The curious case of the disappearing Polish S (2015) (aresluna.org)
196 points by colinprince 10 hours ago
I believe the fact that Polish uses the Latin alphabet (with a small Slavic twist to express the extra sounds) meant it was much easier for Poland to align itself westward. I think the average Pole is much closer culturally to the Western neighbours than to a Ukrainian or Russian (maybe apart from cuisine).
The adoption of the Latin alphabet was itself a move to align itself westward, with kingdoms in the Latin world, not the Byzantine one, and tied to adopting Catholicism rather than Orthodoxy.
Like Kazakhstan, which decided to switch from Cyrillic to the Latin alphabet [1] in order to align more with Europe and less with Russia.
I wonder if Ukraine will do the same in a distant future...
[1] https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20180424-the-cost-of-ch...
Ukraine absolutely must ditch Cyrillic alphabet, after the war. There will be plenty of things to change.
I sometimes hear the same in my circles about Persian ditching the perso-arabic script. I don't get it, why can't you align a country however you like without creating a huge rift between a big population and years of literature, material etc etc? One can learn multiple scripts and almost all literate people know the latin script globally nowadays. Besides, sad to see the whole world just use the latin script in the end but that's not the point
Sharing a writing system helps with communication across cultures, even when there isn't a shared language.
> One can learn multiple scripts and almost all literate people know the latin script globally nowadays.
If almost all literate people know the latin script, there's a benefit to writing your language in it. Of course, the switching cost is high.
Yes. They have to change a lot of things to better align with Europe, especially if they join the EU.
They're already working on moving to the European train gauge, they set Christmas to December 25th, etc. but there's still a long way to go.
Cyrillic didn't prevent Bulgaria from joining EU, why should it be a problem for Ukraine?
Being Catholic helps too
Polish cuisine is very similar to German cuisine.
(This comment will make a lot of Polish people very upset.)
Sure, a common use of bread, potatoes, cabbage/other vegetables, hearty meat dishes etc but the Polish kitchen is closer to Ukrainian/Russian in technique/ingredients.
Barszcz, pierogi, fermented everything, pickles, sour rye, and many dishes built around wheat/rye, mushrooms, dairy, and Eastern-style fillings are much more like Ukrainian/Belarusian/Russian food.
The biggest German influences are probably the sausages and the beer culture.
It's also true for Belarus, Baltics, and some parts of Ukraine. Generally, we can speak about North-Eastern European cuisine with potatoes, secale flour breads, and various pickled things. And that name will make a lot of everybody upset, cause everybody in those lands pretend they are "Central". Americans would not believe how many "geographical centers of Europe" are claimed there.
I'm not sure how surprised Americans would be to learn that there are so many "centers of Europe". After all, we all know that Colorado is in "the west", Texas in the "southwest", and, clearly, "the South" is located in the geographical southeast :D
And my favorite -- you need to go north from Miami to be in "the South"
These American peculiarities are funny too, but they are mostly historical, and from that perspective have reasonable explanation. In turn "we are not Eastern, but Central" is relatively recent PR-born madness. Somebody decided that EE often associates with questionable things like alcohol consumption somehow, so the solution is to separate yourself from other drinkers by claiming being completely different "Central" kind. Nobody stops drinking meanwhile, because why would you? I simplify the story, of course, but the logic is exactly like that.
> Americans would not believe how many "geographical centers of Europe" are claimed there.
They have their own weirdnesses. How is Chicago "mid-west" when it is so far east? How is Virginia south?
How reasonably can German cuisine be described as a single unified thing? My mother was from East Prussia and my father from Swabia and their "home" cuisines were pretty dissimilar -- if for no other reason than climate.
Cuisine in Europe is shaped by climate, soil and former political entities. You'll find similar cuisine in and around the alps, along the north sea coast and around the baltic sea. While the people eating the same food speak a dozen different languages.
Same is true for Croatia.. food from Slavonia (near Zagreb) is very different from the coastal regions (Istria and Dalmatia)
I don't see why. A lot of Western Poland used to be German, and it's not like there's one German cuisine either. You don't get many Bavarians eating pickled herring with beets, but's it's classic cuisine in Berlin.
Western Poland used to be German, but all the Germans left/got expelled. After WW2 it was resettled with Poles from Eastern Poland, nowadays Ukraine and Belarus. Which makes traveling from Berlin to Poznan or Wroclaw an interesting experience. Directly at the German-Polish border, you'll enter Eastern Europe, then when you arrive in the mentioned cities, you're suddenly back in Central Europe.
Also, you'd be surprised at how widespread pickled herring is in Bavaria. Herring has been a trading good for millennia in Europe, was and is still consumed in the winter months in Bavaria. You can easily get a "Fischsemmel" at the Oktoberfest in Munich. Bavarians also used to pickle everything for the winter: cucumbers, beets, cabbage, beans.
Due to Partitions of Poland a lot of of territory was under Prussian influence for over a century - that had to have some culinary effect (other than forced germanization).
Lots of common main ingredients like potatoes, beets, cabbage, and sausages. It could also have a different reason, like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Former_eastern_territories_of_...
