In today's news, the President of Poland, Lech Kaczynski has perished in a tragic plane crash. It's always shocking to hear a leader of a country has died in office, especially one from Europe. If a Middle Eastern President or leader, or whatever, dies, you kind of expect that sort of thing from those people. And even though this is an Eastern European country, Poland is legit, yo. I like Poland. I feel bad for their people now that their leader has died. I'm not sure what kind of leader this man was, but no matter, he was still the president.
Not to poke fun at the dead, since he was living not that long ago, but I am going to take a off-timed shot at trying to figure out the pronunciation of this man's name. His first name must be pronounced as Leach, would you agree? Now, knowing how the Pollocks like to throw a bunch of unnecessary consonants in their words, I would have to assume that the last name is pronounced Ka-zin-ski, like the Unibomber. It was kind of like when the Georgian luger died in the training run before the Olympics. His name was Nodar Kumaritashvil. And we all could tell it was hard to pronounce, and we wanted to be respectful of him in his untimely death. It wasn't until the opening ceremonies, when they were paying him tribute, and the man making the speech said it, that I realized what a name that really is.
By the way, this is totally showing off my awareness of the world around me, when I have no idea who the president of a country is. I am, apparently, an American Pig-Dog, who only cares about USA. USA #1!
So anyway, I'm sorry, Poland, to hear about you're loss. It's a sad day in Europe and around the world, that is for sure.
(no one voted on the favorite candy bar poll, and I'm very unhappy with you people. The winner is Snickers, even if it wasn't voted upon, because everyone knows that Snickers pwnz.)
I'm certain that I voted for Twix. Oh well.
ReplyDeleteThe problem with his name (from the English speaker's perspective) is that it contains a couple of phonemes (linguistic speak for distinct sounds your mouth can make) that do not occur in any dialect of American English. Furthermore there are a couple of diacritics that affect pronunciation (diacritics = things like accent marks, tildes, things that modify another letter) that usually get dropped when an article is written for an English speaking audience, one of which is in his name.
Full name: Lech Aleksander Kaczyński
Lech
American way to pronounce it: Think of the word "elect". Drop the e and the t so you just have "lec".
Polish way: The same, but instead of the [k] sound, you do [x] which is equivalent to the ch in the Scottish word "loch". So a harder sound in the back of the throat.
Kaczyński
American way: "cz" in Polish is equivalent to our "ch" sound. the "y" is equivalent to a short "i" sound like the word "in". The "a" is like in "father". So Ka - chin - ski.
Polish way: Oh boy. Well, the "ń" is pronounced halfway between our normal american english "n" and spanish ñ. So sort of "nyeh", but don't really complete the "y" sound (the palatization of the n). Try to slip a little "ie" between the "n" and the "s" in his name. Furthermore the "cz" sort of turns into a light "t + ch". So more like "Kat + chinie + ski".
Hope that helps. Nadzwyczajne posiedzenie rządu: - Takiego dramatu świat nie widział!
lol yeah. thanks
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