"Mieszkam we Włoszech, ale pracuję w Niemczech."
Translation:I live in Italy but I work in Germany.
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I had a look on google maps, and the shortest road journey I can find is 80km, 1hr 13m, Colle Isarco/Gossensaß to Mittenwald via Innsbruck. So not quite as bad as you might think, in theory.
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This is not too far. My worries are about if this person lives in Sicily and works in Kiel :P
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I think you could worsen it if you had to commute to Flensburg, which lies close to the Danish border, some more kilometres North of Kiel. :D
Lampedusa - Heligoland would probably be the worst case scenario when considering travel duration :D
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It depends on whether Sylt was further away from the continent than Helgoland, but the latter is obviously more troublesome to access as there are few ferries regularly travelling to this island. :D
That's very interesting and, if done on purpose, it's quite doable! I tried to repeat the same considering only cities/towns with over 100k population and ended up with Bolzano to München, 3 h 18 min (278 km).
Why not "I am living in Włochy, but I work in Germany"? Włochy is a district in Warsaw :p
It is declined differently though. It would be "we Włochach" in the Polish sentence.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/W%C5%82ochy
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I lived in Warsaw for a while last year. And when I read it, I was so surprised. Could anyone explain to me the reason why that „dzielnica” is called Italia? I know we share a lot of stuff, history-wise (i.e. the national anthems, to begin with), but to have a whole district named after a foreign country... Jak miło!.
The name comes from the the XVIth century, when the current district was still just a village, and it seems to come from the surname of the family who owned it - named Włoch, which is basically the word for an Italian man.
because we wouldn't be able to pronounce it otherwise.
The rules:
- we - before words that start with "w" and "f" followed by a consonant
we Francji, we Włoszech - but w Finlandii, w Warszawie
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some other words and some set up phrases.
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we mnie (in me)
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we śnie (in a dream/sleep)
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both w/we środę and w/we czwartek are correct (on Wednesday, on Thursday)
They are two Schengen countries very close to each other so I don't think it is too unlikely.
Firstly, as "Niemczech" is the Locative form, let's focus on the Nominative one: "Niemcy". It is worth pointing out that the name of the country is the same as the word for 'the German people'. So "Niemcy to kraj, w którym żyją Niemcy" (Germany is a country where Germans live) is a correct sentence.
The main theory is that the word "Niemcy" comes from the words "niemy" (mute) and "obcy" (foreign, alien). In this way, Niemcy would be therefore 'mute people', because their language was not understandable to the Slavic people, just as they wouldn't understand the Slavs. Another theory is based on the similarity to the words "nie my", meaning literally "not we". As in "These are different people than we are". Finally, some people claim that this word is based on the name of an ancient Celtic tribe called "Nemeti" or "Nemetes".
Well, it's a Slavic loanword.
It has certainly the same origin as немец (a German) in Russian. I've been told that the word is related to some other word that meant 'mute' (and designated someone who didn't speak the local language) and that it was originally a generic word for any foreigner.
I'm curious about the other word. I think that the Polish word for Italy has a similar origin, the same as Wales, Wallachia or Rotwelsch (a language once used among thieves).
cz. "němý" = eng. "dumb", they simply spoke a different language, not understood by slavic people :-)
Why do the translated country names end with -ech and not -ach? I thought -ach was used for all nouns in loc.pl. case?
Even if country names are adjectives as some other languages the expected endings are -ich/-ych??
Those few countries with plural names in Polish are a bit more complicated, I think.
For example "Indie -> w Indiach", "Chiny -> w Chinach", "Filipiny -> na Filipinach"
But also "Niemcy -> w Niemczech", "Włochy -> we Włoszech", "Węgry -> na Węgrzech".
"Niemcach", "Włochach", "Węgrach" would be Locative plural forms for "Germans", "Italians", "Hungarians", actually.