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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)

#111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 y…

Fair enough. Though as a laptop user, I didnt consider any emphasis on the right alt.

Not if you had a non-US laptop. Almost every laptop keyboard except for US models have an AltGr on the right.

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

#112

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 prop…

This bug comes from a programmer trying to fix one problem - users press Control S and get a save dialog - by altering some fundamental and bug-prone behaviour. Imagine the damage programmers could do if they had more options to meddle easily! They have low-level APIs if they need them to hook keys. Best leave it at that. Meanwhile, there is the accesskey attribute in HTML to let you customise shortcut keys: https://…

> the accesskey attribute

Holy crow what a mess. No wonder I'd never heard of this.

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

#113
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.

As a Ukrainian learning Polish right now - absolutely not. Until any scientist actually proves with numbers that latinization of a Slavic language script provides ANY benefit AT ALL, let alone outweighing the negatives of conversion. If I had to guess the purported benefits of such switch are a pure fantasy and an urban myth repeated by people without any basis in reality.

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

#114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And how does it relate to Medium?

I just got a really great keyboard...except that the space bar and my Linux distro don't get along at all.

So now I have a surprise deep-dive to make this thing usable.

It's a Nietszchean Bargain: that which doesn't kill you makes you stronger.

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

#115
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 in…

You are entirely free to put vowel diacritics when writing with the perso-arabic script and it's done in children's books. By that logic Vietnamese shouldn't be written with the latin script since it's sino-tibetian

Also, middle persian had a native abjad [1]. (As well as a derived alphabet [2])

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pahlavi_scripts

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avestan_alphabet

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

#116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Out of curiosity, what's the proposed replacement script?

mostly latin with a sprinkle of proposals to revive the avestan alphabet or middle persian script. I wouldn't say it's a huge debate at all in general though

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

#117
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Language in the scope of a cultural phenomenon is something way beyond just cost or efficiency in communication

thats way wi dont rayt English veri efishent ither

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

#118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quote: > During its existence, Kievan Rus' was known as rusĭskaja zemlja, translated as the "land of Rus'",[21] or the "Rus' land" (Old East Slavic: роу́сьскаꙗ землꙗ́), with Rus' being derived from the ethnonym Роусь, Rusĭ (Medieval Greek: Ῥῶς, romanized: Rhos; Arabic: الروس, romanized: ar-Rūs), in Greek as Ῥωσία, Rhosia, in Old French as Russie, Rossie, in Latin as Rusia or Russia (with local German spelling variant…

So what? Old French Bretaigne referred both to Britain and Brittany, Old French Russie referred to both Russia (maybe, haven't done research on this) and Ruthenia. But we're not speaking Old French, we're speaking 21-century English. In 21-century English, Russia ≠ Ruthenia, Brittany ≠ Britain. The quote you've provided is irrelevant.

In your version of English, Russia == Russian Federation. Right?

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

#119
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I'm using custom split keyboard with whatever I program to Blank key and still it never crossed my mind to put any Polish character as single key.

In Poland we informally use combinations and maybe some Poles use letter per key but I my entire live I never met a single person to do so

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

#120
post #39
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...

Kazakhstan decided to do so, but Poland always had Latin alphabet.

Ukraine always had Cyrillic alphabet. There is no way, they will reject their culture just to punish foe. Also Cyrillics is tied to orthodox Christianity which has very big role in Ukraine.

In that context is more interesting that way more pro-russian Belarus, has some use of Latin (mostly in geographical standards) based on Latin variant, heavily inspired by Polish language.

By the way, parent of Belarusian and Ukrainian, the Ruthenian language (not related to Russian, Ruthenian was the second language of PLC), has a lot of alphabets including Latin and Arabics. First was caused by spread of Polish language, and second by large number of Tatar Muslims settled there.

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