Polish kingary.net
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Dangerously Close . . .   Spring 2003  ][ Back ]

For a language that likes to cluster a lot of consonants around a single vowel, Polish has a lot of word pairs in which the meaning is quite different (even completely opposite), but the orthographic difference is a single vowel, often simply the addition of "y":

Polish Pronunciation Meaning
przeszłość pshesz-woshch past
przyszłość pshisz-woshch future
     
wejście vay-shche building entrance
wyjście vi-shchhe building exit
     
wjazd vyazd vehicular entrance
wyjazd vy-jazd vehicular exit
     
wykład vi-kwad lecture
wkład vkwad refill
     

The most troublesome is przeszłość // przyszłość — when explaining grammar in Polish to first year students, one slip of the tongue and suddenly you have some momentarily confused students. "But I thought this was a past tense, not a future tense!"

Of course if you're driving, wyjazd/wjazd might be disastrously confusing . . .

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