The Belostok ( Białystok ) pogrom occurred between 14–16 June 1906 (1–3 June Old Style ) in Białystok , Poland (then part of the Russian Empire ). During the pogrom , between 81 and 88 Jews were killed by soldiers of the Imperial Russian Army , the Black Hundreds , and about 80 people were wounded.
105-669: Raphael Lemkin ( Polish : Rafał Lemkin ; 24 June 1900 – 28 August 1959) was a Polish Jewish lawyer who is known for coining the term genocide and campaigning to establish the Genocide Convention . During the Second World War , he campaigned vigorously to raise international awareness of atrocities in Axis-occupied Europe . It was during this time that Lemkin coined the term " genocide " to describe Nazi Germany 's extermination policies . As
210-499: A / (spelled a ), / ɔ / (spelled o ) and / u / (spelled u and ó as separate letters). The nasal vowels are / ɛ w̃ / (spelled ę ) and / ɔ w̃ / (spelled ą ). Unlike Czech or Slovak, Polish does not retain phonemic vowel length — the letter ó , which formerly represented lengthened /ɔː/ in older forms of the language, is now vestigial and instead corresponds to /u/. The Polish consonant system shows more complexity: its characteristic features include
315-645: A French-language work, La réglementation des paiements internationaux , regarding international trade law (1939). He left Warsaw on 6 September 1939 and made his way north-east towards Wolkowysk . He was caught between the invaders, the Germans in the west, and the Soviets who then approached from the east. Poland's independence was extinguished by terms of the pact between Stalin and Hitler . He barely evaded German capture, and traveled through Lithuania to reach Sweden by early spring of 1940. There he lectured at
420-436: A German court. Makarewicz, a national-conservative who believed that Jews and Ukrainians should be expelled from Poland if they refused to assimilate, answered that the doctrine of state sovereignty gave governments the right to conduct internal affairs as they saw fit: "Consider the case of a farmer who owns a flock of chickens. He kills them, and this is his business. If you interfere, you are trespassing." Lemkin replied, "But
525-512: A bomb thrown by Jewish anarchist Aron Elin (Gelinker). In the same year, police officers Mozger, Moneshko and Barancevich were killed and eight other policemen were wounded. As a consequence of the violence, martial law was declared in Białystok in September 1905, which lasted until March 1906. After martial law was lifted, the series of assassinations and acts of terror began anew. On March 4,
630-771: A dialect of Polish. Many Silesians consider themselves a separate ethnicity and have been advocating for the recognition of Silesian as a regional language in Poland . The law recognizing it as such was passed by the Sejm and Senate in April 2024, but has been vetoed by President Andrzej Duda in late May of 2024. According to the last official census in Poland in 2011, over half a million people declared Silesian as their native language. Many sociolinguists (e.g. Tomasz Kamusella , Agnieszka Pianka, Alfred F. Majewicz, Tomasz Wicherkiewicz ) assume that extralinguistic criteria decide whether
735-669: A few culturally and linguistically related tribes from the basins of the Vistula and Oder before eventually accepting baptism in 966. With Western Christianity , Poland also adopted the Latin alphabet , which made it possible to write down Polish, which until then had existed only as a spoken language . The closest relatives of Polish are the Elbe and Baltic Sea Lechitic dialects ( Polabian and Pomeranian varieties). All of them, except Kashubian , are extinct. The precursor to modern Polish
840-471: A large farm near Wolkowysk and was one of three children born to Józef Lemkin and Bella née Pomeranz. His father was a farmer and his mother an intellectual, painter, linguist, and philosophy student with a large collection of books on literature and history. Lemkin and his two brothers (Eliasz and Samuel) were homeschooled by their mother. As a youth, Lemkin was fascinated by the subject of atrocities and would often question his mother about such events as
945-520: A large number of branches in all of these areas) offers services available in Polish at all of their cash machines in addition to English and Spanish . According to the 2011 census there are now over 500,000 people in England and Wales who consider Polish to be their "main" language. In Canada , there is a significant Polish Canadian population : There are 242,885 speakers of Polish according to
1050-543: A lect is an independent language or a dialect: speakers of the speech variety or/and political decisions, and this is dynamic (i.e. it changes over time). Also, research organizations such as SIL International and resources for the academic field of linguistics such as Ethnologue , Linguist List and others, for example the Ministry of Administration and Digitization recognized the Silesian language. In July 2007,
1155-454: A nasal consonant, rather than a nasal vowel. For example, ą in dąb ("oak") is pronounced [ɔm] , and ę in tęcza ("rainbow") is pronounced [ɛn] (the nasal assimilates to the following consonant). When followed by l or ł (for example przyjęli , przyjęły ), ę is pronounced as just e . When ę is at the end of the word it is often pronounced as just [ɛ] . Depending on
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#17327726679681260-550: A nearby forest. During the fighting, artillery fire destroyed their home and German troops seized their crops, horses and livestock. Lemkin's brother Samuel eventually died of pneumonia and malnutrition while the family remained in the forest. After graduating from a local trade school in Białystok Lemkin began the study of linguistics at the Jan Kazimierz University of Lwów (now Lviv, Ukraine ). He
