85-921: The Brześć Ghetto or the Ghetto in Brest on the Bug , also: Brześć nad Bugiem Ghetto, and Brest-Litovsk Ghetto ( Polish : getto w Brześciu nad Bugiem , Yiddish : בריסק or בריסק-ד׳ליטע ) was a Nazi ghetto created in occupied Western Belarus in December 1941, six months after the German troops had invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941. Less than a year after the creation of the ghetto, around October 15–18, 1942, most of approximately 20,000 Jewish inhabitants of Brest (Brześć) were murdered; over 5,000 were executed locally at
170-499: 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
255-417: A battalion of 500. Browning provides evidence to support the notion that not all of the men were hateful antisemites . He includes the testimony of men who said that they begged to be released from the task and to be placed elsewhere. In one instance, two fathers claimed that they could not kill children and so asked to be given other work. Browning also tells of a man who demanded his release, obtained it, and
340-530: A cross-examination by Irving, Browning countered Irving's suggestion that the last chapter of the Holocaust had yet to be written (implying there were grounds for doubting its reality) by saying, "We are still discovering things about the Roman Empire . There is no last chapter in history." Browning countered Irving's argument that the absence of a written Führer order from Adolf Hitler to carry out
425-771: 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
510-669: 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
595-520: 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
680-543: 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,
765-454: 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
850-402: 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
935-491: 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,
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#17328012575521020-405: 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
1105-677: A visiting professor at the University of Washington in Seattle. Browning has acted as an expert witness at several Holocaust-related trials, including the second trial of Ernst Zündel (1988) and Irving v Penguin Books Ltd (2000). Born in Durham, North Carolina , Browning was raised in Chicago , where his father was professor of philosophy at Northwestern University and his mother
1190-478: 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
1275-805: A young boy named M. Engelman and sisters Maria and Szulamit Kacaf) and Sofia and Piotr Gołowczenko (for saving Izrael, Nechemii and Lii Mankierów). A Polish priest, Father Jan Urbanowicz, Dean of the Holy Cross Parish in Brześć, was also executed by the Germans in June 1943 for aiding Jews. The former ghetto has been the site of construction for Brest. In February 2019, a mass grave was discovered, with 600 bodies recovered, though it has been estimated that over 1,000 could be in this particular grave. Shoes, clothes, and personal items were recovered since January. By March 2019, over 1,214 bodies were recovered from
1360-711: 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
1445-419: 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 ,
1530-427: 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
1615-447: 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
1700-595: 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
1785-524: 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 ;
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#17328012575521870-581: Is the author of nine books, including Ordinary Men (1992) and The Origins of the Final Solution (2004). Browning taught at Pacific Lutheran University from 1974 to 1999 and eventually became a Distinguished Professor. In 1999, he moved to UNC to accept the appointment as Frank Porter Graham Professor of History, and in 2006 he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . After retiring from UNC in 2014, he became
1955-529: 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
2040-430: 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
2125-401: 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
2210-596: 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
2295-600: The Brest Fortress on the orders of Karl Eberhard Schöngarth ; the rest in the secluded forest of the Bronna Góra extermination site (the Bronna Mount, Belarusian : Бронная гара ), sent there aboard Holocaust trains under the guise of 'resettlement'. Before World War II, Brześć nad Bugiem (known as Brześć Litewski before the partitions , now Brest, Belarus ) was the capital of Polesie Voivodeship in
2380-666: 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
2465-539: The Second Polish Republic (1918–39) with the most visible Jewish presence. In the twenty years of Poland's sovereignty, of the total of 36 brand new schools established in the city, there were ten public, and five private Jewish schools inaugurated, with Yiddish and Hebrew as the language of instruction. The first ever Jewish school in Brześć history opened in 1920, almost immediately after Poland's return to independence. In 1936 Jews constituted 41.3% of
2550-522: 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
2635-474: 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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2720-578: 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
2805-404: 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
