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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)

#91

Post by vkazanov »

tannenfreund87 wrote: post #64
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…

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…

I grew up in the east of lithuania, mostly hearing polish and russian in my early years, and then also lithuanian to a smaller degree.

I eventually managed to separate the languages proper but I clearly see how the languages are are not a discrete classification.

Like, lithuanian polish and lithuanian russian are similar, but polish polish is further away phonetically.

Lithuanian has weird phonetics but the underlying grammar is very close to slavic languages.

English is much further away on the spectrum but why are sentence intonations (irony , question, etc) are still strangely compatible with languages from other branches of the language tree..?

Conclusion: strict language separation is a political construct not a natural thing.

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

#92

Post by keiferski »

pndy wrote: post #88
quibono wrote: post #2

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).

Dirty summary (not involving AI): Just like Christianity arrived in Poland by marriage of Mieszko with Czech princess Doubravka/Dobrawa in 10th century, we also adapted Czech alphabet (and thus Latin) from Jan Hus efforts of codifying Czech language. Scholars believe that around same time Polish began to develop as a separate language. And up until the 13th century it was still possible to communicate with southern n…

The most ironic part of this story is that Czechia is rather a-religious nowadays, primarily from “Catholic imperialism” from the Austrian empire and from the communist era. So the country Poland got Christianity from is no longer interested in it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_the_Czech_Republic

Poland on the other hand has Catholicism as a key identity marker, although IME living in Poland for a decade, this is fading rapidly with younger people.

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

#93

Post by pndy »

reddalo wrote: post #39
quibono wrote: post #2

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).

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...

Somehow related: there's browser extension called "Ukraïnsjka Latynka" [1] that transliterates on the fly Cyrillic script to Latin using various systems. It's quite helpful (especially nowadays) for someone who never had chance to familiarize with that script.

[1] - https://paiv.github.io/latynka/en/

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

#94

Post by egorfine »

orthoxerox wrote: post #62
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'…

Well, yeah, that sounds plausible. It's in the same ballpark as Czech, and which language is more popular is largely irrelevant when they are that close in numbers.

Whether the numbers are correct is debatable but we have no way of checking that.

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

#95

Post by ErroneousBosh »

bleepblap wrote: post #55
rconti wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"

Here in Scotland, if you start at the famous Gretna Green on the west coast (it's on the estuary of the River Esk) and drive more-or-less dead north up the A7 (it's quite wiggly) until you hit the next beach, you're on the east coast at Portobello.

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

#96

Post by raverbashing »

msm_ wrote: post #73
raverbashing wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

I don't get it. In Poland we use exclusively US keyboard layout. To type Polish characters we have key combinations with AltGr (as TFA explained in a lot of detail).

Some people are more accustomed with composing letters + accents instead of using key combinations with AltGr

Coming from Windows this is very common

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

#97

Post by ErroneousBosh »

raverbashing wrote: post #41
Random09 wrote: post #20

Earlier 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)

Upvote for DNA.

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

#98

Post by egorfine »

fsckboy wrote: post #59
egorfine wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

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 til…

> Are you claiming that 36 million Ukrainians speak Russian and not Ukrainian

Basically this but not exactly.

Number are up for debate because none of the sane estimates put the count of Ukrainians at 45m. It's closer to 37m or even But yeah, the vast majority of urban population thinks in Russian.

Also see an adjacent comment in this thread: if we sum up the predominantly ukrainian-speaking urban centers' population we get to a bit over 11m people which is basically the same figure as Czech language.

Thus putting Ukrainian language to the second place even by conservative estimate.

Which makes my original point incorrect.

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

#100

Post by HackerThemAll »

Many American companies fell into that. Intel, Nvidia, AMD control panels all contained keyboard shortcut keys that interfered with Polish diacritics. Even Google at one point had the exact issue described in this article.

Medium is trying to be little too convenient here. They could just save stuff automatically every few seconds, and that wouldn't require users to press any combination of keys.

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