On the decline

Based on some of the conversations we’ve been having with companies (both Polish and foreign) operating in Poland, you could come to the conclusion that inflection is some kind of crime against humanity – or at least, against the language of business. From them it might seem to be the greatest and possibly the only problem involved in running a business in this country. The terror that declination strikes into the hearts of companies is almost as bewlidering as the rules of Polish grammar itself. However, since we are a magazine that covers not only Poland but also the rest of the region, we are aware of the much laxer attitudes to such issues in those other languages. In Russia the natives even go so far as to use a whole different set of letters, rendering trade and proper names into phonetic transcriptions – seemingly without a murmur from foreign companies. In the Baltic states, the language police are also very vigilant. Not only are names always written phonetically, but strange endings and weird letters are used. So why didn’t former US president Džordžas Bušas launch a pre-emptive airstrike against Lithuania in retaliation for the way his name was being maltreated? The answer to the mystery of companies’ generally sanguine view of transliteration in those countries would appear to be that they release all their pent up frustration about it in Poland. But this still begs the question: why here? Because they can? And if you can, surely that means that either someone is letting this happen or no one is that bothered. If nobody cares or is there to stop them, then companies can and will take matters into their own hands. Even then. I still don’t know what their actual problem is. Why is the word ‘Fanta’ better than its genitive ‘Fanty’? I really don’t know. If it’s just about web searches, then, well, that’s a really poor excuse, since online search engines and translators can actually recognise words in their genitive and nominative forms. Besides, these are usually included in tags, so please... Getting back to the point, such a company (let’s call it X) sets itself up in Poland, where the official language is, funnily enough, Polish – the grammatical principles of which state that you decline all nouns. And there are so few exceptions that even a heavy smoker can list them all in one breath. Even so, such exceptions sooner or later start being inflected anyway. Nevertheless, the foreign company decides, for whatever reason, that their name should never be inflected. It’s not clear whether they think that perhaps they can get away with this, or it’s rather the case that their marketing department is somehow under the weird impression that they are above the official rules of grammar. But what happens next is that some time later, some poor journalist, who is so semi-literate and behind the times that she can only follow the actual rules of Polish grammar as taught in those outmoded institutions, schools and universties, ignorantly tries to actually write in Polish, declining those nouns according to the principles she was taught. The text, which the whole market has been eagerly awaiting, is then published and... outrage ensues! Had the author simply not received that memo that inflection is sototally passé?? Time to employ the old ‘but other people are doing it’ argument against this inflection junkie! After all, that word simply cannot be declined because in the company’s home country and native tongue the word isn’t inflected. This is the kind of argument that the PR department will typically reel out. When we then politely inform them that “virtually every word is inflected in Polish,” we are then told: “But it looks awful!” And the only way to resolve the impasse is to enter into extended negotiations. It is from such linguistic wranglings that we have discovered that the locative looks more or less alright, but the genitive is just too much. And that’s even after the emails we received from the PR manager begging us for an interview with the CEO also gave his surname in declined form – a name from an uninflected language. Hmm...

In my view, the battle over inflection is simply a tug-of-war between business and the fourth estate. The latter has the knowledge, the former has the money. Anyway, PR departments will be delighted to know that CAPITAL LETTERS and commas will be covered in the next issue.