Yes it's similar, but certainly not more than Ukrainian/Russian/Belarusian food.
> I think the average Pole is much closer culturally to the Western neighbours than to a Ukrainian or Russian (maybe apart from cuisine).
Not really. Poles share much more with Ukrainians and Russians that they like to admit. And I am Polish.
"A Pole is a Russian who thinks he's French."
The real issue here is first that browsers don't expose a simple way to check for key combinations and second that developers don't bother building their own. You'll find on any number of sites that an intended key combination can also be invoked with additional modifiers of alt or shift or whatnot. Even here, the code shown only fixes the broader issue on windows; alt+cmd+s still gets blocked.
There should be a proposal for browsers to expose a property on the keydown/up/press event containing a code for the key combination. Something like "CTRL+S", "CTRL+ALT+S", etc. The programmer could then switch over this property rather than having to check key codes and modifiers manually.
I would also propose to any web developers that they build this property themselves in their own code and check against it instead of checking modifiers directly. Not only would it protect against bugs like in the OP, it would also be a lot more convenient to use.
It's just like the new Copilot 365. Every time I try to type "Ć", Copilot pops up. I have to close the app constantly.
Every little thing like that creates a new Linux user. After switching I've never looked back.
Posted from SteamOS.
Lol
For a good while the default US Intl keyboard in some Linux versions would give a ć instead of a ç for the combination c + '
Makes sense right? Except that made a lot of people angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move
Because Brazilian users were expecting c + ' to become ç
(And they had to use Alt Gr + c instead)
The US international keyboard settings suck. It's more convenient to enable a compose key and do diacritics with that.
Not sure what there is to lol about. '+c still composes to ć for me, and that makes sense to me; AltGr+, is ç, AltGr+c is © for me. But all of those symbols are outside my national script so I cannot say that any of them have been burdened by weight of expectation.
As Pole I never had this issue. Why would you even use US Intl keyboard. Even for Arch with install everything manually I haven't any issues
> Why would you even use US Intl keyboard
Because (for some reason) you don't have your "standard" keyboard - just the US ISO one
Some keyboards have an extra key (or maybe more than one) and hence can't be mapped fully with a US keyboard
of course the absolute idiots at MSFT don't know their own APIs https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20040329-00/?p=40...
To be fair, you have to have a very high average IQ at a company to produce an OS nobody understands anymore. Or you know, things like the legendary five-state boolean.[1]
[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/microsoft.offic...
Best part is that it installs itself automatically, without prompting me for that.
Thank you Microsoft; nice to see your QA works well.
And every time you press it, an entire VM gets spun up, fully provisioned, and then set to LLM processing mode even though all you'll be doing is immediately closing the app again.
Thanks Microsoft, stellar!
Fun fact: when treated with unicode Normalization Form Canonical Decomposition, 8 out of 9 polish letters (ż,ó,ć,ę,ś,ą,ź,ń) break down into base letter + combining diacritical mark, but ł stays intact. That means you can't use sqlite's unicode61 remove_diacritics tokenizer to normalize polish text for FTS.
When a Polish speaker searches for something with “ł”, do they expect to also see “l”?
No.
But the other way around sometimes yes.
The linguistic, historical, and cultural information is so fascinating, and really well explained.
3/4 with Ctrl+S is so me today with my :wa embedded harder in my muscle memory than washing my hands after returning from outside
I don't even think about it. It's autosave without plugin.
Meanwhile, in 2026 I suddenly cannot type capital Ś in Edge on Mac. I feel like I moved back in time 25 years or so.
I noticed it too, but for Teams. Is it because they are both MS apps?
This was a fun read. Here is the tl;dr version:
> Instead of blindly and greedily blocking Ctrl S, we could block Ctrl S only if Alt key was not pressed.
Ctrl alt s was the keyboard shortcut for the polish S. Ctrl s was blocked to improve saving. And this also blocked ctrl alt s too.
No, the shortcut was alt+s. That's what people typed. Then on Windows, which used alt-combinations already, it became rightalt+s (as the rightalt wasn't used by Windows itself) but instead of having a dedicated rightalt code, Windows would rewrite that key into a ctrl+alt code combination.
If you're going to tl;dr, at least get the most important detail right. People only ever pressed alt, and Windows went "and now you're pressing ctrl+alt", so that alt+s becomes ctrl+s with an alt that no one's looking for when it comes to intercepting and killing off key events.
Fair enough. Though as a laptop user, I didnt consider any emphasis on the right alt.
> Polish is the second most-used Slavic language, right after Russian and just before Ukrainian
This is not exactly right regarding Ukrainian. While it is the official language of Ukraine, in reality... let's say that not all Ukrainian people are actually speaking it.
There are still enough people speaking Ukrainian even if we roll back the clock to 2019.
Lviv = 2.5m
Vinnytsia = 1.5m
Ivano-Frankivsk = 1.3m
Khmelnytskyi = 1.2m
Rivne = 1.1m
Ternopil = 1m
Volyn = 1m
Chernivtsi = 0.8m
Zakarpattia = 0.8m (I've subtracted the Hungarians)
>This is not exactly right regarding Ukrainian. While it is the official language of Ukraine, in reality... let's say that not all Ukrainian people are actually speaking it.
your "adjustment" didn't propose what other Slavic language would outnumber Ukrainian to be 3rd behind Polish and Russian, so you didn't move the needle.
