Polish phonology
The phonological system of the Polish language is similar in many ways to those of other Slavic languages, although there are some characteristic features found in only a few other languages of the family, such as contrasting postalveolar and alveolo-palatal fricatives and affricates. The vowel system is relatively simple, with just six oral monophthongs and two nasals in traditional speech, while the consonant system is much more complex.
Vowels
The Polish vowel system consists of six oral sounds. Traditionally, it was also said to include two nasal monophthongs, with Polish considered the last Slavic language that had preserved nasal sounds that existed in Proto-Slavic. However, recent sources present for modern Polish a vowel system without nasal vowel phonemes, including only the aforementioned six oral vowels.OralClose
Mid
Open
DistributionThe vowels and have largely complementary distribution. Either vowel may follow a labial consonant, as in mi and my. Elsewhere, however, is usually restricted to word-initial position and positions after alveolo-palatal consonants and approximants, while cannot appear in those positions. Either vowel may follow a velar fricative but after velar the vowel is limited to rare loanwords e.g. kynologia and gyros . Dental, postalveolar consonants and approximants are followed by in native or assimilated words. However, appears outside its usual positions in some foreign-derived words, as in chipsy and tir . The degree of palatalization in these contexts is weak. In some phonological descriptions of Polish that make a phonemic distinction between palatalized and unpalatalized consonants, and may thus be treated as allophones of a single phoneme. In the past, was closer to, which is acoustically more similar to.NasalNasal vowels do not feature uniform nasality over their duration. Phonetically, they consist of an oral vowel followed by a nasal semivowel or . Therefore, they are phonetically diphthongs.Phonological statusThe nasal phonemes appear in older phonological descriptions of Polish e.g.,,. In more recent descriptions the orthographic nasal vowels ą, ę are analyzed as two phonemes in all contexts e.g.,. Before a fricative and in word-final position they are transcribed as an oral vowel followed by a nasal consonant or. Under such an analysis, the list of consonantal phonemes is extended by a velar nasal phoneme or by two nasal approximants,.DistributionIf analyzed as separate phonemes, nasal vowels do not occur except before a fricative and in word-final position. When the letters ą and ę appear before stops and affricates, they indicate an oral or followed by a nasal consonant homorganic with the following consonant. For example, kąt is, gęba is, pięć is and bąk is, as if they were spelled *kont, *gemba, *pieńć and *bonk. Before or, nasality is lost altogether, and ą and ę are pronounced as oral or. The sequence is also denasalized to in word-final position, as in 'I will be'.
Historical developmentDistinctive vowel length was inherited from late Proto-Slavic, although in Polish only some pretonic long vowels and vowels with the neoacute retained length. Additional vowel lengths were introduced in Proto-Polish as a result of compensatory lengthening when a yer in the next syllable disappeared according to Havlík's law. In Polish this only happened in penultimate syllables before a voiced consonant.The resultant system of vowel lengths was similar to what is today preserved in Czech and to a lesser degree in Slovak, although the distribution of the sounds often differed. In the emerging modern Polish, however, the long vowels were shortened again but sometimes with a change in quality. The latter changes came to be incorporated into the standard language only in the case of long o and the long nasal vowel. The vowel shift may thus be presented as follows:
In most circumstances, consonants were palatalized when followed by an original front vowel, including the soft yer that was often later lost. For example: *dьnь became dzień, while *dьnьmъ became dniem. Nasal vowels *ę and *ǫ of late Proto-Slavic merged to become the medieval Polish vowel, written ø. Like other Polish vowels, it developed long and short variants. The short variant developed into present-day ę, while the long form became, written ą, as described above. Overall:
Dialectal variationPolish dialects differ particularly in their realization of nasal vowels, both in terms of whether and when they are decomposed to an oral vowel followed by a nasal consonant and in terms of the quality of the vowels used.Also, some dialects preserve nonstandard developments of historical long vowels ; for example, a may be pronounced with in words in which it was historically long. ConsonantsThe Polish consonant system is more complicated; its characteristic features include the series of affricates and palatal consonants that resulted from four Proto-Slavic palatalisations and two further palatalisations that took place in Polish and Belarusian.PhonemesThe consonant phonemes of Polish are as follows:
The tongue shape of the postalveolar sounds is similar to the shape postalveolar approximant . The alveolo-palatals are pronounced with the body of the tongue raised to the hard palate but a greater area of the front of the tongue is raised close to the hard palate compared to the English palato-alveolar sounds. The series are known as "rustling" and "soughing" respectively; the equivalent alveolar series is called "hissing". Polish contrasts affricates and stop–fricative clusters by the fricative components being consistently longer in clusters than in affricates. Stops in clusters may have either a plosive release accompanied by a weak aspiration or a fricated release depending on the rate of speech and individual speech habits.
