Polish Language Research Articles

Język polski w jednoklasowych szkołach podstawowych w guberni grodzieńskiej po 1906 roku: niespełnione obietnice rządu

This article examines the implementation of one paragraph of the Tsar’s decree of 22 April 1906, to which historians have paid little attention. It stipulated that in those one-class schools that were located in the Polish populated part of Grodna Province, the Polish language could be taught as a subject and used to teach arithmetic. The overseer of the Vil’na school district, Boris Wolf, and some other local officials tried their best to implement the decree not only because the regulations passed by the higher authorities had to be enforced but also because they believed that the loyalty of non-Russians could be ensured by meeting their cultural requirements. In the end their efforts were in vain. The official version was that the‚ ethnographic expeditions’ and meetings of local administration officials did not indicate the exact area where Poles would dominate numerically, but this interpretation was a pretext, not a cause. The Polish language in primary school was seen by many officials as a tool for the Polonisation of Belarusian Catholics, so those close to the principles of nationalist nationality politics obstructed the implementation of the decree of 22 April 1906 in the Grodno Governorate. They would also have been aware that the introduction of the Polish language in primary schools, together with other measures confirming that the area was a Polish ‚national territory’, could lead to parts of the Białystok and Bielsk districts being included to the Kingdom of Poland in the event of future territorialization of ethnicity. The likelihood of the implementation of such projects on the western borderlands of the Romanov empire grew in the early 20th century, until their eventual implementation in the Soviet Union.

Esej, czyli obelga dla współczesnego naukowca (?)

This article aims to present two complementary issues related to the contemporary perception and understanding of the essay. The first part explores various definitions of the term “essay.” As a distinct form of discourse and a separate literary genre, the essay has been the subject of extensive literature (relevant to both general literary studies and Polish studies). Despite sustained scholarly interest over a long period, there has been a noticeable decline in linguistic precision among those frequently using the term “essay” in modern Polish language. As a result, the word has become either meaningless (as nearly any text is labeled this way) or is associated with lower-quality, non-scholarly writing. The second issue addresses the current variations of essays being written today. It is easy to observe tendencies that blur the line between essays, literary columns, or fragments of autobiographical writing. These variations reflect a broader trend (or fashion) within contemporary humanistic discourse.

Highly educated Ukrainian migrants in Poland prior to 2022: education, work and integration efforts

ABSTRACT Drawing on recent original qualitative research, this paper focuses on the under-researched area of highly skilled migration in the relatively new migratory context of Ukrainian migrants to Poland. Commonly, migrants from Ukraine have been found to work in basic low-paid jobs and in an informal, non-regulated capacity; thus, often falling prey to precarious and insecure employment. However, this article focuses on career pathways of highly educated migrants from Ukraine in Poland and explores how they take advantage of their education and qualifications. The analysis is focused on individual-level factors. The paper discusses the findings of 29 individual in-depth interviews. Among the respondents, 15 were working in occupations requiring higher education, and 14 worked below their education. This article contributes to the literature on the use of qualifications of migrant workers from Ukraine in Poland. We found that knowledge of the Polish language, and individual attitudes influence migrants’ use of education/qualifications. The relationship between family composition and the labour market situation of people with higher education is not clearly established in this research. We hope these findings will support the integration efforts of the newly arrived forced migrants from Ukraine in Poland and beyond.

Milestones in Polish: From roadside signs to conditions (not) to be met

The article presents the history of the lexical unit kamień milowy ‘milestone’ in the Polish language, with a particular emphasis on its new meaning, coming from the EU variety of English, and the meaning-specific collocability. The study has shown how the political context influenced the popularity of the name in its new meaning, its functioning in the media, and its social reception. Data come from dictionaries, language corpora, the Polona digital library, the EU legal acts database, and the EU terminology database

A Review of Approaches to Standardizing Medical Descriptions for Clinical Entity Recognition: Implications for Artificial Intelligence Implementation

This article reviews the current state of standardization in specific areas of the medical sector in Poland, focusing on terminology and the unique context of the Polish language. The primary objective was to analyze the existing resources and examine possibilities, challenges, and opportunities associated with integrating Artificial Intelligence, particularly natural language processing methods, into the healthcare system. The additional goal of this review was to place Poland in the international context by comparing the current state of the Polish standardization of healthcare with those of selected countries with more and less developed systems. The exploration highlights the main challenges that impact integration, including the specificity of the language and challenges in transferring knowledge from other languages, lack of communication between parties, and lack of stakeholder involvement in the standardization processes. This review also presents potential solutions to the mentioned challenges and provides insights into future directions, possibilities, proposals, and recommendations for all stakeholders. The practical application of this research extends beyond Poland. Many countries with underrepresented languages face similar challenges in clinical data processing, and the advances in CER for Polish could serve as a model for implementing AI-driven solutions in these regions. By refining CER models and adapting them to diverse linguistic and healthcare contexts, this research can foster improvements in patient care, medical research, and healthcare administration on a global scale.