2890-564: The " granary " of the Reich and opposed the ethnic cleansing schemes of Heinrich Himmler and Arthur Greiser as economically disruptive. An attempt to settle the difficulties at a conference between Himmler, Göring, Frank and Greiser at Göring's Karinhall estate on February 12, 1940 was scuttled in May, when Himmler showed Hitler a memo, "Some Thoughts on the Treatment of Alien Population in
2975-416: 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
3060-486: 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
3145-546: The Brześć population, or 21,518 citizens. Some 80.3% of private enterprises were owned by Jews. Before World War I , Brześć (then known as Brest-Litovsk) was controlled by the Russian Empire for a hundred years following the partitions of Poland , and all commercial activity was largely neglected. Brest-Litovsk was renamed as Brześć nad Bugiem (Brest on the Bug) in the Second Polish Republic on March 20, 1923. Just before
3230-584: The East," on May 15, 1940, which Hitler called "good and correct." Himmler's memo, which called for expelling all of the Jews of German-ruled Europe to Africa, reducing Poles to a "leaderless laboring class" and Hitler's approval of the memo led, as Browning noted, to a change in German policy in occupied Poland along the lines suggested by Himmler. Browning called the Göring-Frank–Himmler-Greiser dispute
3315-561: The German Einsatzgruppe under SS-Obergruppenführer Karl Eberhard Schöngarth massacred 5,000 Jews including 13-year-old boys and 70-year-old men in a single night. The Order Police battalions passing through Brześć and Białystok carried out significantly larger shooting actions. "The first massacre of Brest Jews – wrote Christopher Browning – was perpetrated not by the notorious Einsatzgruppen but rather by Police Battalion 307 with Wehrmacht support, in mid-July, on
3400-709: The German Foreign Office: A study of Referat D III of Abteilung Deutschland, 1940–43 (1978). Browning married Jennifer Jane Horn on September 19, 1970 and had two children: Kathryn Elizabeth and Anne DeSilvey. Browning is best known for his 1992 book Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland , a study of German Ordnungspolizei (Order Police) Reserve Unit 101 . The battalion committed massacres and round-ups of Jews for deportations to Nazi death camps in German-occupied Poland in 1942. The conclusion of
3485-712: The Governor-General of occupied Poland. The SS favored " The Nisko/Lublin Plan " to create a "Jewish reservation" in Lublin , in occupied Poland, into which all the Jews of Greater Germany, Poland and the former Czechoslovakia would be expelled. Frank was opposed to the "Lublin Plan" on the ground that the SS were "dumping" Jews into his territory. Frank and Hermann Göring wished for the General Government to become
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3570-583: 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
3655-671: 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 ), /
3740-557: The Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, and Brześć was captured the same day. On 24 June 1941, a 15-man Sicherheitspolizei detachment, commanded by SS-Untersturmführer Schmidt, arrived in Brześć. On December 16, 1941, the Germans placed Brest under the administration of the Reichskommissariat Ukraine and established a Nazi ghetto in the city for some 18,000 Polish Jews , who still resided there after months of deportations and ad hoc mass executions. On July 10–12, 1941
3825-453: The book, influenced in part by the famous Milgram experiments popularized in the 1970s, was that the men of Unit 101 killed out of obedience to authority and peer pressure . As presented in the study, the men of Unit 101 were not ardent Nazis but ordinary middle-aged men of working class background from Hamburg , who had been drafted but found to be ineligible for regular military duty. After their return to occupied Poland in June 1942,
3910-570: The bureaucracy were willing to countenance the mass murder of Jews. Browning divides the officials of the General Government of occupied Poland into two factions. The "productionists" favored using Jews of the ghettos as a source of slave labor to help with the war effort. The "attritionists" favored letting them starve and die of disease. At the same time, there were struggles between the Schutzstaffel (SS) and Hans Frank ,
3995-485: 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
4080-430: The children's home, and elderly at the home for the retired were killed in the ghetto itself. In the course of 2 days, some 16,000 were killed. Resistance organizations formed by Jews in the camp, "Liberation" and "Revenge", planned on attacking the Germans during the liquidation to create a diversion allowing Jews to escape. These plans were foiled by the Germans who were informed of these plans. Some Jews managed to avoid
4165-713: 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
4250-479: 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
4335-430: 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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#17328012575524420-531: 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 ;
4505-596: The end of 1941, for several individuals preventing their expulsion. Several families were hidden by the family of the head of the local communist underground P. Zhulikov (who perished himself in 1943). Following the recapture of the city by the Red Army in July 1944, only some 20 Jews are known to have survived in Brześć. Recognized rescuers from the Brześć area include P. Grigoriewicz, Maria i Ignacy Kurianowiczowie, W. Niesterenko, A. Łabasiuk, A. Stelmaszuk. P. Makaren (for saving
4590-420: 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
4675-476: 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.