1365-675: A pogrom. On 14 June, two Christian processions took place; a Catholic one through the market square celebrating Corpus Christi and an Orthodox one through Białystok's New Town celebrating the founding of a cathedral. The Orthodox procession was followed by a unit of soldiers. A bomb was thrown at the Catholic procession and shots were fired at the Orthodox procession. A watchman of a local school, Stanislaw Milyusski, and three women, Anna Demidyuk, Aleksandra Minkovskaya and Maria Kommisaryuk, were wounded. These incidents constituted signals for
1470-798: A presentation to the Legal Council of the League of Nations conference on international criminal law in Madrid , for which he prepared an essay on the Crime of Barbarity as a crime against international law. In 1934 Lemkin, under pressure from the Polish Foreign Minister for comments made at the Madrid conference, resigned his position and became a private solicitor in Warsaw. While in Warsaw, Lemkin attended numerous lectures organized by
1575-402: A reversed diacritic hook called an ogonek . Polish is a synthetic and fusional language which has seven grammatical cases . It has fixed penultimate stress and an abundance of palatal consonants . Contemporary Polish developed in the 1700s as the successor to the medieval Old Polish (10th–16th centuries) and Middle Polish (16th–18th centuries). Among the major languages, it
1680-491: A single word. This applies in particular to many combinations of preposition plus a personal pronoun, such as do niej ('to her'), na nas ('on us'), prze ze mnie ('because of me'), all stressed on the bolded syllable. The Polish alphabet derives from the Latin script but includes certain additional letters formed using diacritics . The Polish alphabet was one of three major forms of Latin-based orthography developed for Western and some South Slavic languages,
1785-677: A special adviser on foreign affairs to the War Department, largely due to his expertise in international law . In November 1944, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace published Axis Rule in Occupied Europe . This book included an extensive legal analysis of German rule in countries occupied by Nazi Germany during the course of World War II , along with the definition of the term genocide . Lemkin's idea of genocide as an offence against international law
1890-405: A verse by Jan Brzechwa ) is W Szczebrzeszynie chrząszcz brzmi w trzcinie [fʂt͡ʂɛbʐɛˈʂɨɲɛ ˈxʂɔw̃ʂt͡ʂ ˈbʐmi fˈtʂt͡ɕiɲɛ] ('In Szczebrzeszyn a beetle buzzes in the reed'). Unlike languages such as Czech, Polish does not have syllabic consonants – the nucleus of a syllable is always a vowel. The consonant /j/ is restricted to positions adjacent to a vowel. It also cannot precede
1995-478: A vowel when it precedes another vowel (it represents /j/ , palatalization of the preceding consonant, or both depending on analysis). Also the letters u and i sometimes represent only semivowels when they follow another vowel, as in autor /ˈawtɔr/ ('author'), mostly in loanwords (so not in native nauka /naˈu.ka/ 'science, the act of learning', for example, nor in nativized Mateusz /maˈte.uʂ/ 'Matthew'). Some loanwords , particularly from
2100-804: A young law student deeply conscious of antisemitic persecution, Lemkin learned about the Ottoman empire 's genocide of Armenians during World War I and was deeply disturbed by the absence of international provisions to charge Ottoman officials who carried out war crimes. Following the German invasion of Poland , Lemkin fled Europe and sought asylum in the United States , where he became an academic at Duke University . Lemkin coined genocide in 1943 or 1944 from two words: genos ( ‹See Tfd› Greek : γένος , 'family, clan, tribe, race, stock, kin') and -cide ( Latin : -cidium , 'killing'). The term
2205-711: Is a West Slavic language of the Lechitic group within the Indo-European language family written in the Latin script . It is primarily spoken in Poland and serves as the official language of the country, as well as the language of the Polish diaspora around the world. In 2024, there were over 39.7 million Polish native speakers. It ranks as the sixth most-spoken among languages of the European Union . Polish
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#17327726679682310-419: Is also spoken as a second language in eastern Germany , northern Czech Republic and Slovakia , western parts of Belarus and Ukraine as well as in southeast Lithuania and Latvia . Because of the emigration from Poland during different time periods, most notably after World War II , millions of Polish speakers can also be found in countries such as Canada , Argentina , Brazil , Israel , Australia ,
2415-837: Is forbidden. On 15 September 2018 the Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties Foundation (www.ucclf.ca) and its supporters in the US unveiled the world's first Ukrainian/English/Hebrew/Yiddish plaque honouring Lemkin for his recognition of the tragic famine of 1932–1933 in the Soviet Union, the Holodomor , at the Ukrainian Institute of America, in New York City, marking the 75th anniversary of Lemkin's address, "Soviet Genocide in
2520-427: Is most closely related to Slovak and Czech but differs in terms of pronunciation and general grammar. Additionally, Polish was profoundly influenced by Latin and other Romance languages like Italian and French as well as Germanic languages (most notably German ), which contributed to a large number of loanwords and similar grammatical structures. Extensive usage of nonstandard dialects has also shaped
2625-447: Is possible to say ko goście zoba czy li? – here kogo retains its usual stress (first syllable) in spite of the attachment of the clitic. Reanalysis of the endings as inflections when attached to verbs causes the different colloquial stress patterns. These stress patterns are considered part of a "usable" norm of standard Polish - in contrast to the "model" ("high") norm. Some common word combinations are stressed as if they were