Woda i ziemia, czyli o tekstach Tomasa Venclovy i ich roli w kształceniu literacko-kulturowym uczniów liceum

The article aims to pay attention to the functions of aquatic and earth motifs present in Tomas Venclova’s works. In light of the analysis of texts such as From Travel Diaries and Describe Vilnius and the poet’s selected poems, the author distinguishes several intertwining functions of these motifs, e.g. mood-creating, image-creating, (self-)reflective. They are subordinated to the main function diagnosed by the author – memory. The final part of the article is devoted to reflections on the use of Venclova’s texts in Polish language classes in high school as contexts, i.a., of Polish Romantic and 20th-century literature, as well as the role of selected works of the Lithuanian writer in the literary and cultural education of contemporary youth.

Kultura uczestnictwa w mediach społecznościowych (na przykładzie picturebooka „Pan Wyrazisty” Olgi Tokarczuk i Joanny Concejo). Refleksje dydaktyczne

The article is devoted to the culture of participation in social media and the issue of creating an image on the Internet, using the example of the picturebook Mr. Expressive by Olga Tokarczuk and Joanna Concejo. Due to the fact that the writer and illustrator took up topics relevant to the net generation, such as consumerism, addiction to digital media, narcissism, loneliness, lack of acceptance and understanding of different attitudes, the word-and-graphic story of contemporary culture was subjected to didactic reflection (as a proposal for reading in Polish language classes).

Few-Shot Methods for Aspect-Level Sentiment Analysis

In this paper, we explore the approaches to the problem of cross-domain few-shot classification of sentiment aspects. By cross-domain few-shot, we mean a setting where the model is trained on large data in one domain (for example, hotel reviews) and is intended to perform on another (for example, restaurant reviews) with only a few labelled examples in the target domain. We start with pre-trained monolingual language models. Using the Polish language dataset AspectEmo, we compare model training using standard gradient-based learning to a zero-shot approach and two dedicated few-shot methods: ProtoNet and NNShot. We find both dedicated methods much superior to both gradient learning and zero-shot setup, with a small advantage held by NNShot. Overall, we find few-shot to be a compelling alternative, achieving a surprising amount of performance compared to gradient training on full-size data.

Языковое законодательство в межвоенной Польше как элемент национальной политики: историография проблемы

The paper deals with the language policy of Poland as an element of national policy. The international treaties on the protection of national minorities, the Constitution of Poland of 1921 and the laws adopted on July 31, 1924 “On the State language and working language in State institutions and self-government institutions”, “On language and organization of school work for national minorities”, “On language in courts, prosecutor’s office and notary institutions” are considered. In the Second Polish Republic, one third of the population consisted of national minorities, for whose rights the Polish Sejm adopted these laws. The laws provided for the limited use of the languages of national minorities – Lithuanian, Belarusian and Ukrainian. In certain cases, Polish civil servants were required to use the languages of national minorities in their activities. Due to their inconsistency and half-heartedness, the laws were not actually implemented and caused discontent both among representatives of national organizations and among the majority of Polish political circles. Among historians and in journalism, the laws “On Language...” also caused a discussion. Most researchers believe that the Polish language legislation did not aim to actually improve the situation of national minorities, but only to imitate their protection in order to form a positive image of a “democratic” Poland in the international arena.

Polish language adaptation and validation of the Fonseca Anamnestic Index for individuals with temporomandibular disorders.

