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The curious case of the disappearing Polish S (2015)

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Re: The curious case of the disappearing Polish S (2015)

#61

Post by tannenfreund87 »

jyounker wrote: post #58
q3k wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: The curious case of the disappearing Polish S (2015)

#62

Post by orthoxerox »

egorfine wrote: post #28

> 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)
That's 11.2 million Western Ukrainians, who are overwhelmingly Ukrophone. Even if you completely ignore the rest of the country (which definitely wasn't completely Russophone and is even less now), that's still more than the number of Czech speakers.

Re: The curious case of the disappearing Polish S (2015)

#63

Post by tannenfreund87 »

CurtHagenlocher wrote: post #13
q3k wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Polish cuisine is very similar to German cuisine. (This comment will make a lot of Polish people very upset.)

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.

Re: The curious case of the disappearing Polish S (2015)

#64

Post by tannenfreund87 »

demetrius wrote: post #50
egorfine wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[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, ethni…

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.

Re: The curious case of the disappearing Polish S (2015)

#65

Post by reddalo »

cynicalsecurity wrote: post #43
reddalo wrote: post #39

Earlier 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.

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.

Re: The curious case of the disappearing Polish S (2015)

#66

Post by smitty1e »

npodbielski wrote: post #38
smitty1e wrote: post #5

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.

Re: The curious case of the disappearing Polish S (2015)

#67

Post by demetrius »

egorfine wrote: post #54
demetrius wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

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.

Re: The curious case of the disappearing Polish S (2015)

#68

Post by demetrius »

reddalo wrote: post #65
cynicalsecurity wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ukraine absolutely must ditch Cyrillic alphabet, after the war. There will be plenty of things to change.

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?

Re: The curious case of the disappearing Polish S (2015)

#70

Post by xdennis »

jagaerglad wrote: post #52
cynicalsecurity wrote: post #43

Earlier 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…

Probably because Persian is an Indo-European language, and alphabets are better than abjads (alphabet without vowels) for it.

Semitic languages are easy to write without vowels because the meaning is very obvious even if you omit the vowels, but in many languages you have a great deal of collisions if you omit vowels.

It's the same reason Chinese characters are a poor fit for Korean and Japanese. Chinese is not an inflected language so one symbol for a word works quite nicely, but other languages need a way to add prefixes and suffixes to works.

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