Cold beer & a pronunciation test

Last night's new beer was Czarne Fortuna ('"black luck?"), a black, sweet, honey & spiced beer, brewed in Szceczin by Browar. Way too sweet for me.

There's another Polish beer called "Lech," which was also the first name of the Polish president killed in the airplane crash near Katyn this spring -- Lech Kaczynski. He was not all that popular at the time, though his martyrdom improved his standing among SOME Poles. Not all. A Polish student told me, last night, that shortly after the crash, a big billboard went up in Sczeczin which said: "Cold Lech is the best."

When Judy & I were picking grapes in the Beaujolais region of France, eons ago, one of our co-workers, French, told us that during WWII the French used the word "ronronner," which is the word for "to purr," and is very hard to pronounce correctly, to determine if a suspected spy was really French or a German in disguise, because the German would not be able to pronounce it.

Yesterday the student Kuba who is teaching us Polish gave us the equivalent Polish word, used in WWII by the Poles to determine if a person really was Polish. It's a name, maybe never anyone's, but made-up for the test. Try it out:

Brzeczyszczykiewicz.

(The first "e" has the little tail on it called an "ogonek" which gives it a nasal "en" sound, almost the sound of "on," but more nasal.)

I learned, too, that when two consonents are repeated in a Polish word, they are both pronounced. E.g. Kamiennek Gora, a little town in the Sudenten, is pronounced Kamien-nuh-nek Gora. Kennedy, in other words, would be Ken-nuh-nedy...