>Language sets the community of Wilamowice in southern Poland apart from the rest of their country. Although linguists are divided, residents firmly believe that its unique language, called Vilamovian, stems from the founding of the town in medieval times by Flemish colonists. The language has slowly been dying out, but both young and old are determined to preserve the culture of their ancestors.
>Flemish historian and linguist Rinaldo Neels was warmly welcomed in Wilamowice, when he paid a visit to the municipality for his PhD thesis at the University of Leuven: “The imminent language death of Vilamovian, a Germanic language island in South Poland”. While some members of the folklore association dressed up in traditional clothing, others related stories on the Flemish roots of their hometown.
>He notes that it can hardly be a coincidence that classic Flemish nursery rhymes such as I Saw Two Bears Making Sandwiches and Sleep, Baby, Sleep are popular in Wilamowice.
>Today only 70 of the town’s 2,800 inhabitants speak Vilamovian, and most of them are in their 80s. While the language is irreversibly dying, the community has not abandoned its identity. A survey carried out by Neels shows that three out of four inhabitants would like more financial support from the municipality to preserve the cultural legacy, and more than half of the population think that children should acquire basic knowledge of Vilamovian in primary school.
Should I emigrate to Wilamowice and learn Wymysiöeryś? I speak a West-Flemish dialect closest to medieval Flemish, so it shouldn't be that great a step.
ny ołys ej gułd, wos zih fynklt ny olles i goed wa blynkt (W.Fl) niet alles is goud wat bliinkt (NL)
Lincoln Torres
"ł" is like the English "w", btw
Blake Carter
How did that came to be, anyway? W is close to U and V, but not L at all. Why is that in polish the letter is stroked L?
Josiah Brown
parts of it, about 40% some parts sound more German, other things more Flemish
I noticed they say "ik syn" for 'I am' and that is a typical and isolated rural Flemish thing.
Luke Turner
Is it more or less understandable than Afrikaans?
Anthony Evans
root of the word in proto slavic the word was pronounced with an L as polish evolved people started pronouncing it as Ł, but to signify the root of the word the letter was simply made into a modified L
>In Polish and Sorbian languages, almost all historical /ɫ/ have become /w/ even in word-initial and inter-vocalic position. For example, mały "small" in both Polish and Sorbian is currently pronounced as [mawɨ] (compare Russian мaлый [ˈmalɨj]). The [w] pronunciation, called wałczenie in Polish, dates back to the 16th century, first appearing among the lower classes. It was considered an uncultured accent until the mid-20th century, when the stigma gradually began to fade. As of the 21st century, [ɫ] can still be used by some speakers of eastern Polish dialects, especially in Belarus and Lithuania, as well as in Polish-Czech and Polish-Slovak contact dialects in southern Poland.[12]
Simply because this Polish ł evolved from l
Levi Butler
Some things are weird, like the Celtic p/k shift for example. We have something similar in a local dialect shift for "bald headed person" kletskop --> pletskop.
I can kinda see how a thick L can become a W though.
Anthony Lee
Yep. We have a lot of holdovers like this.
Ch and h ż and rz
are same sounds but they weren't in the past so we keep that in the written form.
William Stewart
Lesser, it is to be expected I guess as they have been isolated for 700 years. But still I bet I could learn it fast if given some time.
Hudson Morgan
>ny ołys ej gułd, wos zih fynklt >ny olles i goed wa blynkt (W.Fl)
btw I should have chosen fonkelt here, obviously more related to fynklt
the meaning is the same though: "Not everything is gold, what shines."
Juan Evans
You can take all these people back to Belgium.
Or you could pay them pensions or something.
Parker Wilson
Eh, very inefficient, our commies mostly rid our language of legacy letters, one of the few things they did right.
Caleb Sullivan
we value history more than efficiency
and at least our 16th century texts are fully understandable to us and they even use the same spelling
Xavier Sanders
>70 speakers left jaiks they must be pretty inbred unless they take polish wives
Jeremiah Powell
Do people even read those texts? When I try to read stuff in old russian I get terribly confused because the language is so distant I barely understand anything without translation.
Nathan Cook
typical Belgian architectural taste, 100% Flemish heritage
we read them at school
Jan Kochanowski's poems (16th century) are perfectly understandable, maybe except for few obsolete words
Well I bet the younger people go away to the cities, it is the same case in French Flanders.
The are bilingual btw, they speak Polish, and Vilamovian amongst themselves. Same case as in French Flanders. Well, RIP soon I guess :(
Thomas White
would feel at home immediately
Michael Bell
the main street doesn't look Belgian tho
why do you care about several old ladies in Poland when millions of Boers are being genocided in South Africa? These are your cousins as well, help them.