2730-750: Is said to have considered Karim Azkoul in particular as an ally. The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was formally presented and adopted on 9 December 1948. In 1951, Lemkin only partially achieved his goal when the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide came into force, after the 20th nation had ratified the treaty. Lemkin's broader concerns over genocide, as set out in his Axis Rule , also embraced what may be considered as non-physical, namely, psychological acts of genocide. The book also detailed
2835-595: Is subdivided into regional dialects and maintains strict T–V distinction pronouns, honorifics , and various forms of formalities when addressing individuals. The traditional 32-letter Polish alphabet has nine additions ( ą , ć , ę , ł , ń , ó , ś , ź , ż ) to the letters of the basic 26-letter Latin alphabet , while removing three (x, q, v). Those three letters are at times included in an extended 35-letter alphabet. The traditional set comprises 23 consonants and 9 written vowels , including two nasal vowels ( ę , ą ) defined by
2940-429: Is that the rain of my work fell on a fallow plain," he wrote, "only this rain was a mixture of the blood and tears of eight million innocent people throughout the world. Included also were the tears of my parents and my friends." Lemkin was not widely known until the 1990s, when international prosecutions of genocide began in response to atrocities in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, and "genocide" began to be understood as
3045-524: Is the Old Polish language . Ultimately, Polish descends from the unattested Proto-Slavic language. The Book of Henryków (Polish: Księga henrykowska , Latin : Liber fundationis claustri Sanctae Mariae Virginis in Heinrichau ), contains the earliest known sentence written in the Polish language: Day, ut ia pobrusa, a ti poziwai (in modern orthography: Daj, uć ja pobrusza, a ti pocziwaj ;
3150-529: Is the most widely-used minority language in Lithuania's Vilnius County , by 26% of the population, according to the 2001 census results, as Vilnius was part of Poland from 1922 until 1939. Polish is found elsewhere in southeastern Lithuania. In Ukraine, it is most common in the western parts of Lviv and Volyn Oblasts , while in West Belarus it is used by the significant Polish minority, especially in
3255-430: The kropka (superior dot) over the letter ż , and the ogonek ("little tail") under the letters ą, ę . The letters q, v, x are used only in foreign words and names. Polish orthography is largely phonemic —there is a consistent correspondence between letters (or digraphs and trigraphs ) and phonemes (for exceptions see below). The letters of the alphabet and their normal phonemic values are listed in
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3360-401: The ś in święty ("holy") all represent the sound / ɕ / . The exceptions to the above rule are certain loanwords from Latin, Italian, French, Russian or English—where s before i is pronounced as s , e.g. sinus , sinologia , do re mi fa sol la si do , Saint-Simon i saint-simoniści , Sierioża , Siergiej , Singapur , singiel . In other loanwords
3465-521: The Białystok pogrom ." In his writings, Lemkin demonstrated a belief central to his thinking throughout his life: the suffering of Jews in eastern Poland was part of a larger pattern of injustice and violence that stretched back through history and around the world. The Lemkin family farm was located in an area in which fighting between Russian and German troops occurred during World War I . The family buried their books and valuables before taking shelter in
3570-534: The Brest and Grodno regions and in areas along the Lithuanian border. There are significant numbers of Polish speakers among Polish emigrants and their descendants in many other countries. In the United States , Polish Americans number more than 11 million but most of them cannot speak Polish fluently. According to the 2000 United States Census , 667,414 Americans of age five years and over reported Polish as
3675-582: The Free Polish University , including the classes of Emil Stanisław Rappaport and Wacław Makowski [ pl ] . In 1937, Lemkin was appointed a member of the Polish mission to the 4th Congress on Criminal Law in Paris , where he also introduced the possibility of defending peace through criminal law. Among the most important of his works of that period are a compendium of Polish criminal fiscal law, Prawo karne skarbowe (1938) and
3780-668: The Paris Peace Conference of 1945, but his proposal was turned down. Lemkin presented a draft resolution for a Genocide Convention treaty to a number of countries, in an effort to persuade them to sponsor the resolution. With the support of the United States, the resolution was placed before the General Assembly for consideration. Among his supporters at the UN there were the delegates of Lebanon, and Lemkin
3885-666: The Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth 's influence gave Polish the status of lingua franca in Central and Eastern Europe . The process of standardization began in the 14th century and solidified in the 16th century during the Middle Polish era. Standard Polish was based on various dialectal features, with the Greater Poland dialect group serving as the base. After World War II , Standard Polish became
3990-509: The Sack of Carthage , Mongol invasions and conquests and the persecution of Huguenots . Lemkin apparently came across the concept of mass atrocities while, at the age of 12, reading Quo Vadis by Henryk Sienkiewicz , in particular the passage where Nero threw Christians to the lions. About these stories, Lemkin wrote, "a line of blood led from the Roman arena through the gallows of France to
4095-522: The United Kingdom and the United States . Polish began to emerge as a distinct language around the 10th century, the process largely triggered by the establishment and development of the Polish state. At the time, it was a collection of dialect groups with some mutual features, but much regional variation was present. Mieszko I , ruler of the Polans tribe from the Greater Poland region, united
