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Sabotaged by Polish orthography
- idlewords 9y agoA small correction to the OP: paczki means packages and not boxes (pudełka). It used to be a much more common sign in Polish neighborhoods in the US before Poland leveled up to the first world.
- joering2 9y ago.. and the of course it depends how you want to use the objective boxes (pudełka). I will throw you some pudełka. I am busy with those pudełkami. There is something wrong with those pudełkom. Whats the size of these pudełek? And its funny: the newest IOs still don't have "ą"
- danielam 9y ago"Parcels" is a better translation.
- avaer 9y agoNit: it's not pawnch-kee if you're speaking American English, it's more like pown-chkee. But still not quite.
- ghomrassen 9y agoYeah, I think you're closer, as long as you pronounce the own like owned rather than pow-n, as I read it at first.
- jdmichal 9y agoOr, for those who are versed in IPA: /pɔ̃.tʂki/. * There is no individually-pronounced "n" sound; it is built entirely into the nasalized vowel. * The /ʂ/ sound is actually a laminal retroflex. This is best described as making a "sh" sound, but with the blade of the tongue.
- yorwba 9y agoWiktionary has audio: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/p%C4%85czki#Polish https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/p%C4%85czki#Polish
- yawgmoth 9y agoIn Michigan people will unabashedly say poonchkee. I've stopped arguing about it with people :).
- mtrycz 9y agoYeah, we poles are as obsessed with our prononciation as much as italians are obsessed with their food. People form other countries just can't get it right :)
- lukasm 9y agoThe french `bON ton` is the closes to ą you can get.
- marzell 9y agoThis phoneme (or something close) is also common in Portuguese.
- Symbiote 9y agoWikipedia gives "Zażółć gęślą jaźń" as an example containing all the Polish diacritic letters. Is there a standard way to write this when limited to ASCII? For example, Danish/Norwegian replace æ, ø, å with ae, oe, aa. It seems less likely that something could exist and be reasonably readable for Polish. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_orthography https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_orthography
- wlk 9y agoWhen required people just omit the diacritic signs and replace the letter with regular ASCII letter, so for example: ż->z, ł-l, ó->o, etc. When used in (computer) writing this is very readable, but no one would do this with handwriting, I think most common cases nowadays would be SMS messages (especially on dump phones) or some weird displays that are unable to properly render diacritic letters.
- warpech 9y agoIt is quite common to remove the diacritics if you are lazy or don't have access to the diacritics. That phrase becomes "Zazolc gesla jazn". Most search engines find "Zazolc" and "Zażółć" equal because of that. This becomes a problem in case of the words like "paczki" (boxes) and "pączki" (donuts), which have their own separate meaning - as explained in the article. In contrast to most European countries, in Poland we use American keyboard layout with "Polish (programmers) layout" keyboard setting in OS. You press ALT+A, ALT+E, ALT+L, ALT+S, ALT+C, ALT+Z, ALT+X to write "ą", "ę", "ł", "ś", "ć", "ż", "ź", respectively.
- kornakiewicz 9y agoMostly no. Some words written without Polish characters can become ambiguous without context. For example: word "łaska" - "mercy", written without Polish letter "ł" is "laska" - "stick". Although, in old good times some people used British pound character in texts to express this letter, since '£' is visually similar to 'Ł' and more often available. For other characters (ś,ź,ć,ż,ó,ą,ę) nothing like that was widely adopted. Workaround would be possible for 'ż' and 'ó' since they are (almost - see below) phonetically identical with 'rz' and 'u' respectively, but it wasn't popular, since most probably would be perceived as sign of very, very bad orthography. *Almost, since some people claim they can distinguish these, but it's not popular ability.
- nathancahill 9y agoSimilar to how Spanish will not accent capital letters. The México passport for example says MEXICO on the front.
- urethrafranklin 9y agoFrench, or, if you will, FRANCAIS (note the lack of cedilla) is the same.
- FeteCommuniste 9y agoThe rule is to write Ç with cedilla even when capitalized, but from what I gather French keyboards make it inconvenient, so people often neglect it. On the other hand, it is true that there are no above-letter accents for capitals (in France; Quebec uses them).
- glandium 9y agoFrench keyboards indeed have diacritics available, such as é, è, à, ç, etc. but shift+those keys is another character. On top of that, at least on Windows (I'm not sure about Mac), the caps lock key is not a caps lock, but a shift lock. Which means it doesn't capitalize characters, but does the same as pressing shift+key. Funnily enough, in other French locales (IIRC at least Belgium), the caps lock key on Windows is a caps lock key.
