Traditional Polish Finger Games

Abstract

This article attempts to describe traditional Polish finger games. The constitutive features of the genre of finger play are indicated, as well as the positive impact of the accompanying words on both the linguistic and motor development of young children. The main part of the article is the presentation of the most popular of the Polish texts, ‘Tu sroczka kaszkę warzyła …’ (‘Here little magpie cooked porridge …’). This study provides a basic ethnolinguistic analysis of the variants of this text and demonstrates that this finger game has a pan-Slavic character. The article also briefly discusses other similar texts that are popular in Poland. The data that form the basis of this study were collected by the author in 2012–2017 during research in southern Poland, mainly in the Małopolska region, and in 2021 in Podkarpacie province, along with material from anthologies covering all of Poland and from folklore archives.

Notes

1 Examples of English finger and toe games (starting with the big toe and ending with the smallest toe):

1. This pig went to the barn.

2. This ate all the corn.

3. This said he would tell.

4. This said he wasn’t well.

5. This went Week! week! week! over the door sill. (Rhys 1910, 108).

This little pig went to market.

This little pig stayed at home.

This little pig had roast beef.

This little pig had none.

And this little pig cried, Wee-wee-wee-wee-wee.

I can’t find my way home. (Opie and Opie 1977, 349)

2 This term was created by the paediatrician William Sears and his wife Martha Sears. Attachment parenting is based on the rules of attachment theory in developmental psychology and, consequently, assumes that children create a strong emotional bond with their parents (or people who take care of them), which influences the children’s future lives fundamentally. Thus, parents, through the creation of a close relationship with their children and through their emotional availability, influence the formation of a secure attachment style in children, which translates into their happiness (Sears and Sears 2001).

3 The stereotype of cold upbringing is visible, for example, in Polish proverbs, for example: ‘Kto pieści dzieci za młodu, ten w starości będzie na nie płakał’ (‘He who spoils children in their youth will weep for them in old age’) (Krzyżanowski 1969, 531); ‘Szczęściu swych dzieci zawadza, kto im zbytecznie dogadza’ (‘One who excessively pampers their children hinders their happiness’) (Krzyżanowski 1969, 532); ‘Kto nie słucha ojca, matki, ten słucha psiej skóry’ (‘Whoever does not listen to their father or mother, listens to the dog’s hide’) (Żebrowska-Mazur 2020, 60); and ‘Jak kto podniesie rękę na ojca, matkę, temu ręka uschnie’ (‘Whoever raises a hand against their father or mother, that hand will wither’) (Żebrowska-Mazur 2020, 60). In contemporary Poland, proverbs with such content are largely seen as outdated, and hitting or harshly punishing children is considered inappropriate and harmful.

4 All quoted texts have been translated by the author of the article.

5 As well as all the texts of traditional childlore (Żebrowska-Mazur 2020, 2022).

6 In Poland, the tradition of ethnographic interpretation of the term ‘folklore’ as ‘peasant culture’ persisted for a relatively long time, encompassing many phenomena considered to be spiritual, social, and material culture primarily related to the peasantry. Therefore, when referring to traditional texts of children’s folklore, I mean those texts that have peasant origins or have been borrowed by the common people. Anything accepted by the peasantry should be considered as ‘folk’, meaning creations that operate within the group and express a collective worldview (Bartmiński 1990, 8–9; Żebrowska-Mazur 2020, 15–28).

7 The acronym POB stands for Priorytetowy Obszar Badawczy (Priority Research Area).

8 Utilizing these terms, I refer to the model of language communication formulated by Roman Jakobson. He identifies six factors as constitutive for every speech act: ‘(1) addresser (speaker, encoder, emitter; poet, author; narrator), (2) addressee (decoder, hearer, listener; reader; interpreter), (3) code (system, langue), (4) message (semelfactive parole, the given discourse, the text), (5) context (referent), (6) contact (“a physical channel and psychological connection between speaker and addressee”)’ (Waugh 1980, 57, citing Jakobson 1960, 353).

9 The themes of these songs revolve around the fates of orphans and cattle herding.

10 In this article I quote only the variants necessary to discuss the essence of the genre.

11 Since a magpie appears most frequently in those texts, I will use this name to refer to those texts collectively.

12 The notation of Polish texts shows the simplified phonetics of Polish dialects.

13 When it comes to the texts I collected in the field, I give the name of a Polish village and its administrative district, followed by the date of collection.

14 The abbreviation TR UMCS stands for texts recorded in the field by the creators of the Tape Recordings Archive of the Ethnolinguistic Laboratory of the Maria Curie-Skłodowska University in Lublin.

15 The identification of the ladybug with the ancient deity of the sun and fair weather is documented in the text ‘Słoneczko, słoneczko, leć do nieba, przynieś nam jutro pogodę albo desc’ (‘Sun, sun, fly to the sky and bring us tomorrow good weather or rain’) (Simonides 1985, 159).

16 Interestingly, in Polish a woman who devotes herself to taking care of the house and children, a housewife, is named kura domowa (literally, ‘house hen’), which is negative: a colloquial and contemptuous phrase for ‘a woman who is interested in her house and children only and has neither broader interests nor professional ambitions’ (WSJP PAN). However, according to Maciej Rak, ‘such an ironic name could be popular in the urban culture only. In the countryside, the most popular family model has been the one in which the man works in the field and the woman takes care of her children and the house’ (Rak 2007, 127).

17 The metaphor of gniazdo (nest) meaning ‘house’ is probably universal. It is not only present in Polish; compare English ‘nest’, which can also be used in this metaphorical sense.

18 Phraseme is a linguistic unit that has a meaning or function beyond the sum of its component parts. This could be an idiom, a phrasal expression, a phraseological unit, or other complex language construction whose meaning is not straightforwardly predictable from the meanings of individual words (Chlebda 1991, 27).

19 This is a website that collects childlore texts from around the world. It is a kind of blog, run as a hobby, but its creator, Lisa Yannucci, takes care of the high quality of the published content and publishes comments by informants from different countries.

20 The website also includes texts from Hungary, Germany, Lithuania, and Latvia: https://www.mamalisa.com/?t=e_family&c=158.

21 In versions where the content about the chick’s beheading is replaced with something else (specifically, information that the magpie flew away to bring more food) the exact same gesture is performed, as it can effectively illustrate the magpie’s departure as well.

22 Polish poets who drew from traditional texts included, for example, Jan Brzechwa, Magdalena Samozwaniec, Tadeusz Śliwiak, and Julian Tuwim (Ostasz 2012; Żebrowska-Mazur 2020).

23 The last three words are pronounced faster, while grasping and tickling the baby (Milewska 1903, 32).

24 Similar texts can be found in the following languages: Catalan, Spanish, German, and Russian (Yannucci 2024).

25 The preservation of traditional texts can stem from their association with gestures and be linked to the early acquisition of bodily awareness in childhood, known as body acquisition (Barker and Rice 2019).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Barbara Żebrowska-Mazur

Barbara Żebrowska-Mazur, PhD, is Assistant Professor in the Department of History of Language and Dialectology of the Faculty of Polish Studies at the Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Poland. She is particularly interested in ethnolinguistics, dialectology, and folkloristics, which she expresses in her dialectological field research in the Krakow region and in her scientific publications on verbal folklore, linguistic and cultural awareness of rural residents, and the use of dialect in marketing and advertising.