The Old Polish language () was a period in the history of the Polish language between the 10th and the 16th centuries. It was followed by Middle Polish.
The sources for the study of the Old Polish language are the data of the comparative-historical grammar of Slavic languages, the material of Polish dialects, several Latin manuscripts with Polish glosses, as well as – most importantly – monuments written in Old Polish: the Holy Cross Sermons (), the Sankt Florian Psalter (), Bogurodzica (), the Bible of Queen Sophia (, or Sárospatak Bible, ) and some others.
The Old Polish language was spoken mainly on the territory of modern Poland. It was the main vernacular of medieval Polish states under the Piasts and early Jagiellons, although it was not the state language (that being Latin).
History The Polish language started to change after the baptism of Poland, which caused an influx of Latin words, such as kościół "church" (Latin , "castle"), anioł "angel" (Latin ). Many of them were borrowed via Czech, which, too, influenced Polish in that era (hence e.g. wiesioły "happy, blithe" (cf. wiesiołek) morphed into modern Polish , with the original vowels and the consonants of Czech veselý). Also, in later centuries, with the onset of cities founded on German law (namely, the so-called Magdeburg law), Middle High German urban and legal words filtered into Old Polish.
Around the 14th or the 15th centuries, the aorist and the imperfect became obsolete. In the 15th century the dual fell into disuse except for a few fixed expressions (adages and sayings). In relation to most other European languages, though, the differences between Old and Modern Polish are comparatively slight, and the Polish language is somewhat conservative relative to other Slavic languages. That said, the relatively slight differences between Old and Modern Polish are unremarkable considering that the chronological stages of other European languages that Old Polish is contemporary with are generally not very different from the Modern stages and many of them already labelled "Early Modern". Old Polish includes texts that were written as late as the Renaissance.
Earliest written sentence
The Book of Henryków (, ), contains the earliest known sentence written in the Polish language: Day, ut ia pobrusa, a ti poziwai (pronounced originally as: Daj, uć ja pobrusza, a ti pocziwaj, modern Polish: or , English: ), written around 1270.
The medieval recorder of the phrase, the Cistercian monk Peter of the Henryków monastery, noted: .Digital version Book of Henryków in latinBarbara i Adam Podgórscy: Słownik gwar śląskich. Katowice: Wydawnictwo KOS, 2008, Bogdan Walczak: Zarys dziejów języka polskiego. Wrocław: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Wrocławskiego, 1999,
Spelling
The difficulty that medieval scribes had to face while attempting to codify the language was the inadequacy of the Latin alphabet to some features of Old Polish phonology, such as vowel length and nasalization, or the palatalization of consonants. Thus, Old Polish did not have a unified spelling. Polish glosses in Latin texts use romanized spelling, which often failed to distinguish between distinct phonemes. Already then, however, certain spellings of proper names become unified.
The spelling in the major works of Old Polish, such as the Holy Cross Sermons or the Sankt Florian Psalter is better developed. Their scribes tried to resolve the aforementioned issues in various ways, which led to each manuscript having separate spelling rules. Digraphs were commonly employed to write sounds not present in Latin, the letter ⟨ꟁ⟩ (called "o rogate"; eng. "horned o") with appearance varying between ⟨ꟁ⟩, ⟨ø⟩ and ⟨ɸ⟩ (see image on the right) was introduced to spell the nasal vowels, and the basic Latin letters were now used consistently for the same sounds. Nevertheless, many features were still only rarely marked, for example vowel length.
Parkoszowic About 1440, , a professor of Jagiellonian University, was the first person to attempt a codification of Polish spelling. He wrote a tract on Polish orthographic rules (in Latin) and a short rhyme (in Polish) as an example of their use. The rules that were proposed included the following: introduction of new letters of different shape to write hard (unpalatalized) consonants, while soft (palatalized) consonant letters were left unchanged, doubling of vowel letters to mark long sounds, for example: ⟨aa⟩ – /aː/ (but only if length decided the meaning of a word), use of the letter ⟨ꟁ⟩ to write the short nasal vowel (⟨ꟁꟁ⟩ for the long nasal vowel), use of the letter ⟨g⟩ to write /j/, reserving ⟨q⟩ for /ɡ/ instead, use of digraphs and trigraphs to distinguish between the various coronal fricatives and affricate.
Parkoszowic's proposal was not adopted, as his conventions were judged to be impractical and cumbersome and bore little resemblance to the spellings commonly used. However, his tract is of great importance to the history of the Polish language, as the first scientific work about the Polish language. It provides especially useful insight to contemporary phonology.
Phonology Over the centuries, Old Polish pronunciation underwent several changes.
Consonants The early Old Polish consonantal system consisted of the following phonemes. Since the precise realization of these sounds is unknown, the transcriptions used here are meant to be approximations.
Labial Coronal Post-alveolar Palatal Velar Nasal Stop Affricate () Fricative () () Approximant Trill
The sound [d͡ʒ] only occurred in the cluster [ʒd͡ʒ], therefore its phonemic status is doubtful.
The most important consonantal changes concerned the realization of the soft coronal consonants. Of these, /tʲ/, /dʲ/, /sʲ/ and /zʲ/ strengthened their palatalization and became alveolo-palatal, and the former two were affricated. The resultant sounds were similar to their modern Polish counterparts: /t͡ɕ/, /d͡ʑ/, /ɕ/ and /ʑ/. This change happened very early, starting already in the 13th century as evidenced by spelling.
