Breakfast

Our first breakfast in Poland was in a little café a couple of blocks from our hotel. Posted on the wall was the menu.  My first impression was of the strangely accented characters and irregular strings of consonants.  I now understood how my wife felt trying to read German street names.  My concern elevated; what do these strange words mean? How will I eat?

For what ever reason my eye focus on Kawy.  As I looked down the list below it I saw expresso, cappuccino, etc.  Thus kawy must mean coffee.  I thought herbaty must be tea; salatki must be salad. Through these observations I came to find the similarities in the Polish language rather than just the differences.

I began to realize I could deconstruct coffee to form kawy.  In English a  letter C followed by a, o, or u is pronounced like a K.  The letters W, V and F have a relationship through sound shifts. Over the millennia the sounds associated with these letters have morphed.  For example, W in German has a V sound (hence in German wine is spelt as wein while in latin it is vinum; both have ‘v’ as their initial sound; it is just in the written form different letters are used).  In German the letter V has an F sound, and thus by traversing the sound shifts I could connect F to V to W.  The sound relationship between ee and y is well known.  Hence Co[Ka]ff[w]ee[y]. For those interested in finding out more about the Language I suggest listening to The History of English Podcast.  

This realization on the first day helped me decipher the written word during the remainder our visit.  It did little for conversation and there remained many words I could not process; I still can’t decipher the menu item szczur, but it was nicely presented in a white sauce and tasted very much like chicken, although it did remind me of a meal we had in Peru called Cuy Chactado.