anyone who can speak Polish tell me how you pronounce the ch combination?
Thursday, August 19th, 2010 at
10:53 pm
I am trying to learn Polish and I have heard the ch like in "chcę" pronounced either like a k or hard c sound or like an h with just a hint of the hard c...what is the correct way? my husband's grandmother's maiden name was Mucha and they always pronounced it in the latter...I'm guessing that is correct??
I guess I was a little confusing...the hard c I mean like in the word "cake" or "cut" that is what I meant sorry...
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Tagged with: c sound • grandmother • maiden name
Filed under: Polish Written and Spoken
you really need to talk to my friend elsie she is fluent in polish.
myspace.com/elsielove11
Here is a link to a website that pronounces Polish:
http://www.ivona.com
It would be pronounced
Moo ha the Ha is like Ha ha ha Mooha On Ha ( Mucha)
It means Fly.
Well, I’m somewhat baffled by your phraseology– a "soft g" might mean a sound similar to the s in "measure" to you, but to me, it might mean the sound the g in the Dutch word "sundag" makes.
In proper linguistic terms, the sound made by the ch diagraph in Polish is called the voiceless velar fricative. In the IPA (international phonetic alphabet) this sound is represented by the character [x]. It makes the same sound as the Cyrillic letter x and the Greek letter χ, the Arabic letter خ, as well as the ch in some dialects of German.
This sound doesn’t exist in standard English, but it is found in some Scottish words, the most well known being "loch". The Polish ch makes the same sound as this Scottish ch– which is not pronounced as an aspirated k (a k with a short breathy sound at the end), but rather as a fricative.
This sound is made by pushing air out of your mouth (like any other fricative, take [s] or [f] for example) while the back of your tongue comes close to the velum, a soft patch of skin at the back of your mouth before your tonsils. The back of your tongue will create a space through which air will flow past your velum and out through your mouth, thusly forming this sound.
I think what you’ve described as "an h with just a hint of the hard c" may be the correct sound, but I can’t know for sure from your terminology.