Thursday 9 February 2006

Some Funny Things About Poland

The Polish word for "lamps" is "lampy". This I find incredibly amusing, for some reason. I spent most of our holiday singing songs to myself, in praise of a cartoon character called "Lampy".

A. Blikle is a famous coffee-house. It's on Nowy Swiat ("New Street") in Warsaw. Their coffee is fabulous, their hot-chocolate with khalua is fantastic and their cakes are divine. However, the dessert which I just had to order was the New Orleans Jazz Banana. Yes, you read that right. Jazz Banana. It's not every day that you discover a brand-new euphemism for the penis, so I've been making as much use of it (the euphemism) as possible for the past 2 or 3 days. This one will never wear out (oh, stop it!).

The Polish language has too many letters. English has, what, 26 letters. Which is not enough for all the sounds we need, so learning English is very confusing. The Poles cottoned on to this many years ago and invented 47 (approximately) new letters to represent each sound in their language. So, why the hell does each letter still represent a completely different sound depending on its context? There's a letter that looks like an 'e' with a little tail on the bottom (there's probably a way of showing you - but I can't be arsed to figure it out). In the middle of a word it makes an 'en' sound. But if it's followed by a 'p' or a 'b', it makes an 'em' sound. And if it's at the end of a word it makes an 'eh' sound! What's the deal with that? And don't get me started with the 'L's that have crosses through them. At first, I thought it was an issue with dyslexic signwriters...

In private, Polish people speak Chinese.

1 comment:

meljoy said...

lol, no they don't!! but maybe they do, hmmm... something to think about. And I don't think english is confusing at all! Gaelic is confusing!