4200-482: The University of Stockholm . Curious about the manner of imposition of Nazi rule he started to gather Nazi decrees and ordinances, believing official documents often reflected underlying objectives without stating them explicitly. He spent much time in the central library of Stockholm, gathering, translating and analysing the documents he collected, looking for patterns of German behaviour. Lemkin's work led him to see
4305-474: The classical languages , have the stress on the antepenultimate (third-from-last) syllable. For example, fizyka ( /ˈfizɨka/ ) ('physics') is stressed on the first syllable. This may lead to a rare phenomenon of minimal pairs differing only in stress placement, for example muzyka /ˈmuzɨka/ 'music' vs. muzyka /muˈzɨka/ – genitive singular of muzyk 'musician'. When additional syllables are added to such words through inflection or suffixation ,
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4410-578: The flight and expulsion of Germans (1944–50) , as well as the expulsion of Ukrainians and Operation Vistula , the 1947 migration of Ukrainian minorities in the Recovered Territories in the west of the country, contributed to the country's linguistic homogeneity. The inhabitants of different regions of Poland still speak Polish somewhat differently, although the differences between modern-day vernacular varieties and standard Polish ( język ogólnopolski ) appear relatively slight. Most of
4515-404: The standard language ; considerable colloquialisms and expressions were directly borrowed from German or Yiddish and subsequently adopted into the vernacular of Polish which is in everyday use. Historically, Polish was a lingua franca , important both diplomatically and academically in Central and part of Eastern Europe . In addition to being the official language of Poland, Polish
4620-416: The 16th century, which is also regarded as the " Golden Age of Polish literature". The orthography was modified in the 19th century and in 1936. Tomasz Kamusella notes that "Polish is the oldest, non-ecclesiastical, written Slavic language with a continuous tradition of literacy and official use, which has lasted unbroken from the 16th century to this day." Polish evolved into the main sociolect of
4725-545: The 1933 Simele massacre . He became interested in war crimes upon learning about the 1921 trial of Soghomon Tehlirian for the assassination of Talaat Pasha . After reading about the 1921 assassination of Talat Pasha , the main perpetrator of the Armenian genocide, in Berlin by Soghomon Tehlirian , Lemkin asked Professor Juliusz Makarewicz [ pl ] why Talat Pasha could not have been tried for his crimes in
4830-486: The 2006 census, with a particular concentration in Toronto (91,810 speakers) and Montreal . The geographical distribution of the Polish language was greatly affected by the territorial changes of Poland immediately after World War II and Polish population transfers (1944–46) . Poles settled in the " Recovered Territories " in the west and north, which had previously been mostly German -speaking. Some Poles remained in
4935-694: The Armenians are not chickens". His eventual conclusion was that "Sovereignty, I argued, cannot be conceived as the right to kill millions of innocent people". Lemkin then moved on to Heidelberg University in Germany to study philosophy, returning to Lwów to study law in 1926. During the 1920s Lemkin was involved in Zionist activities. He was a columnist in the Warsaw based Yiddish Zionist newspaper Tsienistishe velt (The Zionist world) . Some scholars think that his Zionism had an influence on his conception of
5040-491: The Czarist army, brought to Białystok by Russian authorities, exchanged fire with Jewish paramilitary groups, thugs armed with knives and crowbars dispersed throughout the main areas of the city to continue the pogrom. Some Jewish sections of the city were protected by self-defense units, usually organized by the labor parties, which moved against the thugs and looters. They were in turn fired upon by Czarist dragoons. Thanks to
5145-583: The Henryków monastery, noted that "Hoc est in polonico" ("This is in Polish"). The earliest treatise on Polish orthography was written by Jakub Parkosz [ pl ] around 1470. The first printed book in Polish appeared in either 1508 or 1513, while the oldest Polish newspaper was established in 1661. Starting in the 1520s, large numbers of books in the Polish language were published, contributing to increased homogeneity of grammar and orthography. The writing system achieved its overall form in
5250-643: The Holocaust ; The only members of Lemkin's family in Europe who survived the Holocaust were his brother, Elias, and his brother's wife and two sons, who had been sent to a Soviet forced labor camp . Lemkin did however successfully help his brother and family to emigrate to Montreal , Quebec, Canada in 1948. After arriving in the United States, at the invitation of McDermott, Lemkin joined the law faculty at Duke University in North Carolina in 1941. During
5355-466: The Jewish self-defense units several working class sections of the city were spared the violence and thousands of lives were saved. In the following two days the attacks on people and property became more systematic and directed, resembling a coordinated military action more than a spontaneous outbreak of violence. Marauding mobs and tsarist soldiers broke into many Jewish homes and either killed people on
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#17327726679685460-479: The Orthodox procession. Once the shots were fired, the violence began immediately. Mobs of thugs, including members of the Black Hundreds , began looting Jewish owned stores and apartments on Nova-Linsk Street. Policemen and soldiers who had earlier followed the Orthodox procession either allowed the violence to happen or participated in it themselves. The first day of the pogrom was chaotic. While units of