4760-474: The extermination of Jews as the improvisation and radicalization of a polycratic regime. Browning has argued that the Final Solution was the result of the " cumulative radicalization " (to use Hans Mommsen 's phrase) of the German state, especially when it was faced with the self-imposed "problem" of three million (mostly Polish) Jews, whom the Nazis had imprisoned in ghettos between 1939 and 1941. The intention
4845-467: 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
4930-485: The genocide of the European Jews constituted evidence against the standard Holocaust history. Browning maintained that such an order need never have been written since Hitler had almost certainly made statements to his leading subordinates indicating his wishes regarding the Jews, which rendered irrelevant the question of an extant written order. Browning testified that several experts on Nazi Germany believe there
5015-489: The killing processes. Browning asserted that the only reason that historians debate whether five or six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust was a lack of access to archives in the former Soviet Union . Browning is a "moderate functionalist" in the debate about the origins of the Holocaust and focuses on the structure and institution of the Third Reich , rather than Hitler's intentions and orders. Functionalism sees
5100-548: 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
5185-439: 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
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#17328012575525270-404: The liquidation by going into hiding. The local police, consisting of Poles as well as Belarusians and Ukrainians, conducted regular searches for hiding Jews. Captured Jews were either shot by the police, or sent to prison. Some 300 to 400 Jews captured and held in the prison were subsequently transported by train to Baranowicze. Members of the communist underground acquired identification cards, at
5355-593: The mass grave, which is measured at 40 meters in length and 2 meters deep. The Jewish community of Brest, and the Simon Wiesenthal Center has requested the site become an official Holocaust memorial. 52°6′N 23°42′E / 52.100°N 23.700°E / 52.100; 23.700 Polish language Polish ( endonym : język polski , [ˈjɛ̃zɘk ˈpɔlskʲi] , polszczyzna [pɔlˈʂt͡ʂɘzna] or simply polski , [ˈpɔlskʲi] )
5440-433: The men were ordered to terrorize Jews in the ghettos during Operation Reinhard and carry out massacres of Polish Jews (men, women, and children) in the towns of Józefów and Łomazy . In other cases, they were ordered to kill a certain number of Jews in a town or area, usually helped by Trawnikis . The commander of the unit once gave his men the choice of opting out if they found it too hard, but fewer than 12 men did so in
5525-431: 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
5610-460: 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
5695-541: The name Tarzan . Christopher Browning Christopher Robert Browning (born May 22, 1944) is an American historian and is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC). A specialist on the Holocaust , Browning is known for his work documenting the Final Solution , the behavior of those implementing Nazi policies, and the use of survivor testimony. He
5780-586: 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
5865-430: The orders of Himmler's chief of Order Police, Kurt Daluege .". In August 1941 the Germans extracted a payment of some 26 million rubles worth of cash and valuables from the Jews of Brześć. On 15 October 1942, Jews were rounded up for "relocation", and murdered over execution pits north-east of the city at the Bronna Mount ( Bronna Góra ) forest. A few hundred Jews: infirm, Jewish police, hospital personnel, children at
5950-673: 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
6035-432: The outbreak of World War II, there was an anti-Jewish riot at the bazaar in Brześć on May 15, 1939. Some Jewish sources categorize it as Polish although ethnic Belarusians constituted 17.8% of the population, and preached militant nationalism among its youth similar to local Ukrainians and Russians, under systematic indoctrination by Soviet emissaries. In September 1939 during the German and Soviet invasion of Poland ,
6120-401: 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
6205-520: 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,
6290-540: 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
6375-410: 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
6460-506: 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
6545-494: 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
6630-706: The town of Brześć (Brest) was overrun by the German troops and handed over to the Russians during the German–Soviet military parade in Brest-Litovsk on September 22, 1939. The whole province was soon annexed by the Soviet Union following mock elections by the NKVD secret police, conducted among the locals in the atmosphere of fear and terror. The mass deportations of Poles and Jews to Siberia followed. The German armed forces launched Operation Barbarossa against
6715-563: 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
6800-443: 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
6885-660: Was a nurse. He received his BA in history from Oberlin College in 1967 and his MA, also in history, from the University of Wisconsin–Madison (UW) in 1968. He then taught for a year at St. John's Military Academy and for two years at Allegheny College . He was awarded his PhD from UW in 1975 for the thesis "Referat D III of Abteilung Deutschland and the Jewish Policy of the German Foreign Office 1940–1943." That became his first book, The Final Solution and
6970-478: Was largely written to rebut Browning but ended up being criticized much more. When David Irving sued Deborah Lipstadt for libel in 1996, Browning was one of the leading witnesses for the defense. Another historian, Robert Jan van Pelt , wrote a report on the gas chambers at the Auschwitz concentration camp , and Browning wrote a report on the evidence for the extermination of Jews. During his testimony and
7055-590: Was no written Führer order for the " Final Solution of the Jewish Question" but that no historian doubts the reality of the Nazi genocide. Browning noted that Hitler's secret speech to his Gauleiters on December 12, 1941 alluded to genocide as the "Final Solution." Browning rejected Irving's claim that there was no reliable statistical information on the size of the prewar Jewish population in Europe or on
7140-537: Was promoted once he had returned to Germany. Ordinary Men achieved much acclaim but was criticized by Daniel Goldhagen for missing what he called a specifically German political culture, characterized by "eliminationist anti-semitism" in causing the Nazi genocides. In a review in The New Republic in July 1992, Goldhagen called Ordinary Men a book that fails in its central interpretation. Goldhagen's controversial 1996 book Hitler's Willing Executioners
7225-547: Was to have those and other Jews resident in the Third Reich expelled eastward once a destination was selected. Browning argued that the phrase "Final Solution to the Jewish Question," which was first used in 1939, meant until 1941 a "territorial solution." The military developments of the Second World War and the turf wars within the German bureaucracy made expulsion lose its viability such that by 1941, members of
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