Comment by ajuc | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ajuc | Hacker News Reader

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I've heard something similar at folk concert but I don't know from which region of Poland it was and it's generally not stuff that people know or sing (except for folk bands, recontruction groups etc.) Maybe it was translated from a russian song.

I think the most alive folk music is the one from górale (Tatra highlanders). It's very distinctive, after 2 chords you know it's from them. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-G2qaeoQ4po https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7o-Mh_ang4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOCTwL14-T8

Besides górale there are a few folk songs that everybody knows and sings at campfires or on weddings or other gatherings (they are called "piosenka biesiadna" because you usually sing them when you're eating).

Examples: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1q0-bT6H7s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wug2YJGqca4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YjY88qmsbDg

I'm not sure they are 100% authentic folk music though, because most versions nowadays are disco-polo :)

Example of true folk song I've heard a few times in my region (on weddings or concerts): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4bY7J3KTx1w

It's in regional dialect that nobody really speaks anymore in daily life.

Another kind of folk music that's still alive is przyśpiewki (orchestra plays same tune and people switch and sing to diss everybody else on weddings :)). It's basically folk rap battles :)

Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDABYBOXaAg

BTW in one Kaczmarski song there's a Russian folk song included. I always wondered if it's true folk song or something he invented. Have you ever heard it?

The inner song starts here: https://youtu.be/7cxciyZEBkE?t=151

The start of the included song is the same as a ukrainian folk song (with a very similar theme).

https://nashe.com.ua/song/15379

another version (gaily gown-greening):

https://www.pisni.org.ua/songs/461535.html

And доню and собі́ would also be ukrainian. So it looks like I have to transliterate from polish to ukrainian, neither of which I have any experience with...

(Incidentally, wesele seems to be one of the false friends you mentioned. Part of the chorus in

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPovcLSEfS4

is Давай, давай веселей, but somehow I doubt the context has much to do with weddings.)

Edit: and speaking of weddings, YT just gave me https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OOc0s0OXV0Q

I guess https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish–Lithuanian_Commonwealth... probably had something to do with the distribution of the song?

Edit2: The instrumentation for Głęboka studzienka reminded me of my favourite bavarian cover band (for anyone that doesn't know they need to hear oom-pah metal): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbsEZzgCwmI

Edit3: TIL poland is a civilised country. You all also have carnaval! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=clr9gqqZ6jg

Yeah the song is a relict of PLC times.

"Wesele" means "wedding", "weselej" means "more happily" (wesoło, weselej, najweselej = happily, happili-er, happili-est - as adverbs not adjectives).

So "dawaj, dawaj, weselej" would mean something like "let's go, let's go, happier now", right?

Yes. I'd imagined something along the lines of "c'mon, c'mon, party!"

And I'd anglicise "Wiesiołyje Rebiata" as "Party Dudes"[1], but take that with a lot of salt[2], as my command of californian is much stronger than my sense of slavic...

(I'm pretty confident about it though, because pop music tends to gravitate to a certain vocabulary. Just as corazon is one of the first words one learns when listening to mexican radio, and сердце occurs often in russian, I assume I'll be hearing serce frequently, along with appropriate first and second person possessives, in disco polo...)

[1] Here's that band rocking their 80's style: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FIZxpmohOlk

[2] i chlebem?

Edit: one of these days I still need to play with the Kogut programming language, http://kokogut.sourceforge.net/kogut.html

True folk song: ukrainian, "Even though he lost interest in the cock"[1]

    Послала мене мати
    к хлопців погуляти:
    "Погуляй собі, доню,
    Я ж тобі не бороню".

    А я собі гуляю,
    Як рибка по Дунаю,
    Як рибка з окунцями,
    Я, молода, з хлопцями.

    ====

    My mother sent me
    to go for a walk with the guys:
    "Take a walk, daughter,
    I'm not tilling[2] you."

    I'm walking[3] around,
    Like a fish in the Danube,
    Like a fish with perches[4],
    Youthful me, with the guys.

from:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jtR4szp1CB0

For a similar story in an anglophone context:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQ0mxQXmLsk

[1] The rest of the song is about planting and furrows and peas in pods and other agricultural topics, so it should be no surprise the young man of the title had a rooster along. As roosters will do, it had awakened her in the morning, after a night of very little sleep.

[2] Compare https://acoup.blog/2020/08/06/collections-bread-how-did-they...

I'm not sure if this verb is referring to the pre-seeding earthwork (which makes a fertile soil receptive to the seeds) or the post-seeding earthwork (which covers up the generative potential, protecting them from the outside environment). Either way, mama ain't doin' it.

[3] I don't know if this is a difference between folk song usage and modern, or ukrainian and russian dialects, but "walk around" pretty much means "party" in russian hiphop lyrics.

Compare https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NU-XAxBkEaE

(and unless I've been listening to the wrong ones, wells and riverbanks in slavic folk songs often lead to trouble — and seat wetting.)

[4] Perches are carnivores. (Well-danced tango is said to have a bit of stalking predator play?) Perch are also fairly indiscriminate: they'll go for just about any bait, whether it wriggles or not.

Thanks a lot :).

The false friends are interesting, I though "hulaty" was the same word as Polish "hulać" which means to have fun/to party.

The other quirky word is "boroniu", which I thought was the same word as Polish "bronić" which means "to defend", but in this context (ja tobie nie bronię) it would mean (I don't forbid you). It comes from the noun "broń" (a weapon).

The agricultural stuff would be "bronować" in comparison from the plural noun "brony" (harrows).

I wonder if the Ukrainian is maybe closer to Polish in this case? Cause it would make more sense that way.

Even "ukonce" have Polish equivalent "okonie".

That's why I suspected Kaczmarski invented it - the song was completely understandable to me without any knowledge of Russian or Ukrainian except for knowing how the sounds change usually.

As [3] indicated, have fun/to party is a perfectly cromulent reading. (and from many of the folk songs I've bothered translating, "walking around" tends to produce grass-stained clothing, so I guess we need an etymological reference here.)

(I don't forbid you) makes much more sense. That was what I was reaching for in the post-seeding covering over as protection in [2]. Going pl->ua in wikipedia, I still do get https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broń to https://uk.wikipedia.org/wiki/Зброя , but logic almost demands that's the reading.

I'd figure that google and yandex translate (and their image searches) are not tuned to folk song usages, so your guesses are probably way more accurate than mine.

I wonder if these verses are of highly-conserved vocabulary (then again, being in verse would tend to conserve vocabulary on its own), so they'd be a slavic equivalent of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schleicher%27s_fable ? Compare https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23667506

> Зброя

False friends again, "zbroja" is armor in Polish :)

"Stworzona je koza" reminds me of yak-shaving. Maybe it should become the coders' folk song?

Przyśpiewki are exactly what I'd been looking for. Will check out the rest tomorrow... Dziękuję!

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