Polish language

“ But neither from those early times, nor from the four or five centuries after the introduction of Christianity, does there remain any monument whatever of the Polish language; nay, with the exception of a few fragments without value, the most ancient document of that language extant is not older than the sixteenth century. Until that time the Latin idiom reigned exclusively in Poland. The teachers of Christianity in this country were for nearly five centuries foreigners, viz. Germans and Italians. ”

“ The ancient Polish language seems to have been very nearly related to the dialects of the Czekhes and the Sorabian Vendes. Although very little is known in respect to the circumstances and progress of the formation of the language into its present state, it is sufficiently obvious, that it has been developed from the conflict of its natural elements with the Latin and German idioms. Of the other Slavic dialects, the Bohemian is the only one which has exerted any influence upon the Polish tongue. ”

“ The Polish language, which is remarkably rich in every kind of flexion, has a still simpler and more regular way of forming also a frequentative out of almost every verb; e.g. czytam, I read, czytivam, I read often; biore, take, bieram, I take often, etc. In Bohemian, which in respect to grammar is by far the most cultivated of the Slavic languages, there is a refinement in the tenses, of which even the most perfect knowledge of the classical languages gives hardly any idea, and the right use of which is seldom, if ever, acquired by foreigners. ”

“ By the inhabitants of the Prussian grand-duchy of Posen, and a part of the province called Western Prussia, together with the Poles in Silesia and the Kassubes in Pomerania; In all less than two millions. [223]
Thus the Polish language is spoken by a population of about ten millions. [224] Like all living languages, it has different dialects, and is in one place spoken with greater purity than in another. As these varieties, however, are neither very striking nor have ever had an influence on literature, they do not concern us here. ”

“ The partition of the Polish kingdom is nearly a hundred years old. But it will not allow the three powers that accomplished it to be at peace. Even now it demands great efforts to establish it as just and right. It is not enough that they have caused the history of the world to be written as if all the blame were on the side of this old Poland. It is not enough that what among other people is counted as virtue or duty—love of one's country, its memories and language, hatred for its enemies and detractors—is branded and punished when professed by a Pole. ”

“ For the crime of patriotism Poland was decimated, thousands of its noblest citizens being transported to the Caucasus and Siberia. The remnant of separate existence possessed by Poland was overthrown, and it was made a province of the Russian empire. Even the teaching of the Polish language was forbidden, the youth of the nation being commanded to learn and speak the Russian tongue. As for the persecution and suffering which fell upon the Poles as a nation, it is too sad a story to be here told. There is still a Polish people, but a Poland no more. ”

“ History is the great school, in which nations appear as the pupils, experience as the teacher; and the fate of mankind depends on a wise application of the great moral lessons which they daily receive. Most of the Polish historians of this ago preferred however the Latin language; but their productions are too intimately connected with Poland to be separated from its literature, and may, therefore, be named here. ”

“ The Russian money becomes the current coin of Poland. The metamorphosis descends from the most important offices to the most minute. Even the weights and measures of Poland are henceforth to be Russian: even the year is not undisturbed, and the Poles are obliged to abandon the new style, and return to the old, because it has been persevered in in Russia—a petty annoyance, which will remind them of their yoke every day. It is a complete system of fusion—a settled intention of effacing the Polish nationality, the Polish religion, the Polish language, of leaving not a trace behind ”

“ The Polish language being forbidden in the schools, every noble Polish woman becomes a schoolmistress of her language at home, not only for her children, but also for her servants and those who are drawn under her sway. ”

“ Eleven good books adopted from the Polish language and set into circulation are of great importance for the English-reading people—just now I am emphasizing only this—because these books are written in the most beautiful language ever written by any Polish author! ”

“ Slavic, Polish, and heathenish, were to them synonymous words. Thus, while the light of Christianity everywhere carried the first dawn of life into the night of Slavic antiquity, the early history of Poland affords more than any other part of the Christian world a melancholy proof, how the passions and blindness of men operated to counterbalance that holy influence. But although so unfavourably disposed towards the language, it cannot be said that the influence of the foreign clergy was in other respects injurious to the literary cultivation of the country. ”

“ The Polish language, the purity of which at the beginning of the present period was an object of particular attention, has in our own century been the subject of numerous learned inquiries; some of which have added considerably to the light thrown in modern times by Slavic-German scholars upon the Slavic languages and Slavic history in general. Linde, besides several other philological and historical writings, has enriched Slavic literature with a comparative critical dictionary in six volumes, which is considered as one of the standard works of the language. ”

“ For the Polish people as a whole this city is certainly a spiritual centre of their nationality. Here the national characteristics find their expression in every department of life, here the national language, literature, and art live and develop; and all this, and what goes with it, influences the spirit of the Poles, binds them, wherever they may be, to the centre, and prevents the spark of nationality in the individual from becoming buried and extinguished. But an economic centre of the nation? ”

“ In 1534 at the provincial diet of Grodzisk the nobility of Great Poland demanded books in the Polish language, particularly the Bible. Every nation has writings in its own language, it asserted; but as for us, the priests want us to be ignorant. [88]
The steady growth of the religious reform movement in Poland led its opponents to the employment of extreme repressive measures. In 1534 the Polish clergy secured from the king an edict, forbidding the Polish nobility to send its youth to any seat of learning known or suspected to be heretical. Those that were at such universities were recalled. ”

