Of Days and Months

We haven’t learned to count yet, but last week, among other things, we learned the days of the week: poniedzielek (Monday), wtorek (T), sroda (W), czwartek (Th), piatek (F), sobota (Sat), and niedziela (Sun). How a culture names its days, keeps its time, is a subject of no little curiosity and even some poetry. The Slavs, including the Poles, begin their week on Monday, not on Sunday, and their calendars run Monday to Sunday, not Sunday to Saturday. The names of their days are, for the most part, prosaically ordinal. Czwartek and piatek translate almost literally as “fourth” and “fifth”; wtorek derives from an archaic word for “two” or “second”; sroda comes from another word, srodek, which means “middle” or “center,” so that that Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday read more or less literally as 2nd day, middle of the week, 4th day, and 5th day. In sobota we can rather easily see “Sabbath.” Sunday and Monday hold slightly more etymological interest for me and raise a question. Sunday, niedziela, derives from nie (“no”) and dziala (“activity, work”), that is, “the day of no work,” as in the biblical injunction that on the seventh day ye shall rest. Monday adds the syllable po, which means “after.” Monday then is “the day after the day of no work.” Which raises the question: why do Slavs begin the week by looking back to a previous day, the previous week? The first day of the week references something prior to the first. Why not look ahead?

English and German day names, referring as they do to Norse gods, Mani, Tiw, Wodin, Thor, Frige, and the Roman god Saturn, pack considerably more myth, mystery, and thunder in their week, but the situation reverses completely when we consider the names of the months—which we haven’t gotten to yet in Beginning Polish, but adventurous students sometimes go off on their own. Consider our September, October, November, December, the 7th, 8th, 9th, and 10th month in the old Roman calendar, now recalibrated as our 9th, 10th, 11th, and 12th month. (Good thing nobody knows Latin anymore, how confusing.) And now hear the Polish: wrzesien (the month of heather), padziernik (the month of broken flax), listopad (the month of the fallen leaves), and grudzien (the month of the frozen, clotted earth). Poetry here. I resolve to pass my weeks under the gods, and my months among the Poles.

Zupa

Sunday last I attended the Polish Soup Festival at Holy Cross Church in North Minneapolis. A flier announcing it had circulated in class two weeks prior. Not the most social of beings, no gourmand, and hardly a proponent of extracurricular learning, I passed the flier along, but with a nascent ambivalence because, on the other hand, I do love soup. It’s one of those perfect foods like bread, tea, cheese, and chocolate. One could survive on it alone—and bread—if you had to. I remember eating soup in Poland, chicken and mushroom, familiar yet with a foreign savor, good, original fare, differently spiced, not Campbell’s or Lipton’s. And so, on Sunday evening (w niedziele wieczorem) I found myself descending the steps into a church basement at just about the same time I remembered not having been to confession in over thirty years.

A Polish Catholic church basement, however, is not unlike any other church basement I’ve been in, mostly linoleum, cinderblock, and busy old ladies, a little on the crinkly side, like Dr. Ruth, only very Catholic. Heavens, they’re Catholic, and not just used-to-be, lapsed, but still culturally Catholic, like me. Ahead to the left, a soup queue, no Nazis. Below the dozen or so hand-lettered signs identifying soup entrees stood our servers attired in festive ethnic costume, including red, four-cornered hats with peacock feathers, and armed with ladles. A blue one without the feather, like the one topping Tony Curtis in Taras Bulba, I could don on occasion. Plastic spoon, plastic bowl, zupa.

The chicken noodle, not as pellucid as my grandmother’s—or the bowl I had in Torun on my first trip to Poland—had the effect of recalling her superior efforts, though she would sometimes forego the kluski noodles for store-bought. She also (or was it my mother?) added whole peppercorns to the broth which would ignite under our young, unwitting molars like firecrackers. Until we learned better. Memorable. I passed on the barscz, red beet soup, hot or cold. Never fancied barscz generally. It smells of earth, and not merely earth, but actual soil, and there are reasons we don’t eat dirt. And certainly it is not made tempting by a dollop of sour cream. I’ve never understood the notion of sour cream. If something’s soured, spoiled, you throw it out. Dirt and spoiled milk, Mmmmm. (Mniam in Polish.) I don’t think so. The mushroom with added chive, the vinegary Highlander, the carrot and dill, the lima bean and cabbage, the vegetable, the tomato and rice—all performed their gustatory functions with aplomb but without the magic of transport to Old World Poland. The potato soup, unfortunately, tasted of scorched pan, aluminum, a Silesian ore. The biggest and most pleasant surprise was the hunter soup, a sauerkraut stew called bigos, hearty and flavorful and meaty, whose recipe I’ve acquired and considered adding to my repertoire.