5565-618: The Russian Empire to participate. A commission set up by the Russian Duma charged with investigating the pogrom held both the local police and the central authorities to blame for the tragedy. In 1908, on the initiative of Constitutional Democratic deputies in the Duma, some of the perpetrators of the violence were tried but the trial was widely criticized for handing out light sentences to those convicted and for failing to bring
5670-671: The Silesian language was recognized by ISO , and was attributed an ISO code of szl. Some additional characteristic but less widespread regional dialects include: Polish linguistics has been characterized by a strong strive towards promoting prescriptive ideas of language intervention and usage uniformity, along with normatively-oriented notions of language "correctness" (unusual by Western standards). Polish has six oral vowels (seven oral vowels in written form), which are all monophthongs , and two nasal vowels . The oral vowels are / i / (spelled i ), / ɨ / (spelled y and also transcribed as /ɘ/ or /ɪ/), / ɛ / (spelled e ), /
5775-566: The Summer of 1942 Lemkin lectured at the School of Military Government at the University of Virginia . He also wrote Military Government in Europe , a preliminary version of what would become, in two years, his magnum opus , entitled Axis Rule in Occupied Europe . In 1943 Lemkin was appointed consultant to the US Board of Economic Warfare and Foreign Economic Administration and later became
5880-675: The Ukraine". ...when Raphael Lemkin coined the word genocide in 1944 he cited the 1915 annihilation of Armenians as a seminal example of genocide " Lemkin's interest in the subject dates to his days as a student at Lvov University, when he intently followed attempts to prosecute the perpetration of the massacres of the Armenians Polish language Polish ( endonym : język polski , [ˈjɛ̃zɘk ˈpɔlskʲi] , polszczyzna [pɔlˈʂt͡ʂɘzna] or simply polski , [ˈpɔlskʲi] )
5985-458: The beginning of the pogrom. Witnesses reported that simultaneously with the shots someone shouted “Beat the Jews!” After the pogrom, a peasant who was arrested for unrelated charges in the nearby town of Zabłudów confessed that he had been paid a substantial amount of money to fire on the Orthodox procession in order to provoke the pogrom. Russian authorities falsely announced that Jews had fired on
6090-485: The cases mentioned above, the letter i if followed by another vowel in the same word usually represents / j / , yet a palatalization of the previous consonant is always assumed. The reverse case, where the consonant remains unpalatalized but is followed by a palatalized consonant, is written by using j instead of i : for example, zjeść , "to eat up". The letters ą and ę , when followed by plosives and affricates, represent an oral vowel followed by
6195-713: The corresponding sentence in modern Polish: Daj, niech ja pomielę, a ty odpoczywaj or Pozwól, że ja będę mełł, a ty odpocznij ; and in English: Come, let me grind, and you take a rest ), written around 1280. The book is exhibited in the Archdiocesal Museum in Wrocław, and as of 2015 has been added to UNESCO 's " Memory of the World " list. The medieval recorder of this phrase, the Cistercian monk Peter of
6300-479: The disappearance of yers . Polish can have word-initial and word-medial clusters of up to four consonants, whereas word-final clusters can have up to five consonants. Examples of such clusters can be found in words such as bezwzględny [bɛzˈvzɡlɛndnɨ] ('absolute' or 'heartless', 'ruthless'), źdźbło [ˈʑd͡ʑbwɔ] ('blade of grass'), wstrząs [ˈfstʂɔw̃s] ('shock'), and krnąbrność [ˈkrnɔmbrnɔɕt͡ɕ] ('disobedience'). A popular Polish tongue-twister (from
6405-430: The distinction between regular penultimate and exceptional antepenultimate stress. Another class of exceptions is verbs with the conditional endings -by, -bym, -byśmy , etc. These endings are not counted in determining the position of the stress; for example, zro biłbym ('I would do') is stressed on the first syllable, and zro bi libyśmy ('we would do') on the second. According to prescriptive authorities ,
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#17327726679686510-581: The domestic penal codes of these countries. Lemkin also worked with a team of lawyers from Arab delegations at the United Nations to build a case to prosecute French officials for genocide in Algeria. Lemkin also applied the term 'genocide' in his 1953 article "Soviet Genocide in Ukraine", which he presented as a speech in New York City. Although the speech itself does not use the word "Holodomor", Lemkin asserts that an intentional program of starvation
6615-531: The eastern parts of the former Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth wrote Polish in the Arabic alphabet. The Cyrillic script is used to a certain extent today by Polish speakers in Western Belarus , especially for religious texts. The diacritics used in the Polish alphabet are the kreska (graphically similar to the acute accent ) over the letters ć, ń, ó, ś, ź and through the letter in ł ;
6720-420: The end of words (where devoicing occurs) and in certain consonant clusters (where assimilation occurs). For details, see Voicing and devoicing in the article on Polish phonology. Most Polish words are paroxytones (that is, the stress falls on the second-to-last syllable of a polysyllabic word), although there are exceptions. Polish permits complex consonant clusters, which historically often arose from
6825-414: The entire country. Polish has traditionally been described as consisting of three to five main regional dialects: Silesian and Kashubian , spoken in Upper Silesia and Pomerania respectively, are thought of as either Polish dialects or distinct languages , depending on the criteria used. Kashubian contains a number of features not found elsewhere in Poland, e.g. nine distinct oral vowels (vs.
