My often fallible memory tells me that dupka is the word my Polish grandparents used for rear end, fanny, bum. A friend claims that the word is dupa. Does anyone here know which is correct? Might there be two Polish dialects, each using one of the above?
Wiktionary is a good resource for this type of question: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/dupa#Polish There's no entry for dupka.
At a site called urban dictionary, I found dupa, dupka, & dupsko. The last meant big ass. Dupka & dupa were referred to as meaning rear end. Might Polish have case endings, with dupka & dupsko being dupa with a suffix altering the basic meaning?
-Ka is a common diminutive inflection in the Slavic languages, often accompanied by other phonemes as intensifiers and lengtheners. E.g., Russian kot, "cat" vs. kokochka, "kitty-cat." This is analogous to the -ito/-ita/-cito/-cita diminutive ending in Spanish, -chen in German, -etto/-etta in Italian, -ele in Yiddish, etc. In English (a much more compact language than Russian, Spanish, German or Yiddish) we've shortened it to simply "-y" or "ie," as in doggy, Charlie, dummy, hottie, etc. We also borrowed the French diminutive suffix -ette along with thousands of French words after the Norman Invasion in 1066. We also have an ancient diminutive ending, "-ling," which is widely used in German, e.g. liebling, "dear, honey," from Liebe, "love." We use it in that sense, as in princeling, foundling, duckling, but it has also taken on a pejorative sense, as in underling, hireling. It has fallen out of favor and is no longer a "living" grammatical construction, i.e., English-speaking people don't instinctively create new words with -ling too often any more. So, back to Polish. If dupa means "rear end" or "butt" (which was originally a perfectly respectable word), then dupka means something like "hiney," "bum" or "ass." English has become a very cosmopolitan language and anglophones love to assimilate foreign words and even foreign grammatical forms. In America, in addition to French -ette, we routinely form diminutives by appending Spanish -ito and Russian -nik. In the Southwest, we even use the textbook-proper Spanish inflection -mente to form adverbs.