Other men do not live by soup alone, and the entertainment that evening consisted of appeals, some in Polish, for signatures on a petition to the bishop for preserving Holy Cross as a Polish parish. Hard economic times for the Catholic Church have led to mergers and consolidations and threatened the erasure of nationally identified congregations. A younger man, who seemed to be a relatively recent immigrant, though with satisfactory English, pressed me for a signature. Not a member of the parish, I demurred. “But you are Catholic?” he wished to remind me. If by Catholic he meant a long unshriven apostate, then, perhaps, but I didn’t want to get into a theological discussion. It was a long story. Wanting to help the earnest young man, my soupmate offered, “But you’re Polish.” Half-Polish, becoming Polish. I really didn’t want to weigh in on a matter I’d given no thought to. And I’m still enough of a Catholic to suspect that even if my signature might fool the bishop, it wouldn’t fool his Bog. I just came for the soup.

Quiz 3: Exit Humbly

Last week’s quiz was a revelation in humility and a reminder that however much you think you know, or even know you know, you really don’t know that much, never much more than squat. A grades on previous quizzes and homework assignments had led me to imagine—falsely, prematurely—that one day I might actually get the hang of this language, that at some point in the not too distant future, I might actually hear, read, or speak an entire sentence with almost instantaneous and perfectly felicitous comprehension. A simple sentence, to be sure, with a single subordinate clause, perhaps, but……. But, no; one of the quiz questions, beginning with the instrumental form of “who,” Kim, completely disabused me of that fantasy. Kim who? was my immediate take on the opening phrase. Kim is not a Polish first name (Kim nie jest polskim imieniem.) Another question and another question would stump me at first, then permit me to gather the relevant words, then wait impatiently as I assembled a plausible response, double-checking the endings, correcting the obvious error or two, then moving uncertainly on. Leave it! My brain churned through them all, abandoning only one translation item completely untried. I was sorry and embarrassed that I could not engage, could not even begin to engage, that enigmatic line. A fifty-year-old Ph.D. is still a schoolboy.

As our instructor consoled us that our quizzes would only get more difficult as we amassed words and grammar rules and syntactical practices and knowledge of those damned endings, I wilted a bit, sighed. His twitting brought to mind a Monty Python sketch that summed up our challenge in its droll, off-hand, and premonitory way. Not the “Learning Italian” sketch, in which the instructor, an Englishman, clumsily models Italian to a roomful of native Italians, but rather the “Great Actors” sketch, in which Alan, the interviewer, fawningly inquires of Sir Edwin how many words he had to say as King Lear at the Aldwitch in 1952, as if acting were like weight-lifting.

"Sir Edwin: Ah, well, I don't want you to get the impression it's just a question of the number of words... um... I mean, getting them in the right order is just as important. Old Peter Hall used to say to me, 'They're all there Eddie, now we've got to get them in the right order.' And, er, for example, you can also say one word louder than another--er, 'To *be* or not to be,' or 'To be *or* not to *be*,' or 'To be or not to *be*' you see? And so on.

Alan: Inflection."

Thank you, Alan. But in learning Polish, inflection would be called intonation; inflection, of course, has to do with the damn endings. All of which suggests, alas, that learning Polish is ultimately more difficult than becoming a great actor. Lots more words to learn, order to get them in, pitch to perfect, AND endings. Oh, yes, and it’s all, eventually, ad lib.

Life in Other Words

I’ve decommissioned the comment option of this blog on the premise that the author ought to be the most beautiful, intelligent, and articulate feature of his own site. And so, I have excommunicated my lovelier commentariat for their lively and insightful violations of this second fundament of writing: narcissism. This stricture has the added value of keeping my attention focused on the evolutions of my own mind under the influence of Polish acculturation. Heaven knows I have had a hard enough time keeping up with the docile creatures that tentatively emerge from the warrens of my intellect and limited imagination (wyobraznia); following the young, nimble half-wild rabbits (kroliky) of suggestion released by others, and those rabbits bred for racing, would simply lead me to exhaustion.

