Thursday, February 12, 2009

Cannot tell Russian from Polish

Being a Pole, you'd think I could differentiate, but 10 feet (or about 3 meters) behind me here in the Frankfurt airport, is a Slav speaking very loudly and clearly on his cell phone. Lots of "tak, tak" s... sounds Alot like the conversations I used to hear at paternal family gatherings my entire childhood... but there's so many Russian newspapers and magazines lying around here, I am thinking it may be Russian. The guy looks like a blue collar Pole, not a Russian mobster... who knows.

I could'da been bi-lingual... had not my parents been afraid of discrimination and immigrant stigma. Argh.

3 comments:

  1. wait wait.. several calls later, and many "jak się masz?"s and "dziękuję bardzo"s later... the guy behind me is definitely a Pole.

    Polish - inmy perspective - also has more of a ... almost romantic lyric-ism to it, that Russian's slightly more harsher tones does not (think of Cleese in "A Fish Called Wanda")
    http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0095159/ It's kind of sad that I know more Mandarin, Hindi, Tamil than I do Polish... and I couldn't get my way out a jamb with any of them. French and German I could, and Spanish and Italian I could very very slowly, or if it was all written down I could....

    że życie
    http://translate.google.com/translate_t#fr|pl|c'est%20la%20vie

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  2. Listen to see if the guy tells any polish jokes. That might give him away!

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  3. Dr Z, I did not hear "A facet idzie do baru, z Kiełbasa pod jednym ramieniu, a pakiet Pierogi ramach innych ..." when I was in Frankfurt.
    =) I've got a 3 sigma confidence level that the guy was another Pole behind me, and not a Russian.

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