AHC: Keep Poland speaking Macaronic

In the 16th century, Polish-Lithuanian nobles started to develop a highly peculiar way of speaking due to a large amount of fluent and skilled Latin speakers, Latin being widely used as a lingua franca. This was on one hand due to the fact that Polish nobility had always looked up to ancient Rome, and on the other to the fantastic but widespread belief stemming from Roman sources that Polish nobles were descendants of the Sarmatians, an Iranian tribe of the 5th century AD. As a result, knowing Latin was considered an important part of 'Sarmatian' culture. It was also indispensable in the public life of the Commonwealth, with many of the political speeches performed in Latin.

This led to an unexpected slang being born through what is known as 'makaronizowanie' (macaronizing): a mixture of Polish and Latin, with Latin heavily influencing Polish sentence structure and word order. This 'macaronic' language was spoken in political gatherings, tribunals, but also in schools and royal courts. The Latin influence on Polish proved very strong – and it took a lot of effort on the part of the linguistic purists of the Enlightenment to 'rectify' it. Polish today still stands out among other Slavic languages as the one with largest amount of Latin loan-words.

So, you challenge is to keep the PLC speaking Macaronic instead of adopting 'real' Polish. I'm not sure how exactly you'd stop those Enlightenment era proto-nationalists from purifying the language or the Enlightenment era leaders from wanting to speaking their 'true language' but I'm sure it can be done.
 

CaliGuy

Banned
So, you challenge is to keep the PLC speaking Macaronic instead of adopting 'real' Polish. I'm not sure how exactly you'd stop those Enlightenment era proto-nationalists from purifying the language or the Enlightenment era leaders from wanting to speaking their 'true language' but I'm sure it can be done.
Well, you can try having Russia fight the Seven Years' War to its conclusion and thus strip East Prussia from Frederick the Great. Then, you can have Russia eventually have a personal union with the PLC (due to its decline) and have some Russian Tsar decide to try eliminating Polish national consciousness by destroying the Polish language in its pure form and promoting Macaronic instead.
 
Well, you can try having Russia fight the Seven Years' War to its conclusion and thus strip East Prussia from Frederick the Great.

Somehow, I think that if Frederick can't recover it, I think within 3 generations Russia is going to lose East Prussia to a Holy Roman Empire state like Brandenburg (we have a claim, take back what was ours!) or Austria (get out Russians!)
 

CaliGuy

Banned
Somehow, I think that if Frederick can't recover it, I think within 3 generations Russia is going to lose East Prussia to a Holy Roman Empire state like Brandenburg (we have a claim, take back what was ours!) or Austria (get out Russians!)
Brandenburg would be total morons to fight against Russia unless they are much more industrialized than Russia is.

As for Austria, I am skeptical that it would have the strength to militarily defeat Russia all by itself.
 
Brandenburg would be total morons to fight against Russia unless they are much more industrialized than Russia is.

As for Austria, I am skeptical that it would have the strength to militarily defeat Russia all by itself.

Russia is going to have some... internal problems that aren't butterflied away. More so than Austria or even Brandenburg.

This is assuming Napoleon is of course butterflied (I mean, come on his Egypt campaign was sooo close to prematurely ending his career and tyranny in the first republic was looing for an enlightened or less so man to take charge...). If he's not, this actually stacks the deck in favor of Brandenburg and Austria even though Austria was humiliated and weakened by him.

Let's take Nappy out of the picture. Problem for Russia is that internal dissent is rising, not to revolution but to the point the bureaucracy is atherosclerotic. The British will also fear them endangering India (like OTL, although the logistics of Russia brining even small field cannons into India by land seem implausible to me but they'll fear the Russians anyways). I imagine they will look for an opportunity to use East Prussia as a distraction in a proxy war. So how do we get rid of Polish if Ease Prussia is lost in say... 3 generation?
 

CaliGuy

Banned
Russia is going to have some... internal problems that aren't butterflied away. More so than Austria or even Brandenburg.

This is assuming Napoleon is of course butterflied (I mean, come on his Egypt campaign was sooo close to prematurely ending his career and tyranny in the first republic was looing for an enlightened or less so man to take charge...). If he's not, this actually stacks the deck in favor of Brandenburg and Austria even though Austria was humiliated and weakened by him.