[flagged]
"Native speaker" is not a very useful term: it combines a lot of criteria (first acquired language, language you know best, language you identify with, language of your parents, language of your ethnic group etc.), and each of these criteria is further very fuzzy (e.g. I know plant names better in Ukrainian, but programming terms better in Russian, which language I know better? Competency is not a single value, ethnic identification is malleable and people can have several of these, etc.)
These criteria usually coincide in speakers of big languages (usually languages of [former] empires), so it's relatively easy to say who is a native speaker of Russian or English. There are a lot of people who fulfill all the criteria at once.
But they rarely coincide for speakers of smaller languages (usually colonised people). When most people are bilingual, it's often harder to say who is a native speaker of Ukrainian or Belarusian. Most people fulfill some criteria but not all of them.
So, the term "native speaker" is not neutral and not very useful.
I grew up in southern Germany, speaking the local dialect. As a young adult, I thought I could speak accent free German. I couldn't have been more wrong. Many people in Hamburg and Berlin rightfully guessed that I'm from Bavaria. Closely related languages and dialects exist in a continuum ((Max Weinreich: "a language is a dialect with an army an a navy"). Many people in Ukraine spoke and speak "surzhyk", depending on the political climate, they could claim to speak Russian or Ukrainian. Then Russian and Ukrainian, together with Belarusian form a dialect continuum. You can easily understand you neighboring village, but it gets harder and harder, the further you are apart until there's very little mutual intelligibility.
Agree. Especially in Ukraine where the term "native speaker" has been politically charged to an insane level.
I prefer mother tongue.
Oh come on, the term itself is political. It has always been political everywhere: same in Russia and Ukraine.
You can't "politically charge" a term that has always been political. The concept of "native language" is 100% political, always.
As for "mother tongue", it has the same problems and more. "Mother tongue" brings in an implicit idea of 'less prestigious ethnic language', "mother tongue" as opposed to "father tongue" (even in ex-USSR: e.g. you would say that Belarusian is "матчына мова", but you'd never say that Russian is someone's "матчына мова" even when speaking about ethnic Russians — because Russian carries higher prestige, so can't be "mother's" language)
We should not try to replace "native language" with a different term, we should avoid it in serious discussions. Instead, we can speak of proficiency, parents passing language to children, the role of education, the ethnic language, the national language, etc.
And if we do so, we see that there's nothing wrong or unusual about Ukrainian.
If anything, it's huge languages like Russian or English that are unusual. They're different from 99% languages of the world. After all, bilinguals are more common than monolinguals. It's Russian that is a weird outlier, not Ukrainian.
Original statements that led to this discussion
>>Polish is the second most-used Slavic language, right after Russian and just before Ukrainian
>This is not exactly right regarding Ukrainian. While it is the official language of Ukraine, in reality... let's say that not all Ukrainian people are actually speaking it.
The language debate about whether Ukraine is third behind Russian and Polish does not get heated till somebody here proposes a Slavic language that would have more speakers than Ukrainian does.
Here you go, stats, you see that Ukraine has a 7m larger population than Poland, but it's already conceded that not everybody there speaks Ukrainian, putting Ukrainian into 3rd place. Are you claiming that 36 million Ukrainians speak Russian and not Ukrainian which would put Czechia in 3rd place with 10 million speakers?
Put up or shut up.
Russia 143,500,000
Ukraine 45,490,000
Poland 38,530,000
Czechia 10,200,000
Belarus 9,498,700
Bulgaria 7,265,000
Serbia 7,164,000
Slovakia 5,414,000
Croatia 4,253,000
Bosnia and 3,829,000
Herzegovina
Slovenia 2,060,000
Montenegro 621,383
What Slavic languages are spoken by more people than Ukrainian?
Wikipedia says https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Ukraine (with a dozen other languages under 1% each) top two:
Ukrainian 32,577,468 67.53%
Russian 14,273,670 29.59%
32 million Ukrainian as 1st language
6.9 million Ukrainian as 2nd language
Obligatory plug of my keyboard layout which solves the awkward right hand contortions: https://pzel.name/pl-lefty.html
It comes bundled with xorg nowadays, you can use:
Option "XkbVariant" "lefty"
> Communism in Poland meant two things: not a lot of disposable income
The issue wasn’t so much the lack of income it was scarcity of items to purchase.
As I am fond of saying: "The good news about Open Source is that you've got the source code; the bad news about Open Source is that _you've_ got the source code."
That is, you may well get sucked down a rabbit hole in order to accomplish a simple task.
What?
Open Source puts the onus on the user to know what they are doing.
The learning curve is not too vertical on the established components, but stand by on the New Shiny.
(2015)
That perhaps explains why I vaguely recall reading it before.
“Polish uses the English/Latin alphabet” - was it developed back when the US and Italy were allies in ancient Roman times?
I stumbled over that too, but it makes sense when you finish the article. The ancient Romans didn’t build a lot of keyboards.
What’s hard to understand here?