For the possibility of an additional velar fricative for, see [|§ Dialectal variation] below. On the same grounds as for gives a phonemic status for speakers who have in their system. Allophones
DistributionPolish, like other Slavic languages, permits complex consonant clusters, which often arose from the disappearance of yers. Polish can have word-initial and word-medial clusters of up to four consonants, whereas word-final clusters can have up to five consonants. Examples of such clusters can be found in words such as bezwzględny, źdźbło,, and krnąbrność . A popular Polish tongue-twister is .For the restrictions on combinations of voiced and voiceless consonants in clusters, see § Voicing and devoicing below. Unlike languages such as Czech, Polish does not have syllabic consonants: the nucleus of a syllable is always a vowel. The consonant is restricted to positions adjacent to a vowel. It also cannot precede y. Voicing and devoicingPolish obstruents are subject to voicing and devoicing in certain positions. This leads to neutralization of voiced/voiceless pairs in those positions. The phenomenon applies in word-final position and in consonant clusters.In Polish consonant clusters, including across a word boundary, the obstruents are all voiced or all voiceless. To determine whether a given cluster has voiced or voiceless obstruents, the last obstruent in the cluster, excluding w or rz, should be examined to see if it appears to be voiced or voiceless. The consonants n, m, ń, r, j, l, ł do not represent obstruents and so do not affect the voicing of other consonants; they are also usually not subject to devoicing except when surrounded by unvoiced consonants. Some examples follow :
The above rule does not apply to sonorants: a consonant cluster may contain voiced sonorants and voiceless obstruents, as in,, słoń, tnąc. Utterance-finally, obstruents are pronounced voiceless. For example, the in bóg is pronounced, and the in zajazd represents. If followed by a word beginning with an obstruent then the above cluster rules apply across morpheme boundaries. When the second word begins with a sonorant the voicing of any preceding word-final obstruent varies regionally. In western and southern Poland, final obstruents are voiced if the following word starts with a sonorant. On the other hand, they are voiceless in eastern and northern Poland. This rule does not apply to prepositional clitics w, z, bez, przez, nad, pod, od, przed which are always voiced before sonorants. Hard and soft consonantsMultiple palatalizations and some depalatalizations that took place in the history of Proto-Slavic and Polish have created quite a complex system of what are often called "soft" and "hard" consonants. These terms are useful in describing some inflection patterns and other morphological processes, but exact definitions of "soft" and "hard" may differ somewhat."Soft" generally refers to the palatal nature of a consonant. The alveolo-palatal sounds are considered soft, as normally is the palatal. The sound is also normally classed as a soft consonant: like the preceding sounds, it cannot be followed by but takes instead. The palatalized velars, and might also be regarded as soft on this basis. Consonants not classified as soft are dubbed "hard". However, a subset of hard consonants,, often derive from historical palatalizations and behaves like the soft consonants in some respects. These sounds may be called "hardened" or "historically soft" consonants. The historical palatalized forms of some consonants have developed in Polish into noticeably different sounds: historical palatalized t, d, r have become the sounds now represented by respectively. Similarly palatalized became the sounds. The palatalization of labials has resulted in the addition of, as in the example pies just given. These developments are reflected in some regular morphological changes in Polish grammar, such as in noun declension. Phonological status of palatalized consonantsIn some phonological descriptions of Polish, however, consonants, including especially the labials m, p, b, f, w, are regarded as occurring in "hard" and "soft" pairs. In this approach, for example, the word pies is analyzed not as but as, with a soft. These consonants are then also analyzed as soft when they precede the vowel . Unlike their equivalents in Russian, these consonants cannot retain their softness in the syllable coda. For example, the word for "carp" has the inflected forms karpia, karpie etc., with soft, but the nominative singular is karp, with a hard.Similar considerations lead to two competing analyses of palatalized velars. In, all three palatalized velars are given phonological status on the grounds of their distribution and minimal contrasts between,, and,, e.g. giełda, magiel but giętki, higiena . Phonemes, and do not occur before where they are separated by a distinct e.g. kiosk, filologia, Hiob . A system with and but without is given by,, and. This analysis is based on an assumption