Wola and wolność in Polish
Wola and wolność in Polish

Summary/Abstract: This paper considers two Polish words: wola ‘will’ and wolność ‘freedom’ and, more tangentially, their Slavic counterparts. In English, the two words are morphologically quite distinct and thus also seem distinct conceptually. The two Polish terms are clearly morphologically related and there are contexts in which wola does still mean freedom, though not vice versa. The main question I want to focus on here is why did Polish need the word wolność when it had wola as well as swoboda, another Slavic proto word which means freedom.

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