On a rare, yet interesting, usage of the Polish adjective ludzki compared to the English equivalent human

Abstract

The lexemes ludzki and human are treated (e.g. in didactics and translation studies) as equivalents, which is refl ected in the dictionary descriptions of the meanings of these words. At the same time, the analysis of the contexts where the expression ludzki człowiek is used leads to other conclusions: not all contents of the Polish adjective are present in its English equivalent. Ludzki is also ‘one who suspends the operation of principles for the sake of another human being’. This component of a more general meaning (‘consistent with the human nature, conceived as good; hence: characterised by favourable disposition, understanding for other people; humane, merciful, gentle, kind’, SJPDor) seems to be absent from English (adjectives human and humane).This article applies the methodology based on the pragmatic analysis of the communication situation and consideration for the context of the utterance/statement (after Grzegorczykowa 1990). The language material used was derived from the following corpora: NKJP (National Corpus of Polish), BNC (British National Corpus), and COCA (Corpus of Contemporary American English).