Given the notable prevalence of temporomandibular disorders (TMD) in the Polish population, there is a clear need for the use of simple, reliable questionnaires as screening tools to facilitate the referral of patients to TMD specialists. The aim of the study was to translate and adapt the Fonseca Anamnestic Index (FAI) into Polish and assess its reliability and validity in identifying TMD symptoms. The Polish adaptation of the FAI (FAI-PL) was developed in accordance with the international guidelines, including the translation and evaluation of the psychometric properties of the questionnaire. Every patient received a standardized assessment, which involved history taking and clinical examination, including the Research Diagnostic Criteria for Temporomandibular Disorders (RDC/TMD) and the FAI questionnaire. The psychometric analyses included an evaluation of the questionnaire's reliability and validity, as well as an exploratory factor analysis (EFA). Of the 122 individuals enrolled in the study, 63.9% were female. The mean age of the participants was 28.1 years (standard deviation (SD): 6.3). According to the RDC/TMD standards, 40.9% of patients had no TMD, while the FAI assessment indicated that 27% of patients had no TMD. The Cronbach's alpha coefficient for the FAI-PL was 0.75. The exploratory factor analysis revealed 3 factors, accounting for 55.2% of the total variation. The diagnostic sensitivity of the FAI-PL was 98.6%, while the diagnostic specificity reached a level of 65.3%. The Polish version of the FAI is a reliable and valid tool for the screening of TMD symptoms in the Polish-speaking population.

„Głośnik” – preradiofoniczna historia słowa w polszczyźnie

The starting point of this article is the analysis of texts collected in the Polona.pl database and other databases of the Digital Libraries Federation. Based on these archives, the author outlines the transformation of the semantic scope of the word głośnik – “loudspeaker” – in 19th-century Polish. The functioning of this term is particularly interesting in the context of inventions which, from today’s perspective, appear as precursors of the modern loudspeaker. The development of radio broadcasting after the First World War popularised the contemporary understanding of the term; earlier – pre-radiophonic – uses in the 19th-century cultural press and dictionaries make it possible to trace changes not only within the language itself, but also the entire acoustemology of Polish society of the time. The semantic evolution of the term “loudspeaker” is at the same time a picture of deeper shifts in the perception of the role and meaning of sound. Under the pressure of the cultural policies of the partitioners, the Polish community retreated in its search for national identity to the level of language, and then – under the influence of new media and lifestyles, but also of the profound reforms of the Polish language in the interwar period – interacted with the cultural phenomenon of the new medium, with its help redefining its view of modernity. Key-words: acoustemology, speaker, semantic field, sound history, Polish history

THE CREATIVE HERITAGE OF THE PROMINENT UKRAINIAN INTERPRETER WORLD CLASSICS MYKOLA LUKASH

The article attempts to introduce readers to the biography of the writer-translator and to highlight the creative and translation legacy of Mykola Oleksiyovych Lukash (1919–1988), a prominent Ukrainian writer-interpreter of world classics, lexicographer, linguist, and polyglot. It sheds light on his life and creative path as an outstanding Ukrainian writer and interpreter of world classics, his schooling, and university education. His work as a primary school teacher in a village school in the Kyiv region, where he taught Ukrainian and German, is outlined. The author of the article focuses on Mykola Lukash’s studies at the Kharkiv Pedagogical University of Foreign Languages and the Agricultural Institute. His translation work on the two parts of Johann Wolfgang Goetheʼs “Faust” is described. The peculiarities of Mykola Lukash’s translations of works such as Goetheʼs “Faust”, Giovanni Boccaccioʼs “Decameron”, Miguel de Cervantesʼ “Don Quixote”, Gustave Flaubertʼs “Madame Bovary” and the poetry of Burns and Heine, among others, are outlined. Emphasis is placed on Mykola Lukashʼs knowledge of twenty foreign languages. Attention is drawn to the fact that he was one of the few translators who could work with the original text, not with intermediate Russian translations.It is noted that Mykola Lukash was one of the first in European literature to translate Federico García Lorca’s poetry, written in the Galician dialect of Spanish, into Ukrainian using the Hutsul dialect. Emphasis is placed on the fact that Mykola Lukash translated over a thousand outstanding works of world literature from a hundred authors in twenty languages. He collected a vast amount of lexicographic material and made translations from English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Polish, Lithuanian, and other languages. It is substantiated that certain concepts from Mykola Lukash’s legacy can be used by modern educators and translators.

