Polish orthography

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Template:Short description Script error: No such module "Unsubst". Template:IPA notice Polish orthography is the system of writing the Polish language. The language is written using the Polish alphabet, which derives from the Latin alphabet, but includes some additional letters with diacritics.[1]Template:Rp The orthography is mostly phonetic, or rather phonemic—the written letters (or combinations of them) correspond in a consistent manner to the sounds, or rather the phonemes, of spoken Polish. For detailed information about the system of phonemes, see Polish phonology.

Polish alphabet

Script error: No such module "Labelled list hatnote". The diacritics used in the Polish alphabet are the kreska (graphically similar to the acute accent) in the letters ć, ń, ó, ś, ź; the kropka (overdot) in the letter ż; the stroke in the letter ł; and the ogonek ("little tail") in the letters ą, ę. There are 32 letters[1]Template:Rp (or 35 letters, if the foreign letters q, v, x are included)[2] in the Polish alphabet: 9 vowels and 23 or 26 consonants.

Polish alphabet, letters in parentheses are only used for loanwords
Majuscule forms (also called uppercase or capital letters)
A Ą B C Ć D E Ę F G H I J K L Ł M N Ń O Ó P (Q) R S Ś T U (V) W (X) Y Z Ź Ż
Minuscule forms (also called lowercase or small letters)
a ą b c ć d e ę f g h i j k l ł m n ń o ó p (q) r s ś t u (v) w (x) y z ź ż
Name of Letters
a ą be ce cie de e ę ef gie ha i jot ka el eł em en eń o ó zamknięte pe ku er es eś te u fau wu iks igrek zet ziet żet
File:Polish-alphabet.png
The Polish alphabet. Grey indicates letters not used in native words.

The letters q (named ku), v (named fau or rarely we[3]), and x (named iks) are used in some foreign words and commercial names. In loanwords q and v are often replaced by kw and w, respectively, and x by ks or gz (as in kwarc "quartz", weranda "veranda", ekstra "extra", egzosfera, "exosphere").

When giving the spelling of words, certain letters may be said in more emphatic ways to distinguish them from other identically pronounced characters. For example, H may be referred to as samo h ("h alone") to distinguish it from CH (ce ha). The letter Ż may be called "żet (or zet) z kropką" ("Ż with a dot") to distinguish it from RZ (er zet). The letter U may be called u otwarte ("open u", a reference to its graphical form) or u zwykłe ("regular u"), to distinguish it from Ó, which is sometimes called ó zamknięte ("closed ó"), ó kreskowane or ó z kreską ("ó with a stroke accent"), alternatively o kreskowane or o z kreską ("o with a stroke accent"). The letter ó is a relic from hundreds of years ago when there was a length distinction in Polish similar to that in Czech, with á and é also being common at the time. Subsequently, the length distinction disappeared and á and é were abolished, but ó came to be pronounced the same as u.

Note that Polish letters with diacritics are treated as fully independent letters in alphabetical ordering (unlike in languages such as French, Spanish, and German). For example, być comes after bycie. The diacritic letters also have their own sections in dictionaries (words beginning with ć are not usually listed under c). However, there are no regular words that begin with ą or ń.

Digraphs

Polish additionally uses the digraphs ch, cz, dz, dź, dż, rz, and sz. Combinations of certain consonants with the letter i before a vowel can be considered digraphs: ci as a positional variant of ć, si as a positional variant of ś, zi as a positional variant of ź, and ni as a positional variant of ń (but see a special remark on ni below); and there is also one trigraph dzi as a positional variant of dź. These are not given any special treatment in alphabetical ordering. For example, ch is treated simply as c followed by h, and not as a single letter as in Czech or Slovak (e.g. Chojnice only has its first letter capitalised, and is sorted after Canki and before Cieszyn).

