Old Polish
wiesiołek) morphed into modern Polish wesoły, with the original vowels and the consonants of Czech veselý).
The Book of Henryków (Polish: Księga henrykowska, Latin: Liber fundationis claustri Sancte Marie Virginis in Heinrichau), contains the earliest known sentence written in the Polish language: Day, ut ia pobrusa, a ti poziwai (pronounced originally as: Daj, uć ja pobrusza, a ti pocziwaj, modern Polish: Daj, niech ja pomielę, a ty odpoczywaj or Pozwól, że ja będę mielił, a ty odpocznij, English: Let me grind, while you take a rest), written around 1270.
The medieval recorder of the phrase, the Cistercian monk Peter of the Henryków monastery, noted that Hoc est in polonico ("This is in Polish").
[3][4][5] The difficulty that medieval scribes had to face while attempting to codify the language was the inadequacy of the Latin alphabet to some features of Old Polish phonology, such as vowel length and nasalization, or the palatalization of consonants.
Polish glosses in Latin texts use romanized spelling, which often failed to distinguish between distinct phonemes.
[6][7] The spelling in the major works of Old Polish, such as the Holy Cross Sermons or the Sankt Florian Psalter is better developed.
Their scribes tried to resolve the aforementioned issues in various ways, which led to each manuscript having separate spelling rules.
[8][9] About 1440, Jakub Parkoszowic [pl], a professor of Jagiellonian University, was the first person to attempt a codification of Polish spelling.
In the 12th and 13th century in the dialects of Lesser Poland and Masovia the initial clusters /xv/ and /xvʲ/ were simplified to /f/ and /fʲ/ (e.g. chwatać > fatać, chwała > fała, chwila > fila).
[22][23] Perhaps one of the oldest loanwords which keeps /f, fʲ/ unchanged is the word ofiara ("victim; offering"), loaned from Czech ofěra, since the pre-writing era change ě>a before a hard consonant (przegłos polski) seemed to have operated in it.
This distinction was later phonemicized with the introduction of borrowings which had hard velars before front vowels, as well as the denasalization of word final /ɛ̃/.
[38] Similarly to some other Slavic languages and dialects, there existed a tendency to constrain the occurrence of vowels in word onset.
Old Polish continued to have four nasal vowels until the 14th century, when they merged in respect to quality, but retained the length distinction.
Examples: Because of this and other evidence, it is thought that early Old Polish had free, lexical stress inherited from Proto-Slavic.
[50][51][52][53] Occasional ellipsis of the second vowel in commonly used trisyllabic words and phrases in the 14th and 15th century (wieliki > wielki, ażeby > ażby, iże mu > iż mu, Wojeciech > Wojciech) point to the conclusion that by that time fixed initial stress had developed.
Old Polish nouns declined for seven cases: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, instrumental, locative and vocative; three numbers: singular, dual, plural; and had one of three grammatical genders: masculine, feminine or neuter.
Consequently, the endings began being assigned based primarily on the lexical gender of nouns, which previously was not the primary consideration (although stem shape still played a role in certain cases), and the old declension classes gradually merged.
In classes which had a choice of two or more endings, these were commonly interchangeable, while in modern Polish, some words stabilized and only accept one.
This was directly caused by the fact that the accusative of all masculine nouns used to be identical with the nominative, causing confusion as to which of two animate nouns was the subject and which the direct object due to free word order: Ociec kocha syn – "The father loves the son" or "The son loves the father".
The use of the genitive for the direct object solves this issue: Ociec kocha syna – unambiguously "The father loves the son".
[66] Old Polish verbs conjugated for three persons; three numbers, singular, dual and plural; two moods, declarative and imperative; and had one of two lexical aspects, perfective or imperfective.