“ Polish schools; and numerous convents of their own and other orders presented to the scholar an asylum, both when in the year 1241 the Mongols broke into the country, and also during the civil wars which were caused by the family dissensions of Pjast's successors. Several chronicles in Latin were written by Poles long before the history of the Polish literature begins; and Polish noblemen went to Paris, Bologna, and Prague, to study sciences, for the very elements of which their own language afforded them no means. ”

“ Therefore, education not being compulsory, as it is in Norway and Sweden, little benefit is derived from the common-school system as here sustained. With a view utterly to abolish the Polish language, it is even made a penal offence to use it in commercial transactions.
The Polish peasantry as a whole are by no means a prepossessing race. Naturally dull, they are still more demoralized and degraded by an unconquerable love of intoxicants, the dram being unfortunately both cheap and potent. ”

“ Besides the oratorical powers and the historical productions of the Poles, the reputation of their modern literature rests chiefly on poetry. Although the Polish poets adhered longer to the strict rules of Boileau than the rest of Europe, and have only in the most recent times chosen better models in the Germans and English,—without however having been able to free themselves entirely from their French chains,—yet the national genius of their language has sometimes conquered the artificial restraints of narrow rules and arbitrary laws. ”

“ The Polish authors who have written in their own language have perhaps been most successful in the short story. Often it is so slight that it can hardly be called a story, but each of these sketches conveys a distinct atmosphere of the country and the people, and shows the individuality of each writer. The unhappy state of Poland for more than 150 years has placed political and social problems in the foreground of Polish literature. Writers are therefore judged and appraised by their fellow-countrymen as much by their patriotism as by their literary and artistic merits. ”

“ Of all the Slavic nations, the POLES, as we have already remarked, had most neglected their popular poetry. There were indeed several collections of popular ballads published, partly by Polish editors, with the title of popular poetry in Poland. But they all, without exception, so far as we know, refer to the Ruthenian peasantry in Poland, who use a language different from the Polish, and essentially the same as the Malo-Russian. These tribes, inhabitants of Poland for centuries, may indeed be [pg.395] called Poles with perfect propriety. ”

“ The high spirit of the Polish nation, and that glowing patriotism for which they are so distinguished, has induced them during the period of their unnatural partition and amalgamation [pg.263] with foreign nations, to devote more zeal than ever to the sole national tie which still binds together the subjects of so many different powers—their language. There have been numerous learned societies founded; among them, above all, the society of the friends of science at Warsaw, to which the most eminent men of the nation belong, must be distinguished. ”

“ The area of Polish speech alone intervenes as a buffer product of the basin of the middle Vistula. The region is a silt-covered lowland, the bed of a former glacial lake. It has been peopled by Slavs for over a thousand years. Upon its open stretches there was no lack of food and no reason therefore for migration. The development of Poland rests primarily on this physical foundation. Added advantages of good land and water communication with the rest of the continent contributed powerfully to the spread of Polish power, which at one time extended from Baltic shores to the Black sea. ”

“ Passing from Lusatian Wendish, the next of the Western Slavonic languages to be considered is Polish. Enjoying great prominence today, with a contemporary literature of extraordinary fertility and of great brilliance, and spoken by a larger number of people than any Slavonic language except Russian, Polish is only one of a group of dialects known in comparative philology as the Lechish group. ”

“ By the side of its life-giving and beneficent agrarian policy Russia has pursued the odious system of debarring Poland from all means of culture and improvement associated with the use of its own language, and has aimed at eventually turning the Poles into Russians by the systematic impoverishment and extinction of all that is essentially Polish in thought, in sentiment, and in expression. ”

“ They lost more than their country: they lost their language, their history, their national life. But in spite of it all, they remained Poles.
"I was born in Russian Poland, not far from Warsaw. From the very first, I was taught that I was a Pole, not a Russian. But only at home, under my own roof, could I be a Pole. The teaching of Polish was forbidden in any school—every word spoken must be Russian. If children were overheard talking in Polish, they were arrested by the police and their parents summoned and fined. ”

“ The two countries have a common religion, and economically she is far more closely{113} bound to Poland than to Russia, and for years her trade has gravitated to Warsaw and not to Petrograd or Moscow. Linguistically also, though the native language has as little to do with Polish as it has with Russian, no educated Lithuanian is ignorant of Polish, and it is impossible for an educated man to live there with interchange of ideas and civilized thought without speaking Polish. ”

“ Education is, however, an even more potent weapon than expropriation, and the fact that no primary or secondary schools exist in Germany where a word of Polish is spoken is inevitably having a fatal influence on the vocabulary and syntax of Polish in Prussia. The only province, however, where the German language is making real headway against Polish is that of East Prussia, where religious differences make matters more complex. In East Prussia, namely, the majority of Poles have been Lutherans since they were invaded and converted by the Teutonic knights in the thirteenth century ”

“ The patriotism and courage of the Polish press are maintained in face of German persecution. The return of Polish emigrants with a little capital, accumulated by toil in foreign lands, is likewise one of the factors which contribute to the preservation of the people in their homeland. ”

“ Small tradesmen, petty farmers and professional men organize themselves into bodies to which individual interests are intrusted whenever German methods become intolerable. But the greatest asset of Polish nationality in this fight against annihilation is its high birth rate. This has also led to the emigration of Poles to the industrial districts of Westphalia, the coal districts of the Lens basin in France and to America. This flow of Poles comes mainly from the provinces of Posen and West Prussia, where sandy inert soils cannot accommodate rapidly increasing numbers. ”