Spelling rules

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Graphemes and values

Vowels
Grapheme Usual value Other values
a Template:IPAslink
ą Template:IPAslink Script error: No such module "IPA"., Script error: No such module "IPA"., Script error: No such module "IPA".; becomes Template:IPAslink before Template:IPAslink (see below)
e Template:IPAslink
ę Template:IPAslink Script error: No such module "IPA"., Script error: No such module "IPA"., Script error: No such module "IPA".; becomes Template:IPAslink word-finally and before Template:IPAslink and Template:IPAslink (see below)
i Template:IPAslink Template:IPAblink before a vowel; marks palatalization of the preceding consonant before a vowel (see below)
o Template:IPAslink
ó Template:IPAslink
u in certain cases, represents Template:IPAblink after vowels
y Template:IPAslink usually transcribed as Template:IPAslink but pronounced closer to Template:IPAslink or Template:IPAslink
Consonants
Grapheme Usual value Voiced or devoiced
b Template:IPAslink Template:IPAblink if devoiced
c1 Template:IPAslink Template:IPAblink if voiced
ć1 Template:IPAslink Template:IPAblink if voiced
cz Template:IPAslink Template:IPAblink if voiced
d Template:IPAslink Template:IPAblink if devoiced
dz1 Template:IPAslink Template:IPAblink if devoiced
dź1 Template:IPAslink Template:IPAblink if devoiced
dż Template:IPAslink Template:IPAblink if devoiced
f Template:IPAslink Template:IPAblink if voiced
g Template:IPAslink Template:IPAblink if devoiced
h Template:IPAslink Template:IPAblink if voiced2
ch
j Template:IPAslink
k Template:IPAslink Template:IPAblink if voiced
l Template:IPAslink
ł Template:IPAslink
m Template:IPAslink
n1 Template:IPAslink
ń1 Template:IPAslink
p Template:IPAslink Template:IPAblink if voiced
r Template:IPAslink
s1 Template:IPAslink Template:IPAblink if voiced
ś1 Template:IPAslink Template:IPAblink if voiced
sz Template:IPAslink Template:IPAblink if voiced
t Template:IPAslink Template:IPAblink if voiced
w Template:IPAslink Template:IPAblink if devoiced
z1 Template:IPAslink Template:IPAblink if devoiced
ź1 Template:IPAslink Template:IPAblink if devoiced
ż Template:IPAslink Template:IPAblink if devoiced
rz3

<templatestyles src="Citation/styles.css"/>^1 See below for rules regarding spelling of alveolo-palatal consonants.

<templatestyles src="Citation/styles.css"/>^2 H may be glottal Template:IPAblink in a small number of dialects.

<templatestyles src="Citation/styles.css"/>^3 Rarely, Template:Angbr is not a digraph and represents two separate sounds:

  • in various forms of the verb zamarzać – "to freeze"
  • in various forms of the verb mierzić – "to disgust"
  • in the place name Murzasichle
  • in borrowings, for example erzac (from German Ersatz), Tarzan

Voicing and devoicing

Voiced consonant letters frequently come to represent voiceless sounds (as shown in the above tables). This is due to the neutralization that occurs at the end of words and in certain consonant clusters; for example, the Template:Angbr in klub ("club") is pronounced like a Template:Angbr, and the Template:Angbr in prze- sounds like Template:Angbr. Less frequently, voiceless consonant letters can represent voiced sounds; for example, the Template:Angbr in także ("also") is pronounced like a Template:Angbr. The conditions for this neutralization are described under Voicing and devoicing in the article on Polish phonology.

Palatal and palatalized consonants

The spelling rule for the alveolo-palatal sounds /ɕ/, /ʑ/, /t͡ɕ/, /d͡ʑ/ and /ɲ/ is as follows: before the vowel Template:Angbr the plain letters Template:Angbr are used; before other vowels the combinations Template:Angbr are used; when not followed by a vowel the diacritic forms Template:Angbr are used. For example, the Template:Angbr in siwy ("grey-haired"), the Template:Angbr in siarka ("sulphur") and the Template:Angbr in święty ("holy") all represent the sound /ɕ/.

Sound Word-finally
or before a consonant 		Before a vowel
other than Template:Angbr 		Before Template:Angbr
/t͡ɕ/ ć ci c
/d͡ʑ/ dź dzi dz
/ɕ/ ś si s
/ʑ/ ź zi z
/ɲ/ ń ni n

Special attention should be paid to Template:Angbr before Template:Angbr plus a vowel. In words of foreign origin the Template:Angbr causes the palatalization of the preceding consonant Template:Angbr to /ɲ/, and it is pronounced as /j/. This situation occurs when the corresponding genitive form ends in -nii, pronounced as /ɲji/, not with -ni, pronounced as /ɲi/ (which is a situation typical to the words of Polish origin). For examples, see the table in the next section.

According to one system, similar principles apply to the palatalized consonants /kʲ/, /ɡʲ/ and /xʲ/, except that these can only occur before vowels. The spellings are thus Template:Angbr before Template:Angbr, and Template:Angbr otherwise. For example, the Template:Angbr in kim ("whom", instr.) and the Template:Angbr in kiedy both represent /kʲ/. In the system without the palatalized velars, they are analyzed as /k/, /ɡ/ and /x/ before /i/ and /kj/, /ɡj/ and /xj/ before other vowels.