But I will address the most recent comment/suggestion. In response to my penultimate post, in which I observed and lamented the time required for learning a language—learning anything seriously, I dare say—a veteran and accomplished educator, seconded by an uncommonly astute student, suggested that I should see my entire life, every waking hour, as an opportunity to improve my Polish. (Our instructor has additionally suggested we sleep with our books under our pillows.) While it may be the best way of studying a language short of immersing oneself entirely in the culture by moving to Poland, immersing one’s daily life in the words is certainly not an effective way to limit one’s time in acquiring mastery. Quite the opposite. The university recommends that for a 5-credit course like Beginning Polish, a student should expend at least 15 hours per week in study, which I believe I do—in class and in blocs of study throughout the week. Subtracting the 3.5 hours of class time, I should be devoting 11.5 hours of homework per week. Immersing my self in the words would easily absorb the remaining 67 hours of discretionary time: the rest of my life would be homework.

I ventured a little experiment last week after receiving this recommendation and tried, Adamlike in the Polish Garden of Eden, to note and name all of the nouns on my bike ride to work: drzewo (tree), more specifically jesion (ash), klon (maple), brzoza (birch: former cabinet secretary Zbigniew Brzezinski’s name derives from this word), ulica (street), autobus, samochod (car), skrzyzowacasie (crossing), swiatla regulujace ruch uliczny (traffic lights), and, of course, rower (bicycle). It took me awhile to look these up, write them down, and put them to memory. And I still don’t know exactly how to pronounce skrzyzowacasie. Then I thought about all the other nouns I would have to look up on my three-mile ride to work. And not all of them would be in my little $10 Langenscheidt’s Pocket Dictionary. Our syllabus recommends Stanislawski’s Wielki Slownik Angielsko-Polski (The Great English-Polish Dictionary), Warszawa: Wydawnictwo (publishing house) Philip Wilson, 1999. There is a 2-volume and a 4-volume edition, @ $180.00—200,000 word and phrase entries. So if, in addition to my normal 15 hours of study a week, I immersed my remaining 67 hours per week in Polish words at the optimistic rate of 25 words/entries per hour, I’d be through Stanislawski in two and a half years. Which returns me to my lament.

Hearsay

A few days ago I ran into a former squash colleague of mine, Herr Doktor A_W_, a small-animal veterinarian and a German, now, happily expatriated. Neither of us having been active on the courts for a couple of years, he asked what I was up to. “Polish,” I said and provided a bit of background on this less strenuous pastime in response to his interrogation. A euroskeptic smile underlined his curiosity as he related his most recent experience with members of the Polish national persuasion. In the not too distant past, a veterinary colleague of his had arranged for a professional vet student exchange with some institution in Poland; and my countrymen-to-be, it seems, comported themselves with less than perfect civility. The good doctor recalled the group as a male-dominated, sexist pecking order whose primary objective was getting laid. We did not have time to suss the unsavory details, but in going our separate ways, he granted that they might not be representative of Polish society as a whole. Or they may well have been, just as they might represent patriarchy and western civilization generally, and quite possibly the veterinary profession. To my mind, a preoccupation with sex and the social order would seem as natural to Polish primates as to German and American primates, as well as to the smaller mammals that A_W_, V.M.D. would treat regularly.

I was more interested in his use of the word “hierarchy,” as if even in informal social settings in a completely different country, a clear, conscious regimentation applied in Polish groups. In demotic America, “hierarchy” is something of a dirty word, but I have noticed the concept and the word used much more comfortably in a Polish cultural context. The Nobel Laureate, Czeslaw Milosz, wrote that “in the life of the mind a strict hierarchy is mandatory.” Rank matters, even among peers. Poland’s most recent poet of Nobel stature, Wislawa Szymborska, we learn, falls visibly short of Milosz’s achievement, though she’s “very good.” Some are more equal than others. (I like her better, at least in translation.) In the life of the body and the body politic, a similar traditional attitude seems to persist. The spirit of the szlachta, the old Polish nobility, a class more or less exterminated by the Nazis and the Soviets, could well continue to stickle in Polish social life. The Church, the military, and the university, all visibly stratified orders, remain important social institutions. So it doesn’t come as a surprise to me that Poles might favor “hierarchy,” though it might to Herr W_ that I, an American, acknowledge its attraction. Not averse to hierarchies myself, I prefer them loose and voluntary.

