Old Polish

"Day, ut ia pobrusa, a ti poziwai", highlighted in red

The Book of Henryków (Polish: Księga henrykowska, Latin: Liber fundationis claustri Sancte Marie Virginis in Heinrichau), 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: Daj, niech ja pomielę, a ty odpoczywaj or Pozwól, że ja będę mielił, a ty odpocznij, English: Let me grind, while you take a rest), written around 1270.

The medieval recorder of this phrase, the Cistercian monk Peter of the Henryków monastery, noted that "Hoc est in polonico" ("This is in Polish").[2][3][4]

About 1440 Jakub Parkoszowic, a professor of Jagiellonian University was the first one to attempt a codification of Polish spelling. He wrote a tract on Polish orthographic rules (in Latin) and a short rhyme Obiecado (in Polish) as an example of their use. The following rules were proposed:[5][7]

• introduction of new letters of different shape to write hard (velarized) consonants, while soft (palatalized) consonant letters are left unchanged,
• doubling of vowel letters to mark long sounds, for example: aa – /aː/,
• use of the letter ø to write the short nasal vowel (øø 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 affricates,

among others.

Parkoszowic's proposal was not adopted. 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.[5][7]

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.[7]

Relatively few consonantal changes occurred during the Old Polish period. The most important concerned the realization of the soft coronal obstruents. 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/.[7] This change happened very early, starting already in the middle of the 13th century as evidenced by spelling.[5]

On the other hand, the palatalization of the affricates /t͡sʲ/ and /d͡zʲ/ weakened and by the middle of the 15th century they became hard.[5]

Somewhere around the 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/).[5][7]

The very end of the Old Polish period (starting in the 15th century) sees the palatalization of the velar prosives /k/ and /ɡ/ before front oral vowels to [kʲ] and [ɡʲ] – the so-called "fourth Slavic palatalization". This distinction was later phonemicized with the introduction of borrowings which had hard velars before front vowels. Note that this change did not affect the velar fricative /x/ or velars before the front nasal vowel /æ̃~ɛ̃/.[5][7] 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 thusly:[5][7]

Early Old Polish vocalic system consisted of the following phonemes. As mentioned, the sound qualities are approximations.[6][7]

[ɨ] and [ɨː] were in complementary distribution with [i] and [iː] respectively, and the pairs can be regarded as allophones.[6]

All vowel phonemes occurred in pairs, one short and one long. Long vowels emerged in Old Polish from three sources:[5][6]

1. compensatory lengthening after the deletion of weak yers before a voiced consonant (e.g. PS rogъ > OP rōg, PS gněvъ > gniēw, PS stalъ > OP stāł; see Havlík's law)
2. from the contraction of various sequences of two vowels separated by /j/ (e.g. PS sějati > OP siāć, PS dobrajego > OP dobrēgo, PS rybojǫ > OP rybǭ)
3. inherited from Proto-Slavic neoacute accent

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 dintinct 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 complete in the late 15th century. The higher vowels are traditionally called pochylone ("skewed") in Polish.[5][6][7]

The nasal vowels developed differently. Old Polish continued to have four nasal vowels until the 14th century, when they merged in respect to quality, but retained the length distinction. The new system therefore had only two nasal vowels: short /ã/ (from earlier /æ̃/ and /ɑ̃/) and long /ãː/ (from earlier /æ̃ː/ and /ɑ̃ː/). In the 15th century when vowel length was disappearing the two nasals retained the old length distinction through changes in quality, like the other non-high vowels. The short nasal was fronted to /æ̃~ɛ̃/ and the long backed to /ɒ̃~ɔ̃/ and lost its length (both with differing dialectal realizations).[5][6][7]

The described changes led to the creation of the late Old Polish vocalic system:[6][7]

Although stress was never marked in writing, its development in Old Polish can be partially inferred from certain other phonetic changes.

In the oldest works the verbal suffix -i/-y of the 2nd & 3rd ps. sg. imp. is dropped in some verbs, but retained in others. A comparison with East Slavic languages shows that the suffix remained when it was stressed in Proto-Slavic. Examples:

• Bogurodzica spuści – Russian спусти́ spustí
• Bogurodzica raczy – Russian рачи́ račí
• Bogurodzica usłysz – Russian услы́шь uslýšʹ
• Sankt Florian Psalter chwali – Russian хвали́ xvalí
• Holy Cross Sermons wstań – Russian вста́нь vstánʹ

Because of this it is thought that early Old Polish had free, lexical stress inherited from Proto-Slavic.[5][6]

Frequent ellipsis of the second vowel in trisyllabic words in the 14th and 15th century (wieliki > wielki, ażeby > ażby, iże mu > iż mu, Wojeciech > Wojciech) point to the conclusion that by that time fixed initial stress had developed.[5] The initial stress in the peripheral Podhale and southern Kashubian dialects (now considered a separate language but still part of the Lechitic dialect continuum) are taken to be remnants of earlier widespread initial stress.[6]

Old Polish nouns declined for seven cases: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, instrumental, locative and vocative; three numbers: singular, dual, plural; and had one of three grammatical genders: masculine, feminine or neuter.[5][6]

The following is a simplified table of Old Polish noun declension:[6]

Forms in parentheses are encountered sporadically, or begin appearing at the very end of Old Polish period (during the transition to Middle Polish). An apostrophe before a suffix means that it triggered softening of the preceding consonant. i-stems are also called consonantal stems.

Although Old Polish inherited all of the inflectional categories of Proto-Slavic, the whole system was subject to a fundamental reorganization. The Proto-Slavic inflection paradigms were applied based on the shape of the stem, but this had been obscured by many phonetic changes. Consequently, the endings began being assigned based primarily on the lexical gender of nouns, which previously was not the primary consideration (although stem shape still played a role in certain cases). Many endings were lost from Proto-Slavic and others, often those which were more distinct, took their place.[5][6]

Although many of the above endings are the same as modern Polish, they did not necessarily have the same distribution. In classes which had a choice of two or more endings, these were commonly interchangeable, while in the modern language some words have stabilized and only accept one.[6][7]

The modern Polish distinction in animacy in masculine declension was only beginning to appear in Old Polish. The most visible symptom of this trend was the use of the genitive of masculine animate nouns in the singular in place of the accusative. This was directly caused by the fact that the accusative of all masculine nouns used to be identical with the nominative, causing confusion as to which of two animate nouns was the subject and which the direct object due to free word order: Ociec kocha syn – "The father loves the son" or "The son loves the father". The use of the genitive for the direct object solves this issue: Ociec kocha syna – unambiguously "The father loves the son". Such forms are ubiquitous already in the oldest monuments of the language, although exceptions still happen occasionally.[6][7]

Old Polish verbs conjugated for three persons; three numbers: singular, dual, plural; two moods: declarative and imperative; and had one of two lexical aspects: perfective or imperfective. There was also the analytical conditional mood, formed by the aorist of the verb być "to be" and an old participle form.[5][6]

Significant changes from Proto-Slavic occurred in the usage of tenses. The ancient aorist and imperfect tenses were already in the process of dissapearing when the language was first attested. In the oldest texts of the 14th and 15th century these forms number only 26, and neither of the tenses show the whole inflection paradigm. The only exception was the aorist of być "to be", which survived and came to be used to form the conditional mood.[5][6][7]

The role of the past tense was taken up by a new analytical formation, composed of the present of być and the old L-participle of a verb.[5][6]