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.
The curious case of the disappearing Polish S (2015)
51–60 of 122 posts
Re: The curious case of the disappearing Polish S (2015)
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Re: The curious case of the disappearing Polish S (2015)
#53I 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).
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Re: The curious case of the disappearing Polish S (2015)
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
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"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, ethni…
Agree. Especially in Ukraine where the term "native speaker" has been politically charged to an insane level.
I prefer mother tongue.
Re: The curious case of the disappearing Polish S (2015)
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
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"
Re: The curious case of the disappearing Polish S (2015)
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
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)
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.
Re: The curious case of the disappearing Polish S (2015)
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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.
Re: The curious case of the disappearing Polish S (2015)
#58I 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).
Polish cuisine is very similar to German cuisine. (This comment will make a lot of Polish people very upset.)
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.
Re: The curious case of the disappearing Polish S (2015)
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
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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
Re: The curious case of the disappearing Polish S (2015)
#60Meanwhile, 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?