that there is actually no but only as chie, hie occur only in loanwords. However, a decomposed palatalization of kie, gie i.e., in all contexts is a predominant pronunciation in contemporary Polish. Based on that, a system without palatalized velars is given by, and. In such a system palatalized velars are analyzed as, and before and, and before other vowels. This is the main analysis presented above. The consonants t, d, r can also be regarded as having hard and soft forms according to the above approach, although the soft forms occur only in loanwords such as tir . If the distinction is made for all relevant consonants, then y and i can be regarded as allophones of a single phoneme, with y following hard consonants and i following soft ones. Glottal stopIn more contemporary Polish, a phonetic glottal stop may appear as the onset of a vowel-initial word. It may also appear following word-final vowels to connote particular affects; for example, nie is normally pronounced, but may instead be pronounced or in a prolonged interrupted. This intervocalic glottal stop may also break up a vowel hiatus, even when one appears morpheme-internally, as in poeta or Ukraina . A relatively new phenomenon in Polish is the expansion of the usage of glottal stops. In the past, initial vowels were pronounced with an initial voiceless glottal fricative, pre-iotation, or pre-labialization.Dialectal variationIn some Polish dialects there is an additional voiced velar fricative, represented by the letter. It may be actually a voiced glottal fricative for some speakers, especially word-finally. In most varieties of Polish, both and represent.Some eastern dialects also preserve the velarized dental lateral approximant,, which corresponds to in most varieties of Polish. Those dialects also can palatalize to in every position, but standard Polish does so only allophonically before and. and are also common realizations in native speakers of Polish from Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine. notes that students of Polish philology were hostile towards the lateral variant of, saying that it sounded "unnatural" and "awful". Some of the students also said that they perceived the lateral as a variant of, which, he further notes, along with the necessity of deciding from context whether the sound meant was or, made people hostile towards the sound. On the other hand, some Poles view the lateral variant with nostalgia, associating it with the elegant culture of interwar Poland. In the Masurian dialects and some neighboring dialects, mazurzenie occurs: postalveolar merge with the corresponding dentals unless is spelled . StressThe predominant stress pattern in Polish is penultimate: the second-last syllable is stressed. Alternating preceding syllables carry secondary stress: in a four-syllable word, if the primary stress is on the third syllable, there will be secondary stress on the first.There must be a syllable for each written vowel except when the letter i precedes another vowel. Also, the letters u and i sometimes represent only semivowels after another vowel, as in autor ; these semivowels mostly occur in loanwords. Some loanwords, particularly from classical languages, have the stress on the antepenultimate syllable. For example, fizyka is stressed on the first syllable. That may lead to a rare phenomenon of minimal pairs differing only in stress placement: muzyka 'music' vs. muzyka – genitive singular of muzyk 'musician'. When further syllables are added at the end of such words through suffixation, the stress normally becomes regular: uniwersytet has irregular stress on the third syllable, but the genitive uniwersytetu and derived adjective uniwersytecki have regular stress on the penultimate syllables. Over time, loanwords tend to become nativized to have a penultimate stress. Another class of exceptions to the usual stress pattern is verbs with the conditional endings -by, -bym, -byśmy etc. Those endings are not counted in determining the position of the stress: zrobiłbym is stressed on the first syllable and zrobilibyśmy on the second. According to prescriptive grammars, the same applies to the first and second person plural past tense endings -śmy, -ście although this rule is often ignored in colloquial speech. The irregular stress patterns in the presence of these verb endings are explained by the fact that the endings are detachable clitics rather than true verbal inflections: for example, instead of kogo zobaczyliście? it is possible to say kogoście zobaczyli? – here kogo retains its usual stress in spite of the attachment of the clitic. Reanalysis of the endings as inflections when attached to verbs causes the different colloquial stress patterns. Some common word combinations are stressed as if they were a single word. That applies in particular to many combinations of preposition plus a personal pronoun, such as do niej, na nas, przeze mnie, all stressed on the bolded syllable of the preposition. Historical phonology* |