Not So Keen A __________________ (fill in the blank)

The early quiz and homework returns indicate that I haven’t lost my knack for getting good grades. But after thirty years at university, I know the difference between getting good grades and actually learning the material. Not that I am not learning Polish. One cannot encounter so fresh and osmotic a subject and not absorb significant amounts at the outset, only that I’m all too aware of what I don’t know and should know after five weeks—and could know if I worked harder: hard and soft consonants, what exactly voicing and devoicing is, and the rules for devoicing. Our instructor provides explanations in a linguistic jargon not less difficult than Polish itself. These “rules” do not help me express. They seem descriptive, analytic, not the kind of formulae by which one naturally generates discourse. In first language acquisition, we more or less learn these rules practically by ear and use, then take grammar exams on them in eighth grade, exams which have little impact on the average person’s competency, thankfully. In second language learning, at least in the academy, such linguistic scaffolding remains primary to pedagogy. And so, one can earn As without necessarily feeling any intimations of fluency. In time, our instructor assures us, in time.


And it is time, time on task, drill time, practice time, listening time—time that accounts for whatever progress I have made so far and exhibited in quiz and homework. I have no gift, no genius for foreign languages; I grind. When I am called upon to recite in class, perhaps half of those times I have drawn, immediately, a complete blank, and made that embarrassing excursus to dithering lexical incompetence—the kind that characterized George W. Bush at a press conference. This brain infarct, initially cognitive, is not becoming; it engenders embarrassment, which further compounds the hesitation. Affect affects effect. Sometimes I emerge from that foggy thicket, the path spontaneously and inexplicably opened in my mind ex nihilo, like the universe; sometimes I simply guess and grope to success; sometimes the instructor graciously moves on to another student, who provides an answer I knew but simply could not produce. Professor Polakiewicz has wisely not attempted to coax right answers out of me. When I’m wrong, I seem to benefit somewhat from stewing in error, tamten not tento—which is not even a word, only a misguided construction. If there were time, I could learn Polish best by making every possible language mistake in the book, but I suspect that the possible mistakes are infinite and time, not.

Student

The Polish word for “student” is student. If only the rest were that simple. As I noted in an earlier post, Polish is a heavily inflected language, which means that nouns take different endings depending on how they are used in a sentence, that is, according to their case. In the nominative case, let’s say, as the subject of a sentence, “That student seems a little bit old to be taking a first semester language class,” we’d use the Polish form student. When we wish to indicate possession, ownership, “The utter confusion of that student,” we’d use the genitive case, here the Polish form studenta. The dative case, indicating the recipient of an action (a.k.a. the indirect object), would appear in a Polish sentence as follows: “The generous instructor gave studentowi the benefit of the doubt.” In the accusative, where the noun serves as the direct object (the complement of a transitive verb), we find “the generous instructor passing the old studenta, though with some reservation.” (An observant reader will note that the genitive and the accusative forms of this word are the same. Hmm.) These four cases are generally recognized in English grammar, but only the genitive has a different form: student, student’s, student, student.


In Polish, there are three more cases: instrumental, locative, and vocative. The instrumental shows means or agency. That is, if a seasoned instructor corrected an older student’s (studenta) error by means of a younger student, that younger student, if male, would be referred to as studentem. (I have no idea whether such a sentence would be in any way idiomatic in Polish. Hard to make it so in English—this is purely hypothetical.) Then there’s the locative, which appears after prepositions of location: “in” the student, “on” the student, “about” the student, “next to” the student, and “after” the student would all render the student, in Polish, studentcie. Finally, if one were to invoke a student, in joy or despair, one would cry out, “Oh, studentcie!”

Thus, seven case forms to remember for any noun. Oh, and the case forms are different for feminine nouns: studentka, studentki, studentce, studentke, studentka, studentce, and studentko. And for plurals: studenci, studentow, studentom, studentow, studentami, studentach. Much to remember then, and quickly please, including grammar terms (transitive/intransitive) which an old English major has long since forgotten, along with many umbrellas, keys, anniversaries, birthdates, and the names of any number of schoolmates. [I do recall my children’s names: "Hey, Stefan (Stefanie), Hey, Zoe (Zosiu)! Love you."] Why must language be so complicated? Because life, which language reflects, tries to capture, is complicated, and if you think about it, even more so than language. Which is why we also have silence—baffled, stunned, complete silence—a reverent WTF! a kind of non-utterance, the perfect uneffing of the ineffable.