Other issues with i and j

Except in the cases mentioned in the previous paragraph, the letter Template:Angbr if followed by another vowel in the same word usually represents /j/, but it also has the palatalizing effect on the previous consonant. For example, pies ("dog") is pronounced [pʲjɛs] (/pjɛs/). Some words with Template:Angbr before Template:Angbr plus a vowel also follow this pattern (see below). In fact i is the usual spelling of /j/ between a preceding consonant and a following vowel. The letter Template:Angbr normally appears in this position only after Template:Angbr, Template:Angbr and Template:Angbr if the palatalization effect described above has to be avoided (as in presja "pressure", Azja "Asia", lekcja "lesson", and the common suffixes -cja "-tion", -zja "-sion": stacja "station", wizja "vision"). The letter Template:Angbr after consonants is also used in concatenation of two words if the second word in the pair starts with Template:Angbr, e.g. wjazd "entrance" originates from w + Script error: No such module "Lang".. The pronunciation of the sequence wja (in wjazd) is the same as the pronunciation of wia (in wiadro "bucket").

The ending -ii which appears in the inflected forms of some nouns of foreign origin, which have -ia in the nominative case (always after Template:Angbr, Template:Angbr, Template:Angbr, and Template:Angbr; sometimes after Template:Angbr, Template:Angbr, and other consonants), is pronounced as [ji], with the palatalization of the preceding consonant. For example, dalii (genitive of dalia "dalia"), Bułgarii (genitive of Bułgaria "Bulgaria"), chemii (genitive of chemia "chemistry"), religii (genitive of religia "religion"), amfibii (genitive of amfibia "amphibia"). The common pronunciation is [i]. This is why children commonly misspell and write -i in the inflected forms as armii, Danii or hypercorrectly write ziemii instead of ziemi (words of Polish origin do not have the ending -ii but simple -i, e.g. ziemi, genitive of ziemia).

In some rare cases, however, when the consonant is preceded by another consonant, -ii may be pronounced as [i], but the preceding consonant is still palatalized, for example, Anglii (genitive of Anglia "England") is pronounced [anɡlʲi]. (The spelling Angli, very frequently met with on the Internet, is simply an error in orthography, caused by this pronunciation.)

A special situation applies to Template:Angbr: it has the full palatalization to [ɲ] before -ii which is pronounced as [ji] – and such a situation occurs only when the corresponding nominative form in -nia is pronounced as [ɲja], not as [ɲa].

For example (pay attention to the upper- and lower-case letters):

Case Word Pronunciation Meaning Word Pronunciation Meaning
Nominative dania /daɲa/ dishes (plural) Dania /daɲja/ Denmark
Genitive (dań) (/daɲ/) (of dishes) Danii /daɲji/ of Denmark
Nominative Mania /maɲa/ Mary (diminutive of "Maria") mania /maɲja/ mania
Genitive (Mani) (/maɲi/) (of Mary) manii /maɲji/ of mania

The ending -ji, is always pronounced as /ji/. It appears only after c, s and z. Pronunciation of it as a simple /i/ is considered a pronunciation error. For example, Script error: No such module "Lang". (genitive of Script error: No such module "Lang". "pressure") is /prɛsji/; Script error: No such module "Lang". (genitive of Script error: No such module "Lang". "poetry") is /pɔɛzji/; Script error: No such module "Lang". (genitive of Script error: No such module "Lang". "reason") is /rat͡sji/.

Nasal vowels

The letters Template:Angbr and Template:Angbr, when followed by plosives and affricates, represent an oral vowel followed by a nasal consonant, rather than a nasal vowel. For example, Template:Angbr in dąb ("oak") is pronounced /ɔm/, and Template:Angbr in tęcza ("rainbow") is pronounced /ɛn/ (the nasal assimilates with the following consonant). When followed by Template:Angbr or Template:Angbr, and in the case of Template:Angbr, also at the end of words by most speakers (in a situation where the speaker pronounces the vowel nasally, it is nasalized only lightly),[4] these letters are pronounced as just /ɔ/ or /ɛ/.

Homophonic spellings

Apart from the cases in the sections above, there are three sounds in Polish that can be spelt in two different ways, depending on the word. Those result from historical sound changes. The correct spelling can often be deduced from the spelling of other morphological forms of the word or cognates in Polish or in other Slavic languages.

Other points

The letter Template:Angbr represents /w/ in the digraphs Template:Angbr and Template:Angbr in loanwords, for example autor, Europa; but not in native words, like nauka, pronounced [naˈu.ka].

