The set comprises 23 consonants and 9 written vowels, including two nasal vowels defined by a reversed diacritic hook called " ogonek" ( ę, ą).
The letters x, q and v are at times included in the extended 35-letter alphabet, however, these are not used in native words. Polish is written in the traditional 32-letter Polish alphabet, which has nine additions to the letters of the basic 26-letter Latin alphabet ( ą, ć, ę, ł, ń, ó, ś, ź, ż). Polish is subdivided into regional dialects and maintains strict T-V distinction pronouns, honorifics and various forms of formalities when addressing individuals. There are over 50 million Polish speakers around the world – it is the sixth-most-spoken language of the European Union. In addition to being the official language of Poland, it is also used by Polish minorities in other countries. It is spoken primarily in Poland and serves as the native language of the Poles. Polish (Polish: język polski, ( listen), polszczyzna ( listen) or simply polski, ( listen)) is a West Slavic language of the Lechitic group, written in the Latin script.
For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Unicode characters. When Nigel Richards was conquering the French Scrabble dictionary, he had to pay a lot more attention to inflection.įind out how the role of inflection would affect would-be Scrabble champions around the world here.This article contains IPA phonetic symbols. (We also form adverbs out of adjectives by adding “-ly,” but linguists treat that as morphological derivation instead of inflection, since it changes the word’s part of speech, unlike how we mark nouns for number or verbs for tense.) That’s about it when it comes to English inflection, though. And some adjectives (mostly consisting of one or two syllables) have comparative and superlative forms marked with “-er” and “-est” respectively. We can make a noun plural, typically by adding “-s.” We can mark the tense of a verb by adding “-s,” “-ed,” or “-ing” (except for irregular verbs, where the inflection is trickier). On the linguistic spectrum from “analytic” to “synthetic,” English is more analytic than many other European languages, meaning that its morphology isn’t as reliant on inflection. Now, our own Ben Zimmer, writing for Slate, adds to Roeder's analysis, explaining that "while these foreign-language Scrabble dictionaries may indeed have larger totals of playable words compared to English, they only reach those gaudy numbers because of how basic 'root' words get inflected in those languages." Top Scrabble competitor Andrew Fisher likened Richard's achievement it to “Roger Federer deciding to take up badminton, and then winning the BWF world title a couple of months later," while Five Thirty Eight's Oliver Roeder compared Scrabble dictionaries across languages to demonstrate that learning all the French Scrabble words (386,000) was even harder than a French player's learning Scrabble words in English (about 200,000) he also pointed out that Romanian and Italian, at 500,000+ words each, would be the hardest of all. Richards' achievement stunned language analysts and the entire Scrabble community, who were quick to point out that Richards didn't even begin studying the French Scrabble dictionary until nine weeks before the tournament. The only thing crazier than Scrabble mega-champion Nigel Richards, who competes in English, setting out to win his latest championship in French? The fact that he pulled it off.