and the consonantal groups, which at first seem fright ening, are easily pronounced after some practice. The survival of the old nasal vowels imparts to Polish an acoustic effect not unlike that of French.
The Slavonic inflexional type has been well preserved : there are seven cases in both singular and plural (the dual has almost disappeared). The verb is of the normal type, except that it has
lost the imperfect and aorist. A peculiar feature in the syntax of Polish is the impersonal passive construction, where the logical subject is put in the accusative after the neuter of the participle. The vocabulary of Polish has been considerably influenced by earlier Czech and also by German and Latin, but in the main the Slavonic character has not been seriously affected, and the number of words from other languages is negligible.
Polish dialects are usually divided into two broad divisions. The group to which the literary language belongs has preserved the old pronunciation of sz and i (as in English "ship" and "azure" respectively), while the other has altered them to s and z. Scholars are disagreed on the question of Kagube, which is spoken by fewer than a quarter of a million people in the neighbourhood of Danzig. In its modern form, it is very close to Polish, espe cially from the point of view of vocabulary, but it has several fea tures which make it possible that at an earlier stage it was more closely connected with Polabian.
BIBLIOGRAPHY.-The historical grammar of Benni, Lot Nitsch, Roz wadowski and Ulaszyn (Gramatyka jezyka polskiego—Cracow, 1923) is authoritative. It is slightly smaller than and covers a somewhat dif ferent field from the Polish Language and its History (in Polish), which is part III. of the Encyklopedja Polska (1915). Another excel lent historical grammar is that by J. Lot, Gramatyka Polska. The grammar by St. Szober (LwOw—Warszawa, 1923) is the best descrip tive work. The Grammaire de la langue polonaise, by A. Meillet and Mme. de Willman-Grabowska (Paris, 1921) is the best sketch in a western language. The most complete dictionary is that of S. B. Linde (Slovnik jezyka polskiego, Lwow, 1854-60), in 6 volumes. The Handworterbuch der deutschen and polnischen Sprache in 4 vols., by Konarsky, Inlender, Goldschneider and Zipper (1st edition, 1904), is good but bulky. The Dictionnaire complet francais-polonais et polo nais-francais by W. Janusz (Lwow, 1908) is excellent, and bet ter than A. B. Chodiko's Doktadny slownik polsko-angielski (Berlin, 1912). A Polish Phonetic Reader by Arend-Choiriski (London, supplements the larger works of Benni and other Polish phoneticians.
(N. B. J.)