There are certain clusters where a written consonant would not normally be pronounced. For example, the Template:Angbr in the words mógł ("could") and jabłko ("apple") is omitted in ordinary speech.

Capitalization

Names are generally capitalized in Polish as in English. Polish does not capitalize the months and days of the week, nor adjectives and other forms derived from proper nouns (for example, angielski "English").

Titles such as pan ("Mr"), pani ("Mrs/Ms"), lekarz ("doctor"), etc. and their abbreviations are not capitalized, except in written polite address. Second-person pronouns are traditionally capitalized in formal writing (e.g. letters or official emails); so may be other words used to refer to someone directly in a formal setting, like Czytelnik ("reader", in newspapers or books). Third-person pronouns are capitalized to show reverence, most often in a sacred context.

Punctuation

Polish punctuation is similar to that of English. However, there are more rigid rules concerning use of commas—subordinate clauses are almost always marked off with a comma, while it is normally considered incorrect to use a comma before a coordinating conjunction with the meaning "and" (i, a or oraz).

Abbreviations (but not acronyms or initialisms) are followed by a period when they end with a letter other than the one which ends the full word. For example, dr has no period when it stands for doktor, but takes one when it stands for an inflected form such as doktora and prof. has period because it comes from profesor (professor).

Apostrophes are used to mark the elision of the final sound of foreign words not pronounced before Polish inflectional endings, as in Harry'ego ([xaˈrɛɡɔ], genitive of Harry [ˈxarɨ] – the final [ɨ] is elided in the genitive). However, it is often erroneously used to separate a loanword stem from any inflectional ending, for example, *John'a, which should be Johna (genitive of John; no sound is elided).

Quotation marks are used in different ways: either „ordinary Polish quotes” or «French quotes» (without space) for first level, and ‚single Polish quotes’ or «French quotes» for second level, which gives three styles of nested quotes:

  1. „Quote ‚inside’ quote”
  2. „Quote «inside» quote”
  3. «Quote ‚inside’ quote»

Some older prints have used „such Polish quotes“.

History

Script error: No such module "Labelled list hatnote". Poles adopted the Latin alphabet in the 12th century. However, that alphabet was ill-equipped to represent certain Polish sounds, such as the palatal consonants and nasal vowels. Consequently, Polish spelling in the Middle Ages was highly inconsistent, as different writers used different systems to represent these sounds, For example, in early documents the letter c could signify the sounds now written c, cz, k, while the letter z was used for the sounds now written z, ż, ś, ź. Writers soon began to experiment with digraphs (combinations of letters), new letters (φ and ſ, no longer used), and eventually diacritics.

The Polish alphabet was one of two major forms of Latin-based orthography developed for Slavic languages, the other being Czech orthography, characterized by carons (hačeks), as in the letter č. The other major Slavic languages which are now written in Latin-based alphabets (Slovak, Slovene, and Serbo-Croatian) use systems similar to the Czech. Sorbian spelling is also closer to Czech, though it does include more Polish elements than the aforementioned languages. Polish-based orthographies are used for Kashubian and usually Silesian, both spoken in Poland.

The letter "ƶ" is a historical allograph for ż.Script error: No such module "Unsubst".

Computer encoding

There are several different systems for encoding the Polish alphabet for computers. All letters of the Polish alphabet are included in Unicode, and thus Unicode-based encodings such as UTF-8 and UTF-16 can be used. The Polish alphabet is completely included in the Basic Multilingual Plane of Unicode. ISO 8859-2 (Latin-2), ISO 8859-13 (Latin-7), ISO 8859-16 (Latin-10) and Windows-1250 are popular 8-bit encodings that support the Polish alphabet.

The Polish letters which are not present in the English alphabet use the following HTML character entities[6] and Unicode codepoints:[7][8]

Upper case Ą Ć Ę Ł Ń Ó Ś Ź Ż Ƶ
HTML entity &#260;
&Aogon;		 &#262;
&Cacute;		 &#280;
&Eogon;		 &#321;
&Lstrok;		 &#323;
&Nacute;		 &#211;
&Oacute;		 &#346;
&Sacute;		 &#377;
&Zacute;		 &#379;
&Zdot;		 —
Unicode U+0104 U+0106 U+0118 U+0141 U+0143 U+00D3 U+015A U+0179 U+017B U+01B5
Result Ą Ć Ę Ł Ń Ó Ś Ź Ż —
Lower case ą ć ę ł ń ó ś ź ż ƶ
HTML entity &#261;
&aogon;		 &#263;
&cacute;		 &#281;
&eogon;		 &#322;
&lstrok;		 &#324;
&nacute;		 &#243;
&oacute;		 &#347;
&sacute;		 &#378;
&zacute;		 &#380;
&zdot;		 —
Unicode U+0105 U+0107 U+0119 U+0142 U+0144 U+00F3 U+015B U+017A U+017C U+01B6
Result ą ć ę ł ń ó ś ź ż —

For other encodings, see the following table. Numbers in the table are hexadecimal.