6930-412: The following table. The following digraphs and trigraphs are used: Voiced consonant letters frequently come to represent voiceless sounds (as shown in the tables); this occurs at the end of words and in certain clusters, due to the neutralization mentioned in the Phonology section above. Occasionally also voiceless consonant letters can represent voiced sounds in clusters. The spelling rule for
7035-445: The idea of genocide, but there is a debate about the nature of this influence. Lemkin worked as an Assistant Prosecutor in the District Court of Brzeżany (since 1945 Berezhany, Ukraine) and Warsaw, followed by a private legal practice in Warsaw. From 1929 to 1934, Lemkin was the Public Prosecutor for the district court of Warsaw. In 1930 he was promoted to Deputy Prosecutor in a local court in Brzeżany . While Public Prosecutor, Lemkin
7140-435: The language spoken at home, which is about 1.4% of people who speak languages other than English , 0.25% of the US population, and 6% of the Polish-American population. The largest concentrations of Polish speakers reported in the census (over 50%) were found in three states: Illinois (185,749), New York (111,740), and New Jersey (74,663). Enough people in these areas speak Polish that PNC Financial Services (which has
7245-403: The largest stores in the city. The pogrom was the subject matter of many news reports and articles, including a special manifesto issued by the Polish Socialist Party condemning the occurrence. Russian authorities tried to blame the pogrom on the local Polish population in order to stir up the hatred between two ethnic groups (both of which generally opposed the Tsar). However Jewish survivors of
7350-442: The legal team of Robert H. Jackson , Chief US prosecutor at the Nuremberg Tribunal . The concept of " genocide " was non-existent in any international laws at the time, and this became one of the reasons for Lemkin's view that the trial did not serve complete justice on prosecuting Nazi atrocities targeting ethnic and religious groups. Lemkin committed the rest of his life to push for an international convention , which in his view,
7455-439: The letter y . The predominant stress pattern in Polish is penultimate stress – in a word of more than one syllable, the next-to-last syllable is stressed. Alternating preceding syllables carry secondary stress, e.g. in a four-syllable word, where the primary stress is on the third syllable, there will be secondary stress on the first. Each vowel represents one syllable, although the letter i normally does not represent
7560-431: The middle aged and young speak vernaculars close to standard Polish, while the traditional dialects are preserved among older people in rural areas. First-language speakers of Polish have no trouble understanding each other, and non-native speakers may have difficulty recognizing the regional and social differences. The modern standard dialect , often termed as "correct Polish", is spoken or at least understood throughout
7665-460: The most widely spoken variant of Polish across the country, and most dialects stopped being the form of Polish spoken in villages. Poland is one of the most linguistically homogeneous European countries; nearly 97% of Poland's citizens declare Polish as their first language . Elsewhere, Poles constitute large minorities in areas which were once administered or occupied by Poland, notably in neighboring Lithuania , Belarus , and Ukraine . Polish
7770-587: The name Tarzan . Bia%C5%82ystok pogrom The Białystok pogrom was one of a series of violent outbreaks against Jews between 1903 and 1908, including the Kishinev pogrom , the Odessa pogrom , and the Kiev pogrom . At the beginning of the 20th century, Białystok was a city with a predominantly Jewish population. In 1897, the Jewish population numbered 41,900 (out of about 66,000, or about 63%). Białystok
7875-649: The nobles in Poland–Lithuania in the 15th century. The history of Polish as a language of state governance begins in the 16th century in the Kingdom of Poland . Over the later centuries, Polish served as the official language in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania , Congress Poland , the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria , and as the administrative language in the Russian Empire 's Western Krai . The growth of
7980-673: The others being Czech orthography and Croatian orthography , the last of these being a 19th-century invention trying to make a compromise between the first two. Kashubian uses a Polish-based system, Slovak uses a Czech-based system, and Slovene follows the Croatian one; the Sorbian languages blend the Polish and the Czech ones. Historically, Poland's once diverse and multi-ethnic population utilized many forms of scripture to write Polish. For instance, Lipka Tatars and Muslims inhabiting
8085-428: The owner of a spinning mill, as he walked to the synagogue on Yom Kippur . On October 6, Farber threw a bomb into a police station, injuring several policemen inside. Farber himself was killed by the explosion. On February 21, 1905, the district's Chief of Police, Yelchin, was killed, and on June 8 the city's new Police Chief, Pelenkin, was wounded by another bomb blast. In July 1905, two police officers were wounded by
8190-401: The palatal sounds / ɕ / , / ʑ / , / tɕ / , / dʑ / and / ɲ / is as follows: before the vowel i the plain letters s, z, c, dz, n are used; before other vowels the combinations si, zi, ci, dzi, ni are used; when not followed by a vowel the diacritic forms ś, ź, ć, dź, ń are used. For example, the s in siwy ("grey-haired"), the si in siarka ("sulfur") and
8295-550: The police in the city. Between the years 1905 and 1906 there were seven police chiefs. The police did not enter Surazh Street, which was considered a stronghold of anarchists. On 11 June 1906 the Police Chief of Białystok, Dierkacz, was murdered, most likely on the orders of the Russian commissar and fervent anti-semite Szeremietiev. Dierkacz was known for his liberal sympathies and opposition to anti-semitism; for this he
