Old Polish
| Old Polish | |
|---|---|
| ięzyk Polſki | |
| Pronunciation | [ˈjɛ̃zɨk ˈpɔlskʲi] |
| Region | Central Europe |
| Era | developed into Middle Polish by the 16th century |
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Indo-European
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| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | – |
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Linguist list
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0gi |
| Glottolog | None |
Old Polish (Polish: język staropolski) is the period in the history of the Polish language between the 9th and the 16th centuries, followed by the Middle Polish language.
The Polish language started to change after the baptism of Poland, bringing in words from Latin such as kościół ("church", from L. castellum, meaning "castle"), anioł ("angel", from L. angelus), often via the Czech language, which also influenced Polish in that era (hence Lechitic "wiesiełyj" yielded modern Polish "wesoły" and "wesele"). Also, in later centuries, with the onset of cities founded on German law (namely, the so-called Magdeburg law), Middle High German urban and legal words filtered into Old Polish. Around the 14th or 15th centuries the aorist and imperfect became obsolete. In the 15th century the dual fell into disuse except for a few fixed expressions (adages, sayings). In relation to most other European languages, though, the differences between Old and Modern Polish are comparatively slight; the Polish language is somewhat conservative relative to other Slavic languages.
The difficulty the medieval scribes had to face was attempting to codify the language was the inadequacy of the Latin alphabet to some sounds of the Polish language, for example cz, sz. Thus, Old Polish does not have a standard spelling. One letter could give several sounds - e.g. s can be read as s, sz or ś. Writing words was almost entirely consistent with the spelling of Latin, for example. Bichek - Byczek, Gneuos - Gniewosz etc. The oldest known, according to an old Polish is the opinion of Day, ut ia pobrusa, a ti poziwai (originally: Daj, uć ja pobrusza, a ti pocziwaj, Modern Polish: Pozwól, że ja będę mełł, a ty odpocznij, English, Come, let me hold up, and you rest), written around 1270 in the Book of Henryków.
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