The Polish language
The Polish language (In Polish, poln. j ę zyk polski) counts to the lechischen group of the West-Slavic languages, a sub-group of the indogermanischen family of languages. It is closely used with the Kaschubischen, the Czech, the Slovak and the Sorbian (which is spoken of a minority living in Germany). In Polish is the national language of Poland. To the 38 million Polish speakers in Poland approx. another 15-18 millions come abroad. There are bigger speaker's figures in Russia, Lithuania, Byelorussia, the Ukraine and Czechia and the other succession states of the Soviet Union, but also in Canada, Ireland, Argentina and Australia. There are important Polish minorities in the United States where estimates live according to about 6-10 million Polish-speaking, as well as Germany, Brazil and France.
The oldest Polish written reports known today are names and glosses in Latin documents, in particular in the bull of Gnesen of the pope Innozenz II of 1136 in which nearly 400 single Polish names of places and people appear. One found the first written entire sentence against it in the chronicle of the cloister of Heinrichau near Wroclaw. Under the entries of 1270 a request of a man on his grinding woman is found. "Daj, a ã ja pobrusz æ, a ty poczywaj", what is in the translation: „Let me grind now, and you rest.“
The "Bogurodzica" – the first Polish hymn, the "holy cross sermons" and the „Gnesener of sermons“ belong to the earliest monuments of the Polish language. Later religious texts from the Latin were also transferred into the Polish, for example, of the Psałterz Floriański („Florianer of psalter“) from the 14th century. In the 15th century the at first existing influence of the Czech was forced back, and the Written-Polish emancipated itself from the Latin. After Polish was written up to the 16th century predominantly about priests, it spread in the future also with nobility and bourgeoisie.
The modern Polish literary language developed in the 16th century on the basis of dialects which were spoken in the area of poses in the west of Poland. The Eulenspiegel as well as the chronicle literature of Marcin Bielski and the prose writings of Mikołaj Rej comes from this time. Their high linguistic level concludes by a long spoken tradition of the Polish in the king's court, in the state management as well as also in the worldly and ecclesiastical rhetoric. In the 16th century the Polish language reached a state which allowed to climb up they because of her wealth and her litheness to the most important languages of Central Europe. The educated people of the Renaissance fought for the further development of the Polish and his penetration compared with Latin. „However, the people should know outside that the Poles are no geese that they have her own language!“ [3] if the famous maxim was as a father of the Polish literature valid Mikołaj Rej from 1562.
In the Polish there is a row of loan words from the Alttschechischen and Middle High German as well as from the Latin and Greek; in younger time influence in Polish language went in particular from the Italian, French, High German, English, Ukrainian, Belorussian, Hungarian and Turkish, some of the Russian and Yiddish from. Presently an especially big influence of the English is to be observed.