8400-550: The police officer Kulchitsky was killed, followed by the killings of gendarme officer Rubansky, and NCO Syrolevich, who were killed on March 18. In May 1906, police officer Sheyman was killed by anarchists. Later, the policemen Zenevich and Alekseychuk were wounded, three privates of the Vladimir infantry regiment were wounded and the Cossack Lopatin was killed. These events led to a demoralization and disorganization of
8505-520: The previously Polish-ruled territories in the east that were annexed by the USSR , resulting in the present-day Polish-speaking communities in Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine, although many Poles were expelled from those areas to areas within Poland's new borders. To the east of Poland, the most significant Polish minority lives in a long strip along either side of the Lithuania - Belarus border. Meanwhile,
8610-578: The real organizers of the pogrom to justice. The victims of the pogrom were buried in a mass grave in the Bagnowka cemetery and a memorial obelisk was erected with a poem in Hebrew by Zalman Sznejur inscribed upon it. The poem begins with the words "Stand strong and be proud, you pillar of sorrow" and the monument came to be known as the Pillar of Sorrow . The monument survived through World War II and
8715-540: The same applies to the first and second person plural past tense endings -śmy, -ście , although this rule is often ignored in colloquial speech (so zro bi liśmy 'we did' should be prescriptively stressed on the second syllable, although in practice it is commonly stressed on the third as zrobi li śmy ). These irregular stress patterns are explained by the fact that these endings are detachable clitics rather than true verbal inflections: for example, instead of ko go zoba czy liście? ('whom did you see?') it
8820-410: The series of affricate and palatal consonants that resulted from four Proto-Slavic palatalizations and two further palatalizations that took place in Polish. The full set of consonants, together with their most common spellings, can be presented as follows (although other phonological analyses exist): Neutralization occurs between voiced – voiceless consonant pairs in certain environments, at
8925-506: The six of standard Polish) and (in the northern dialects) phonemic word stress, an archaic feature preserved from Common Slavic times and not found anywhere else among the West Slavic languages . However, it was described by some linguists as lacking most of the linguistic and social determinants of language-hood. Many linguistic sources categorize Silesian as a regional language separate from Polish, while some consider Silesian to be
9030-533: The spot or dragged them outside to murder them. It was only at the end of the third day that Stolypin , the Minister of Internal Affairs, instructed regional governors and mayors to suppress the pogrom. The violence ended abruptly upon the withdrawal of Russian troops from the city. During the course of the pogrom 88 people were killed, including 82 Jews, although some sources list a higher number of 200. A total of 169 shops and houses had been plundered, among them
9135-494: The stress normally becomes regular. For example, uniwersytet ( /uɲiˈvɛrsɨtɛt/ , 'university') has irregular stress on the third (or antepenultimate) syllable, but the genitive uniwersytetu ( /uɲivɛrsɨˈtɛtu/ ) and derived adjective uniwersytecki ( /uɲivɛrsɨˈtɛt͡skʲi/ ) have regular stress on the penultimate syllables. Loanwords generally become nativized to have penultimate stress. In psycholinguistic experiments, speakers of Polish have been demonstrated to be sensitive to
9240-462: The various techniques which had been employed to achieve genocide. Although Lemkin was a Zionist through his entire life, during this period he downplayed his Zionist sympathies in order to convince the Arab and Muslim delegates in the UN to support the UN genocide convention. Between 1953 and 1957, Lemkin worked directly with representatives of several governments, such as Egypt, to outlaw genocide under
9345-525: The violence reported that the local Polish population had in fact sheltered many Jews during the pogrom and did not participate in it. Apolinary Hartglas , a Polish Jewish leader and later a member of the Polish Sejm , together with Ze'ev Jabotinsky , managed to obtain secret documents issued by Szeremietiev which showed that the pogrom had been organized well in advance by Russian authorities who had actually transported railroad workers from deep within
9450-563: The vowel i is changed to y , e.g. Syria , Sybir , synchronizacja , Syrakuzy . The following table shows the correspondence between the sounds and spelling: Digraphs and trigraphs are used: Similar principles apply to / kʲ / , / ɡʲ / , / xʲ / and /lʲ/ , except that these can only occur before vowels, so the spellings are k, g, (c)h, l before i , and ki, gi, (c)hi, li otherwise. Most Polish speakers, however, do not consider palatalization of k, g, (c)h or l as creating new sounds. Except in
9555-526: The war, Lemkin chose to remain in the United States. Starting in 1948, he gave lectures on criminal law at Yale University . In 1955, he became a Professor of Law at Rutgers School of Law in Newark. Lemkin also continued his campaign for international laws defining and forbidding genocide, which he had championed ever since the Madrid conference of 1933. He proposed a similar ban on crimes against humanity during
9660-495: The wholesale destruction of the nations over which Germans took control as an overall aim. Some documents Lemkin analysed had been signed by Hitler, implementing ideas of Mein Kampf on Lebensraum , new living space to be inhabited by Germans. With the help of his pre-war associate McDermott, Lemkin received permission to enter the United States , arriving in 1941. Although he managed to save his own life, he lost 49 relatives in