<templatestyles src="Template:Hidden begin/styles.css"/>

Other encodings
Character
Set		 Ą Ć Ę Ł Ń Ó Ś Ź Ż ą ć ę ł ń ó ś ź ż
ISO 8859-2 A1 C6 CA A3 D1 D3 A6 AC AF B1 E6 EA B3 F1 F3 B6 BC BF
Windows-1250 A5 C6 CA A3 D1 D3 8C 8F AF B9 E6 EA B3 F1 F3 9C 9F BF
IBM 852 A4 8F A8 9D E3 E0 97 8D BD A5 86 A9 88 E4 A2 98 AB BE
Mazovia 8F 95 90 9C A5 A3 98 A0 A1 86 8D 91 92 A4 A2 9E A6 A7
Mac 84 8C A2 FC C1 EE E5 8F FB 88 8D AB B8 C4 97 E6 90 FD
ISO 8859-13 and Windows-1257 C0 C3 C6 D9 D1 D3 DA CA DD E0 E3 E6 F9 F1 F3 FA EA FD
ISO 8859-16 A1 C5 DD A3 D1 D3 D7 AC AF A2 E5 FD B3 F1 F6 F7 AE BF
PN-T-42109-02:1984 "ZU0" — — — 5C — — — — — 60 7E 40 7C 5D 7B 5E 5B 7D
PN-T-42109-03:1986 "ZU2" 3B 24 23 5C 3C 27 3E 2A 26 60 7E 40 7C 5D 7B 5E 5B 7D
PN-I-10050:2002Template:Efn 5A 43
08
27		 5C 5D 4E
08
27		 4F
08
27		 53
08
27		 5A
08
27		 5E 7B 63
08
27		 7C 7D 6E
08
27		 6F
08
27		 73
08
27		 7A
08
27		 7E
IBM 775 B5 80 B7 AD E0 E3 97 8D A3 D0 87 D3 88 E7 A2 98 A5 A4
CSK 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 88 87 A0 A1 A2 A3 A4 A5 A6 A8 A7
Cyfromat 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 88 87 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 98 97
DHN 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 88 87 89 8A 8B 8C 8D 8E 8F 91 90
IINTE-ISIS 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98
IEA-Swierk 8F 80 90 9C A5 99 EB 9D 92 A0 9B 82 9F A4 A2 87 A8 91
Logic 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 8A 8B 8C 8D 8E 8F 90 91
Microvex 8F 80 90 9C A5 93 98 9D 92 A0 9B 82 9F A4 A2 87 A8 91
Ventura 97 99 A5 A6 92 8F 8E 90 80 96 94 A4 A7 91 A2 84 82 87
ELWRO-Junior C1 C3 C5 CC CE CF D3 DA D9 E1 E3 E5 EC EE EF F3 FA F9
AmigaPL C2 CA CB CE CF D3 D4 DA DB E2 EA EB EE EF F3 F4 FA FB
TeXPL 81 82 86 8A 8B D3 91 99 9B A1 A2 A6 AA AB F3 B1 B9 BB
Atari Club (Atari ST) C1 C2 C3 C4 C5 C6 C7 C8 C9 D1 D2 D3 D4 D5 D6 D7 D8 D9
CorelDraw! C5 F2 C9 A3 D1 D3 FF E1 ED E5 EC E6 C6 F1 F3 A5 AA BA
ATM C4 C7 CB D0 D1 D3 D6 DA DC E4 E7 EB F0 F1 F3 F6 FA FC
Template:Notelist

A common test sentence containing all the Polish diacritic letters is the nonsensical "Zażółć gęślą jaźń".

See also

Further reading

  • Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".

References

<templatestyles src="Reflist/styles.css" />

  1. ↑ a b Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".
  2. ↑ Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".
  3. ↑ Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".
  4. ↑ Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".
  5. ↑ Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".
  6. ↑ Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".
  7. ↑ Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".
  8. ↑ Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".

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External links

Template:Polish language Template:Language orthographies Script error: No such module "Authority control".

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