Somewhere around the 13th to 14th century, the phoneme /rʲ/ came to be pronounced with considerable friction, probably resulting in a sound similar to Czech /r̝/ (but by then probably still palatalized: /r̝ʲ/).
The Proto-Slavic language did not have a /f/ phoneme. In the 12th and 13th century in the dialects of Lesser Poland and Masovia the initial clusters /xv/ and /xvʲ/ were simplified to /f/ and /fʲ/ (e.g. > , > , > ). This enlarged their consonantal inventory by two. This change did not make it to the literary language, and was ultimately reversed also in those dialects. But before that, in the 14th and 15th century these two sounds became firmly established in borrowings (in earlier loanwords foreign [f] was replaced by either /b/ or /p/). Perhaps one of the oldest loanwords which keeps /f, fʲ/ unchanged is the word ("victim; offering"), loaned from Czech , since the pre-writing era change ě>a before a hard consonant () seemed to have operated in it. /f/ also appeared later from the reduction of the cluster /pv/ (chiefly in the word > and derivatives).
The very end of the Old Polish period (15th–16th century, so during the transition to Middle Polish) saw the palatalization of the velar plosives /k/ and /ɡ/ before front oral vowels to [kʲ] and [ɡʲ], named the so-called "fourth Slavic palatalization". This distinction was later phonemicized with the introduction of borrowings which had hard velars before front vowels, as well as the denasalization of word final /ɛ̃/. Note that this change did not affect the velar fricative /x/ or velars before the front nasal vowel /æ̃~ɛ̃/. Not all regional varieties handled this change in the way here described, most notably in Masovia.
After these alternations, the late Old Polish consonant system presented itself thus:
Labial Coronal Post-alveolar Palatal Velar Nasal Stop [] [] Affricate Fricative Approximant Trill
Vowels The early Old Polish vocalic system consisted of the following phonemes. As mentioned, the sound qualities are approximations. front central back close [] [] mid open
[ɨ] and [ɨː] were in complementary distribution with [i] and [iː] respectively – the former occurred after hard consonants, the latter in all other positions. The pairs can therefore be regarded as allophones.
All vowel phonemes occurred in pairs, one short and one long. Long vowels emerged in Old Polish from four sources: compensatory lengthening of vowels in penultimate syllables followed by a voiced consonant and a word-final yer, which was deleted (see Havlík's law) examples: PS *rogъ > OP rōg, PS *gněvъ > OP gniēw, PS *stalъ > OP stāł from the contraction of various sequences of two vowels separated by /j/ examples: PS *sějati > OP siāć, PS *dobrajego > OP dobrēgo, PS *rybojǫ > OP rybǭ inherited from Proto-Slavic neoacute accent examples: PS *pъtákъ > OP ptāk, PS *sǫ̃dъ > OP sø̄d, PS grě̃xъ > OP grzēch inherited from Proto-Slavic pretonic long vowels in two-syllable words (so long vowels in the first syllable if the second syllable was final and stressed) examples: PS *mǭkà > OP mø̄ka, PS *dě̄žà > OP dziēża, PS *dōltò > OP dłōto
Due to the lengthening described in 1. short vowels could not occur in word-final syllables before a voiced consonant. The only exceptions was short /ɛ/ from an older strong yer.
Prostheses Similarly to some other Slavic languages and dialects, there existed a tendency to constrain the occurrence of vowels in word onset. A prosthetic [j], [w] or [h] was often introduced to words beginning with a vowel: Earlier *e, *ě received a prosthetic [j] already in Late Common Slavic: PS *edinъ > OP jeden, PS *ěsti > OP jeść. An exception was the dialectal conjunction eż, eże. Earlier *ę, *ǫ were also preceded by a prosthesis since the oldest records, [j] and [v] respectively: PS *ęzykъ > OP język, PS *ędro > OP jꟁdro, PS *ǫtroba > OP wꟁtroba, PS *ǫgľь > OP węgiel. To this day nasal vowels cannot begin a word in Polish. Earlier *a received a prosthetic [j] similarly to front vowels: PS *agoda > OP jagoda. Once again, an exception to this was a conjunction – a, very common to this day, as well as its derivatives: ale, aż, ani etc. Old Polish rounded vowels /ɔ, ɔː/ probably had a labial prosthesis [w], as is universal in dialects (e.g. [wɔkɔ] – /ɔkɔ/ – "oko"), but it was seldom marked in writing. Sometimes the spelling points to a prosthetic [h] instead, for both /ɔ, ɔː/ as well as /u, uː/ (a hon – "a on"; hupana Jana – "u pana Jana"). Old Polish /i, iː/ seemed to have had a rather strong prosthetic [j], often made evident in spelling (np. gymyenyu [jimʲɛɲu] – "imieniu"). More rarely also [h] occurred. Loanwords were also affected, e.g. Jadam instead of "Adam", Jewa instead of "Ewa", Helska as a shortened form of "Elżbieta" ("Elizabeth").
Loss of vowel length During the Old Polish period, vowel length ceased to be a feature distinguishing phonemes. The long high vowels /iː/, [ɨː] and /uː/ merged with their short counterparts, with no change in quality. The fate of the remaining long oral vowels was different; they also lost their length, but their articulation became more closed and so they remained distinct from their old short counterparts. Thus, /ɛː/ changed to /e/ and /ɔː/ changed to /o/. The earlier long /aː/ also gained roundedness and became /ɒ/. This process was long and only complete by the late 15th century. The higher vowels are traditionally called ("skewed") in Polish.