9765-443: The word, the phoneme / x / can be spelt h or ch , the phoneme / ʐ / can be spelt ż or rz , and / u / can be spelt u or ó . In several cases it determines the meaning, for example: może ("maybe") and morze ("sea"). In occasional words, letters that normally form a digraph are pronounced separately. For example, rz represents /rz/ , not / ʐ / , in words like zamarzać ("freeze") and in
9870-870: The worst crime of all crimes. For his work on international law and the prevention of war crimes, Lemkin received a number of awards, including the Cuban Grand Cross of the Order of Carlos Manuel de Cespedes in 1950, the Stephen Wise Award of the American Jewish Congress in 1951, and the Cross of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1955. On the 50th anniversary of the Convention entering into force, Lemkin
9975-741: Was a polyglot , fluent in nine languages and reading fourteen. His first published book was a 1926 translation of the Hayim Nahman Bialik Hebrew novella "Behind the Fence" into Polish, with the title Noah and Marinka. It was in Białystok that Lemkin became interested in laws against mass atrocities after learning about the Armenian genocide in the Ottoman Empire , then later the experience of Assyrians massacred in Iraq during
10080-770: Was also honored by the UN Secretary-General as "an inspiring example of moral engagement." He was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize ten times. In 1989 he was awarded, posthumously, the Four Freedoms Award for the Freedom of Worship. Lemkin is the subject of the plays Lemkin's House by Catherine Filloux (2005) and If The Whole Body Dies: Raphael Lemkin and the Treaty Against Genocide by Robert Skloot (2006). He
10185-616: Was also profiled in the 2014 American documentary film, Watchers of the Sky . Every year, The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights ( T’ruah ) gives the Raphael Lemkin Human Rights Award to a layperson who draws on his or her Jewish values to be a human rights leader. On 20 November 2015, Lemkin's article Soviet genocide in Ukraine was added to the Russian index of "extremist publications", whose distribution in Russia
10290-597: Was also secretary of the Committee on Codification of the Laws of the Republic of Poland, which codified the penal codes of Poland. During this period Lemkin also taught law at the religious-Zionist Tachkemoni College in Warsaw, and took part in Zionist fund raising. Lemkin, working with Duke University law professor Malcolm McDermott , translated The Polish Penal Code of 1932 from Polish to English. In 1933 Lemkin made
10395-618: Was buried in Flushing, Queens , at Mount Hebron Cemetery . At the time of his death, Lemkin left several unfinished works, including an Introduction to the Study of Genocide and an ambitious three-volume History of Genocide that contained seventy proposed chapters and a book-length analysis of Nazi war crimes at Nuremberg. The United States, Lemkin's adopted country, did not ratify the Genocide Convention during his lifetime. He believed that his efforts to prevent genocide had failed. "The fact
10500-658: Was essential to prevent the rise of "future Hitlers ". On 9 December 1948, the United Nations approved the Genocide Convention , with many of its clauses based on Lemkin's proposals. Lemkin was born Rafał Lemkin on 24 June 1900 in Bezwodne , a village in the Volkovyssky Uyezd of the Grodno Governorate of the Russian Empire (present-day Belarus ). He grew up in a Polish Jewish family on
10605-483: Was included in the 1944 research-work " Axis Rule in Occupied Europe ", wherein Lemkin documented mass-killings of ethnic groups deemed " untermenschen " by Nazi Germany . The concept of " genocide " was defined by Lemkin to refer to the various extermination campaigns launched by Nazi Germany to wipe out entire racial groups, including European Jews in the Holocaust . After the Second World War , Lemkin worked on
10710-617: Was primarily a city known for its textile manufacturing, commerce and industry. During the 1905 Russian Revolution the city was a center of the radical labour movement, with strong organisations of the Bund and the Polish Socialist Party as well as the more radical anarchists of the Black Banner association. In the summer of 1904, an eighteen-year-old anarchist, Nisan Farber, stabbed and seriously wounded Avraam Kogan,
10815-507: Was respected by both the Jewish Bund and the Polish Socialist Party . On a previous occasion, when Russian soldiers attacked Jews in the marketplace, Dierkacz had sent in his policemen to put down the violence and had declared that a pogrom against the Jews would occur “only over his dead body”. His murder was a foreboding of the violence to come, as people in the city noted that after Dierkacz's death Russian soldiers began preparing for
10920-534: Was the "third prong" of Soviet Russification of Ukraine, and disagrees that the deaths were simply a matter of disastrous economic policy because of the substantially Ukrainian ethnic profile of small farms in Ukraine at the time. In the last years of his life, Lemkin was living in poverty in a New York apartment. In 1959, at the age of 59, he died of a heart attack in New York City . Only several close people attended his funeral at Riverside Church . Lemkin
11025-599: Was widely accepted by the international community and was one of the legal bases of the Nuremberg Trials . In 1945 to 1946, Lemkin became an advisor to Supreme Court of the United States Justice and Nuremberg Trial chief counsel Robert H. Jackson . The book became one of the foundational texts in Holocaust studies , and the study of totalitarianism, mass violence, and genocide studies. After
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