hey its me

Those damn Pollacks - they're invading the world I tell you! Pretending they funny....but deep down inside there are dark and sinister plans being hatched...you just wait and see!

Have you heard of the Polish terrorist trying to fly into World Trade Center building? But his hot-air baloon just kept bouncing off the building...

Bill: BTW, fix your signature! No self-respecting Pole would misspell their surname like that! :-)

Peteski

Don't tell me they're getting together with the Hungarians again! LOL

:-)

Add "lak" or "ski" to the end and it's fixed :-)

Hungarians? Neah! It is Czechs this time around with some Slovakians thrown in for variety. The "Polish Power" is back in full swing!! :-)

As far as Bill's surname goes I was actually serious - he transposed couple of letters. You know, not all Polish names end in "ski" or "cki" or "lak" for that matter. :-)

Peteski de Pudski

Uh, what have I misspelled that I have been doing since I learned to spell? Can I blame this on the US Army? Dad never corrected the sergeant when he mangled the pronunciation. (duh!) But I've lived with people misspelling it 610 ways and mangling the sound. My sister about had a cow when she was here for the funeral and heard the minister pronounce it Lancaster County-style.

Bill Piotrowicz

any better?

Relax Bill, I just saw one of your recent posts on this thread signed as "Bill Banasazak, MFE Sr." I didn't bother to look at any of your past I just assumed that you have a signature file set up which automatically adds that misspelled signature to the end of all your posts. Well, I was wrong. It appears that the misspelling was only in that lone message. I just checked and your other messages have "Banaszak" spelled correctly. So, it appears that you manually type up your signature in each message.

I'm very familiar with the "never assume because you'll make an ... of you and me" saying and yet I assumed here against the better judgment. Sorry!!

My name is also mispronounced by Americans but I come to expect that. :-)

Piotr Wisniewski

My friend's name is Gryzelak, first name Szymon. He likes to tell people when they ask for his email address: "spell it like it's pronounced"!

Ah, an attack of fumble fingers! I tend to pride myself on my spelling so I need an occasional comeuppance. You share your first name with my deceased father (and many others, I'm sure). Even though I know little Polish I do think I can pronounce most of the sounds. The main exception is the 'rz' sound and I just discovered Basia, the singer. Of course her last name is Trzetrzelewska. ;) One of your distant relatives was in the local hobby shop once and was surprised to hear me pronounce his name correctly after he spelled it out for the owner. So I told him mine, correctly, and we had a good laugh over our shared troubles.

Bill Banaszak, MFE Sr.

Very much the way my father approached English. I'm still working my way through his VCR tapes, trying to figure out some of the titles. ;)

Bill Banaszak, MFE Sr.

Ha! I work with a Polish Starszy Chorozy Sztabowy, first name Zbigniew!

I can manage that, and Zbyszek, but my Brit and US co-workers gave up and he now answers to "ZeeBee"!

Mind you, two years in Warszawa helped my pronunciation, even if I was too low down the military pecking order to get language training... ;0)

Chris

Ah yes, those Polish sounds! Between "cz", "sz" and "rz" the later is probably most difficult for English speakers. Of course if you are spelling you also have to properly choose either "rz" or "z"(with dot on top) for specific words. I also heard Polish language described as a "vowel deprived language" and it certainly rings true.

I made things easier on everybody by taking on nickname "Peteski". Pronounced Peet-ski. :-) It was given to me by a co-worker at my first job in USA and it stuck.

It sounds like your father spells English words same way my mom does. It's a hoot trying to figure out what she wrote.

Peteski

My cousin used to work for the State of Maryland in the library. She was told once that they were going to get updated software to allow them to correctly catalogue Polish language books. They hadn't by the time she retired so the books are probably in the wrong places phonetically. 'Z' with a dot? I think that's a new one to me. When I read Sienkiewicz's Trilogy (in English) I was confused by the names. None of them looked Polish. It so happened that I had purchased a set with the names spelled out phonetically!

Mary Rudy once described that to me as "I'd like to buy a vowel, Pat."

And here I was thinking it was three syllables. ;)

Complicating things for my father was the German he had to learn for school since the Prussians ruled in the part of Poland where he was born. I often wondered as a child where he got those different sounds and I figured some of them out when I took two years of German language in school. My mother's writing was so indistinct at times that I'm one of the few people who can figure the message. Spelling was not her strong suit either.

Bill Banaszak, MFE Sr.

Ah, Wikipedia comes to the rescue. Here is a nice writeup about it:

Cute!

You laugh but some people try to pronounce it just like you described it! :-)

Hey, at least they try. Some people immigrate to US, settle in some "little Poland" (or other ethnicity) community and they spend the rest of their life only speaking their native tongue.

Peteski