Wilamowice is unique only because a Germanic language survived there until today. There were hundreds of such places in Poland and many villages spoke various Germanic languages well into 18th or even 19th century. Ironically, Germanic settlement was especially concentrated in Southeastern Poland, i.w. parts that are today the most nationalistic and conservative.
By a weird twist of history, our assimilated Germans hate Germany guts for some reasons.
Oliver Perry
This looks more Walloon, although we have old factory chimneys like that too dispersed around our lands.
Silesia as a whole is a region which experienced massive desindustrialization in recent decades.
Gabriel Bell
>There were hundreds of such places in Poland and many villages spoke various Germanic languages well into 18th or even 19th century.
>were
good
>By a weird twist of history, our assimilated Germans hate Germany guts for some reasons.
better
>Silesia as a whole is a region which experienced massive desindustrialization in recent decades.
the best
Anthony Murphy
I would gladly take Boer refugees. They actually need help, contrary to all the culturally alien riffraff our politician scum has flooded our cities with.
Also who is the jew responsible for your pic related? And why do they hate normal architecture so much?
>Zaha Hadid >Zaha Hadid was born on 31 October 1950 in Baghdad, Iraq, to an upper-class Iraqi family.[9] Her father Muhammad al-Hajj Husayn Hadid was a wealthy industrialist from Mosul. He co-founded the left-liberal al-Ahali group in 1932, a significant political organisation in the 1930s and 1940s
father Mohammed Hadid >Hadid attended the London School of Economics between 1928 and 1931, and achieved a degree in Economics. It was there that he is said to have been influenced by the ideas of Professor Harold Laski, a "widely known socialist and agnostic".[4] He was also influenced by the works of Sidney Webb, Hugh Dalton, John Maynard Keynes and other economists and socialists whose Fabian ideas held the promise for a new social order to be constructed in the aftermath of the Ottoman Empire.
yeah, it is uncanny how low we have fallen back in the 1970s churches were still full, we used to be very catholic, as strrange as that may sound now.
Still the Vatican partly instigated this here with their modernist 1965 concilium and introduction of "progressive priests", hippies who play guitair in the church and rat organisations like KVHS ("Christians for Socialism"). Then followed an unending string of child abuse scandals, and the masons, who have a strong hold here (Grand-Orient), kept pushing anticatholic propaganda in all our media outlets.
Levi Cooper
no I meant on the roof, the facade.
Jordan Howard
we have everything
there's no European architectural style you can't find in Poland
People clinging on to dead languages is so stupid. It's 2018, English won already. The sooner we realize humanity is in this together and stop wilfully promoting insular "tribal" societies the better.
Luis Parker
t. Albert Pike jr.
Hunter Adams
>The story goes back to the 13th century, when Wilamowice was settled by colonists coming on the invitation of the local ruling dynasty of Silesian Piasts, explains Bartłomiej Chromik, a teacher of Wilamovian at the Warsaw’s Faculty of Artes Liberales, himself a native of the nearby town of Kęty.
>The colonisation of Wilamowice was part a bigger wave of colonists coming from Western Europe to help to rebuild and revive the vast areas of Małopolska and Silesia deserted and ruined following the Mongol/Tatar invasion. But while many of the colonists eventually dissolved into the local population and started speaking Polish, some stuck to their mother tongues.
Colton Wood
>Z analizy języka i stroju późniejszych mieszkańców wywnioskować można, że jej osadnicy wywodzili się z Fryzji i Flandrii[9], a z nazwy miejscowości, że jej zasadźcą był niejaki William, prawdopodobnie ze Szkocji[10]. Miejscowość założona została z dala od dużych rzek, co może być związane z obawą przed powodziami. W 1238 r. Morze Północne zalało wielkie obszary Flandrii, skłaniając jej mieszkańców do emigracji[11]. Analysis of local folkloristic clothing and customs seems to indicate that most of the settlers arrived form Frisia and Flanders, while the name of the town suggests that it was founded by a William, most likely a Scot. The settlement was founded far away from major rivers, perhaps due to fears of flooding. In 1238 the North Sea flooded large parts of Flanders, which led many people to emigrate.
Why would you say that, just because it's in northwestern Europe?
I don't know anything about Belgium. I mean, I know about Belgium, but I don't know about the inner workings of their religion.
Easton Thompson
It's not inefficient, different letters undergo different sound changes and the writing is very transparent when it comes to that. e.g.: Ó can alternate with O but U can't, even though both Ó and U sound the same.
