Krupnik and Spelling

It's no secret that poor translations are abound in Poland.  From menus ('Cocktail' is usually transcribed as 'coctail'; 'vanilla' is 'vanillia') to museum blurbs (I must note that the Podziema Rynku Museum has excellent translations).  Official translations such as "Feel Like at Home" (a slogan from the Euro 2012) have people doing double-takes and taking me aside and saying, "Does this sound right to you?"

Anyway, someone was very gracious enough to give me a bottle of the illustrious Krupnik, a honey-based vodka (note: it is not mead, as mead is a fermented honey 'wine').  It was very, very kind of the person, and I must admit that I was slightly embarrassed because I did not return the favor in kind.

One glance at the label made me slightly cringe:

The offending label

The text reads (verbatim):

Prepared from bees honey and various

spices and aromatic herbs according to

Polish recipes many hundred years old.

Now, here's the thing: if you're going to have some text in English that's big, prominent, and basically being the only representative text of your product/sports tournament/company slogan, you'd think you'd spend that extra amount of money to get it right.  That's the thing I don't really understand: this is the main text, essentially the only text that people (mostly Poles anyway (so why in English?)) are going to read, and they turned it into a first semester English project.  Some say, "Well, you know what it means anyway."  To that I answer, "So it's OK if I go to work and walk around in my bathrobe?  I mean, my junk is covered!  I've done the most basic amount to appear decent in public."

Well, maybe it's done on purpose to evoke authenticity of its rustic Polishness.

And, let's not forget, what matters most is the content of the bottle, not the label.

Cheers!

The Ł

One of the things of having a Polish professor who:  A) studied at MIT, B) speaks Polish, Russian, Slovak, and Yiddish, C) has a keen sense of history and linguistics, is that you learn a lot of interesting things about the language.  For instance, take the Polish letter Ł: it's an L with a slash through it, but pronounced like W, a sound that (I'm pretty sure, please correct me if I am wrong) no other Slavic tongue has.  The thing is, is that Ł used to be pronounced like the Russian Л (transliterated as L.  This L should be pronounced like the L in girl or Polish, not like the L in look or fabulous.)  When reading Old Polish, one should be aware of this to pronounce it correctly.  The problem arising with Ł is that it's a hard phoneme to learn, especially for children.  Gradually, Polish and Poland did away with this guttural sound and replaced it with the more fluid W sound.
Now, if you don't believe me, just ride the subway.  At Stacja Ratusz Arsenał, listen to the announcement, which pronounces it like ArsenaL.  I presume that the name is preserved for historical reasons.

How to Piss off the English

Now, an American like myself has run into quite a bit of resistance to forcing people to adopt the American way of saying things.  (I've had enough of lorry and pronouncing schedule like shed-yoo-all.)  Why not rattle their chains a little?
So, a few years back a Polish girl was pontificating about how British English was superior to American English because it sounded more royal, affluent, and historical.  It was the dialect of Shakespeare, of the Queen, of Hugh Grant.  Except…  it wasn't.  I pointed out firstly that there are many dialects and accents of British English and the best dialect outside of the US was the Irish Brogue followed by the Scottish Brogue.
More importantly, today's British English is NOT the language of Shakespeare (or so say the linguists.)  We have become accustomed to actors in movies speaking with modern British accents and actors on stages fudging with terrible British accents.  But did Shakespeare really speak with a modern British accent?  Probably not.  He probably spoke with an accent closer to the Carolinian accent (much like Stephen Colbert used to.)  The Carolinas (North and South) were colonized about 400 years ago and were buffered from many linguistic influences unlike, say New York or Boston or even Minnesota.  So, to be more historically accurate, those actors should try to emulate Lindsay Graham's way of speech Hugh Grant's.
Also, the English learned how to write from the Irish (ooooh, doesn't that just make their blood boil?!)