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Slavic too. In Polish: żegnała (she said goodbye) za często (literally too often, but used here it would convey the meaning and sound more natural than literal za wiele razy).

BTW żegnała encodes the gender. If it was he it would be żegnał. So arguably it's more compressed than latin.

BTW2 the real compression happens in conditionals żegnałaby = she would have said goodbye



Polish "za" has so many uses, it's really mind-boggling (as someone learning Polish)


Interesting, 'wiele' seems to be a distant cousin to the dutch 'veel' by way of 'viele' (German). More so because 'w' is pronounced as 'v'.


Yup Polish has A LOT of loanwords. Most people don't realize how many. My favorite example is how Polish stole Latin, German and Czech words for color and now each mean different things :)

Kolor - color Farba - paint Barwa - hue

Also Polish is surprisingly similar to Sanskrit, for example only recently I realized that budzik (alarm clock) pobudka (waking up someone as a noun) and all related bud- words have the same word root as Buddha (the awaken one). Blew my mind :)


My favorites: adidasy (for generic gym shoes) and electrolux (for vacuum cleaner).

I'm not sure if those are still in generic use but when I lived there long ago these were Western brands that you simply could not buy in Poland and so the brand names became stand-ins for the objects themselves.

The Buddha reference is hilarious!




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