Let's take Nappy out of the picture. Problem for Russia is that internal dissent is rising, not to revolution but to the point the bureaucracy is atherosclerotic. The British will also fear them endangering India (like OTL, although the logistics of Russia brining even small field cannons into India by land seem implausible to me but they'll fear the Russians anyways). I imagine they will look for an opportunity to use East Prussia as a distraction in a proxy war. So how do we get rid of Polish if Ease Prussia is lost in say... 3 generation?
For what it's worth, though, Russia's internal problems--whatever they were--didn't prevent them from decisively defeating Napoleon in 1812-1814 in our TL.
 
For what it's worth, though, Russia's internal problems--whatever they were--didn't prevent them from decisively defeating Napoleon in 1812-1814 in our TL.

Napoleon's defeat is a bit earlier than what I'm thinking... I'm thinking Crimean War, maybe 1860s
 
Well, you can try having Russia fight the Seven Years' War to its conclusion and thus strip East Prussia from Frederick the Great. Then, you can have Russia eventually have a personal union with the PLC (due to its decline) and have some Russian Tsar decide to try eliminating Polish national consciousness by destroying the Polish language in its pure form and promoting Macaronic instead.
...you keep trying to find a way to tie your pet pre-1900 POD into any scenario, huh? :p
 
All you would get in this alt is a Polish language with a lot more Latin in its sentence structure and vocabulary. More people speaking it would not harm Polish identity, because that would be TTLs Polish language. If something, it might make them more divorced from pan-slavic notions, but that's probably it.
 
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Somehow, I think that if Frederick can't recover it, I think within 3 generations Russia is going to lose East Prussia to a Holy Roman Empire state like Brandenburg (we have a claim, take back what was ours!) or Austria (get out Russians!)
Why would Austria care about East Prussia? It was never part of the HRE and taking it would be establishing an enclave surrounded by Russian-aligned PLC. Or a salient if the rest of Prussia is taken.

Also, that assumes Brandenburg wouldn't just revert to being an economic backwater and a marginally important player in Central Europe (taking all of Prussia and with it the PLC's sea access let Frederick the Great drain the Poles dry, no?).
 
Macaronic would simply be the new Polish in this scenario.

Agreed.

There are languages that replace the bulk of the vocabulary and lexical reference frameworks like stable metaphors and toolkit of allusions, and even modify grammar due to outside influences, immigration/invasion, or internal developments. See the % of Romance in Maltese, Slavic in Romanian, Chinese in Korean, Arabic in Persian etc.

Doesn't really stop it being "Maltese", "Romanian", "Korean" or "Farsi".
 
Agreed.

There are languages that replace the bulk of the vocabulary and lexical reference frameworks like stable metaphors and toolkit of allusions, and even modify grammar due to outside influences, immigration/invasion, or internal developments. See the % of Romance in Maltese, Slavic in Romanian, Chinese in Korean, Arabic in Persian etc.

Doesn't really stop it being "Maltese", "Romanian", "Korean" or "Farsi".

Well, I think Farsi is a bad example to use here, since before the Arab invasion its speakers called it “Parsi”. But otherwise, your point is entirely correct.
 
Make Latin seem pure and beautiful to whoever writes a Polish dictionary. Have them adopt Latin loandwords and macronics into the language officially. Bam, Polish is Macaronic.
 
Make Latin seem pure and beautiful to whoever writes a Polish dictionary. Have them adopt Latin loandwords and macronics into the language officially. Bam, Polish is Macaronic.
So basically what happened to English after all the senseless inkhorn terms the French and classics lovers stuffed in there.

Yet again, that doesn't make a new language. Changes it, yes, and maybe we would differentiate between the pre-Latin Polish and post-Latin Polish as Old Polish, Middle Polish, Modern Polish, etc. But it would still be Polish just like English didn't suddenly adopt a new name after taking in the French, Latin, and Greek that make learning to spell in the language a pain for non-native speakers/spellers.
 
Tibia or shinbone? It's all English.

Also, you can analyze patterns and make assumptions, but, one cannot simply predict linguistic evolution. There's always a degree of randomness in language.
 
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