Polish pronunciation according to Marian Z. Arend’s "A Polish phonetic reader"

Bibliogr. s. 42-43

Polish pronunciation according to Marian Z. Arend’s A Polish Phonetic Reader (1924) Marian Z. Arendt’s A Polish Phonetic Reader is a somewhat forgotten early 20th-century work on Polish pronunciation aimed at foreign learners of Polish. The Poznań-based author, who studied phonetics under Daniel Jones, gives a brief description of the phonological system of Polish, and a collection of twelve short passages transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet meant for pronunciation practice, accompanied by a vocabulary. The article examines the reader with a view to determining its accuracy at representing the standard accent of Polish of Arend’s time, while taking into consideration selected aspects of allophonic, spatial and temporal variation. The analysis leads to the conclusion that while the author failed to acknowledge certain local Greater Polish traits in the speech variety he described and despite a few other minor flaws, his book offered its target audience a relatively comprehensive and reliable phonetic analysis of one of the variants of standard Polish.