Ethnic Relations between Lithuanians and Poles in the Eastern and South-Eastern Part of Lithuania 1960–1985

The article explores the manifestation of the Soviet national policy in the eastern and south-eastern part of Lithuania during the Khrushchev Thaw period and the Brezhnev Era of stagnation by focusing on the ethnic relations between Lithuanian and Poles who, in terms of numbers, dominated in the region. The situation in the eastern and south-eastern part of Lithuania (multi-ethnic population, geographical location, historical heritage, etc.) was very favourable for the implementation of the Soviet national policy. Based on the slogans of “friendship between nations” and “internationalism”, the concept of the convergence of the nations was realised. It manifested in closer relations between various ethnic groups, soviet republics and their population. As far as eastern and south-eastern part of Lithuania was concerned, relationships were promoted with neighbouring republics, firstly with Belarus, rather than with other regions of the Republic of Lithuania. Such policy led to the formation of a specific situation in Vilnius region. A certain part of the inhabitants of the region more often identified themselves with the Belarusian population and had a poor understanding of the life of other regions in Lithuania. This determined segregation between the Lithuanian and Polish communities, and alienation of the Poles. The Soviet authorities controlled ethnic relations between Lithuanians and Poles; any potential ethnic tension was immediately repressed and hardly ever surfaced. Ethnic disagreements between Lithuanians and Poles (due to different interpretation of historical past, etc.) were frozen for several decades and broke out only at time of the decline of the Soviet period. The position of the Polish population in the region was fuelled by attention and support from the Polish authorities and society. However, only relationships sanctioned by the Soviet authorities were allowed. Therefore any nationalist ideas from Poland were immediately stifled. Seeking faster indoctrination of the population, the Soviet authorities used the Polish language factor in the eastern and south-eastern part of Lithuania. The Polish population in this region was provided an opportunity to develop education and culture in their mother tongue, yet this was controlled and Sovietised. The support for nurturing the Polish ethnic identity by the Soviets formed a stereotype among Lithuanians that Poles were protected and the eastern and south-eastern part of Lithuania was deliberately Polonised. In the 1970s, when attempts to consolidate the society in the USSR were made on the basis of the Russian language and culture, assimilation efforts (Russification) strengthened in Lithuania. This process particularly affected the position of the Poles in the eastern and south-eastern part of Lithuania (Polish schools became Russian schools, the number of mixed marriages increased, the Russian language was increasingly used for communication, etc.). Such policies led to the assimilation of certain part of the Polish population in the region.

Badanie potrzeb językowych studentów zza wschodniej granicy. Implikacje dydaktyczne dla praktycznej nauki języka na kierunku Studia polskie dla cudzoziemców

In the academic year 2022/2023, the Faculty of Polish Studies of the Jagiellonian University opened Polish studies for foreigners, which enables learning the Polish language as part of university education. Due to the growing number of students from Ukraine, the goals, effects and content of teaching in this field should be transformed to meet the specific linguistic needs of students from beyond the eastern border. The aim of the article is to present the teaching goals and priorities of students from Ukraine. The results of the study will be compared with the teaching rules of the contemporary methodology of teaching Polish as a foreign language to Eastern Slavs.

On the etymology of the word <i>konoval</i>

The author of the article analyzes the etymology of the lexeme konoval, which originally served to name people who were engaged in grooming and treating horses, as well as other domestic animals. They were homegrown doctors. The attitude towards them was ambiguous. Frequent unsuccessful results of treatment led to the fact that the word konoval began to acquire a negative connotation and, as a result, in the 18th century there appeared another meaning of the word in Russian language: ‘a bad, unqualified doctor’. There is no unity regarding the etymology of the lexeme konoval. There are two mutually exclusive points of view. M. Vasmer believes that this noun is borrowed from the Polish language. The compilers of the “Etymological Dictionary of the Russian Language” edited by N. M. Shansky share this view. The authors of the Etymological Dictionary of Slavic Languages edited by O. N. Trubachev attribute this lexeme to the Proto-Slavic lexical fund. The author examines in detail both versions of the origin of the lexeme. As a result of the analysis and referring to numerous Polish and East Slavic sources, we put forward a hypothesis that the word konoval is actually Russian. This lexeme originally belonged to the Old Russian language, and subsequently got into the Polish language through Ukrainian.

Language independent algorithm for clustering text documents with respect to their sentiment

Determining the sentiment of a written text is an important task in text research. This task can be performed either in the supervised or unsupervised version. In this paper, we propose a novel unsupervised algorithm for documents written in any language using documents written in Polish as an example. The clustering of Polish language texts with respect to their sentiment is poorly developed in the literature on the subject. The novelty of the proposed algorithm involves the abandonment of stoplists and lemmatisation. Instead, we propose translating all documents into English and performing a two-stage document grouping. In the first step of the algorithm, selected documents are assigned to a class of positive or negative documents based on a set of lexical and grammatical rules as well as a set of key-terms. Key-terms do not have to be entered by the user, the algorithm finds them. In the second step, the remaining documents are attached to one of the classes according to the rules based on the vocabulary found in the documents grouped in the first step. The algorithm was tested on three corpora of documents and achieved very good results.

