POLISH LANGUAGE. The Polish lan guage is one of the Slavic family of tongues and is most nearly related to the Bohemian branch of that family. It belongs to the western group of those languages and is spoken by about 15,000,000 people, in its various dialects. Remarkable for its phonetic richness, Polish contains 10 vowels and 35 consonants. The alphabet is the Latin, diacritic marks and com binations being used in addition. The prin cipal peculiarities of pronunciation are the fol lowing: c is pronounced like is in English; ch is a strong guttural, as in German; cz is pro nounced like ch in English; rz has a sound compounded of that of r and the sound of z in the word azure, sometimes almost the same as the latter sound alone; sz is pronounced like our sh; w has the sound of v. The con sonant e has a sound absolutely peculiar to the Polish language: it resembles that of t followed by or combined with a very soft sh. The barred l (t) has a sound common to the Polish with other Slavic tongues: it is produced by sounding the letter l with the point of the tongue firmly pressed against the teeth. The result is a sound approaching that of w. as the I in talk. Among the vowels e and a are pro nounced respectively like the French semi-nasals in and on;, i has the sound of i in the English word pique; and y has a sound resembling that Of the German it. The tonic accent in Polish words is nearly always on the penult.
The Polish is a highly inflected language. There were formerly three numbers, but the dual has been preserved only in the Masovian dialect. There are three genders, masculine, feminine and neuter; and seven cases, the nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, vocative, instrumental and locative or prepositional. The
diminutives and augmentatives are numerous. The inflections of the verbs indicate not only person and number without the aid of personal pronouns as in Russian, but also the gender of the person speaking, and the person spoken about. The great variety of inflections in Polish permits the extensive use of inversion in the structure of sentences.
The principal dialects of Polish are the Masovian or Mazurian, spoken in the districts around Warsaw and in east Prussia; that of Great Poland, which is spoken chiefly in the districts around Posen, Gnesen and Kalisz; the Silesian spoken to the east of the Oder; the Cracovian or the dialect of Little Poland; and the Polish-Lithuanian as distinguished from the Lithuanian proper the language of some of the greatest Polish writers. Consult Polish diction aries by Booch-Arkossy, F. (Polish-German, 2 vols., Leipzig 1893 and 1899) ; Chodzko, A. E. B. (Polish-English 1884) ; Dictionary by seven Polish scholars (2 vols., Vilna 1856-61) ; Karlowicz and others (Warsaw 1900-) • Kierst and Callier (English, Leipzig 1906) ; Linde (6 vols., Lemberg 1854-60). Standard grammars include those of Malecki (ib. 1863) and a 'Com parative Historical Grammar' by the same (ib. 1879) ; Krynski (Warsaw 1903); Malinowski (Posen 1870) • Morfill (London T884) ; Kalina (Lemberg 1883) ; Manassewitsch (Vienna 1892) ; Poplinski (1901) ; Smith (1864) ; Vymazal (in German, Briinn 1884).