On the issue of code switching in the speech of multilinguals on the Lithuanian-Belarusian borderland (based on field materials)

The article deals with cases of switching codes in the speech of the inhabitants of Lithuania, as well as the border Lithuanian-Belarusian territories, who speak Polish, Lithuanian and Belarusian (Russian) languages. The analyzed texts were written down by Rita Balkute during ethnographic expeditions, which were not aimed at revealing the actual linguistic features of the speech of the informants. Analysis of the material shows that ethnolinguistic factors play an important role in code switching; for example, informants often switch to Polish when describing magical practices or when quoting spells. The article discusses the reasons for such transitions, as well as cases of mixing codes when hybrid texts are formed in Polish and Belarusian.

Split Genders: Medical versus Legal Understanding of Gender Identity (De Lege Lata and De Lege Ferenda)

Abstract For centuries, the law accepted the legal gender of an individual that was indicated at birth by the appearance of their genitalia and stated on their birth certificate. Nowadays, however, we have plenty of scientific, medical and psychological evidence (and thus reasons) to revise the adopted way of thinking about legal gender to associate it more with gender identity. Most people do not perceive a potential conflict between genital sex and gender identity, because their genital sex is consistent with their gender identity. Trans- and intersex comunnity needs recognition of their gender identity independent of their genital sex as a condition for a life of self-determination, personal freedom, respect and dignity; these are, aft er all, values that are extremely important for the law. The purpose of this analysis is to determine whether the concept of gender identity is perceived generally in the Polish language and the Polish legal system in a way that takes into account current medical knowledge and the legitimate needs of the individual. If not, then what de lege ferenda recommendations can be made to change this situation?

Sino-Nasal Outcome Test-22: translation, cross-cultural adaptation, and validation in Polish-speaking patients.

There are many specific instruments for assessing the quality of life (QoL) in patients with chronic rhinosinusitis. Of all these tests, the Sino-Nasal Outcome Test-22 (SNOT-22) is the most widely used internationally. The purpose of the study was linguistic adaptation and validation of the SNOT-22 scale in the Polish language. The SNOT-22 was adapted into Polish and was administered to 148 subjects (108 patients with chronic rhinosinusitis with nasal polyps (CRSwNP) and 40 asymptomatic controls. Seventy-one patients completed the SNOT-22 a second time to evaluate test-retest reliability. The Polish SNOT-22 was assessed for internal consistency, test-retest reliability, discriminant validity, criterion validity, and sensitivity and specificity. The Polish SNOT-22 exhibited satisfactory psychometric properties. A high Cronbach's alpha coefficient (α = 0.89) was obtained. Significantly higher scores (p < 0.01) were revealed in the Study Group with a median score of 32 (range 15-53) points in comparison with controls: 5 (range 0-20). A moderate correlation was found between SNOT-22 and the Lund-Kennedy test score (r = 0.334; p < 0.001) and a strong correlation between SNOT-22 and the Lund-Macay test score (r = 0.469; p < 0.001). The best cut-off point was set at a 16 score with a sensitivity of 0.981 and a specificity of 0.995. The determined Area Under Curve (AUC = 0.997; p < 0.001) confirms the diagnostic accuracy of the Polish SNOT-22. The Polish version of the SNOT-22 is a valid and reliable tool for measuring health-related quality of life in patients with CRSwNP in the Polish-speaking population.

The books of V. Biržiška library at the library of the Kaunas A. Sniečkus politechnic institute

Vaclovas Biržiška (1884-1956) is a famous Lithuanian bibliographer and researcher of the press. The quantitative and qualitative analysis of the collection of books from Biržiška's personal library is given in the article. There are 1,480 publications in this collection. 1,072 books are intended for personal purposes. There are books on bibliography, history, pedagogy, and natural science. The collection also includes fiction by Lithuanian, Russian, Western European, American, and Scandinavian writers. The collection is divided into four parts according to language: Lithuanian (495 copies), Russian (520 copies), Polish (304 copies), and other foreign languages (161 copies). The books are marked by Biržiška's personal ex-libris, designed by P. Galaunė and V. Kosciuška.