- eesmith 9y agoHow strong a rule is this? Or is it regional? http://buscon.rae.es/dpd/srv/search?id=BapzSnotjD6n0vZiTp http://buscon.rae.es/dpd/srv/search?id=BapzSnotjD6n0vZiTp is from the Diccionario panhispánico de dudas, 2005. It shows several examples of accented capital letters, like LA NACIÓN in the headline of a newspaper, and the phrase "ESTÁ PROHIBIDO FUMAR DENTRO DE LAS DEPENDENCIAS DE LA EMPRESA." That said, La Nación itself doesn't use accents when capitalized. On the other hand, you can see "EL PAÍS" several times at https://elpais.com/ https://elpais.com/ . On the third hand, the El País in Uruguay doesn't use the accent http://www.elpais.com.uy/ http://www.elpais.com.uy/ . But it does uses ALCANZÓ in a headline http://a2010.kiosko.net/02/06/uy/uy_elpais.750.jpg http://a2010.kiosko.net/02/06/uy/uy_elpais.750.jpg . http://procedimientospolicialesargentina.blogspot.de/2016/04/19-de-abril-dia-de-la-policia-de-la.html http://procedimientospolicialesargentina.blogspot.de/2016/04... has an interesting mix with the blog title "DIA DE LA POLICIA DE LA NACION ARGENTINA" and a poster image saying "DIÁ NACIONAL DEL POLICÍA".
- idlewords 9y agoPolish orthography is a disaster partly because of the choice of Latin over Cyrillic. The latter would have been a much better fit for the sounds in the language. Making matters worse, there are homophones (ż and rz, u and ó, ch and h) that depend on when the word entered the language. Like so many things wrong with the country, you can comfortably blame the Catholic Church for this orthographic train wreck.
- waqf 9y agoCould have done what Serbian (and formerly Serbo-Croat) does: freely added letters to the Latin alphabet to match the required set of phonemes, so that there's a one-to-one correspondence between the Latin orthography and the Cyrillic orthography. (It doesn't solve the problem of missing letters and missing diacritics when trying to write your language using English letters only — but Serbs, Ukrainians etc. can't write their language correctly using only Russian letters either.)
- idlewords 9y agoWe just have more of this crap than other Slavic languages. Specifically: ś—sz ć—cz ź—rz/ż dź—dż Mandarin of all languages has this phonetic distinction, but I don't think any other Slavs kept the full set, on top of the nasals mjd wrote about.
- schoen 9y agoWikipedia says Mandarin has all of /t͡s/ ⟨z⟩, /ʈ͡ʂ/ ⟨zh⟩, /t͡ɕ/ ⟨j⟩, /t͡sʰ/ ⟨c⟩, /ʈ͡ʂʰ/ ⟨ch⟩, /t͡ɕʰ/ ⟨q⟩, /s/ ⟨s⟩, /ʂ/ ⟨sh⟩, and /ɕ/ ⟨x⟩, all contrastive. The fricative and affricate sounds in English that are kinda close to these are only /t͡ʃ/, /ʃ/, /s/, /t͡s/, /ʒ/, and /dʒ/. I think these contrasts represent a very underacknowledged difficulty for English speakers learning Mandarin, because we're used to thinking of tones as the only hard thing. I'm still struggling to properly pronounce a friend's name that I think begins with /ʈ͡ʂʰ/. Maybe Polish speakers can deal with this easily!
- 9y ago
- idlewords 9y agoWhile we're in this thread: notice that pączki is a plural. Please remember this and don't say 'pierogies'—it's just pierogi. There's no need to know the singular for pierogi, because no one has ever eaten just one. In return, I promise to continue working to stop Polish people from pluralizing potato chips as "chipsy".
- peteretep 9y ago> I promise to continue working to stop A general campaign to stop non-natively-Anglophone Europeans from using "funny" to mean "lots of fun" would also be appreicated.
- microcolonel 9y agoYikes, that could cause some heartbreak. Somebody says it was funny to work with you, with a big grin on his face.
- mjd 9y agoAnother Polish-speaker who read this article said she was delighted by my use of “ogoneks” instead of “ogoneki”.
- waqf 9y ago*"ogonki"
- mjd 9y agoRight, thanks!
- schoen 9y agoOuch, that asterisk does some seriously confusing double-duty in a thread like this... In Internet forum speak, the asterisk means "I meant to say" or "You meant to say". In linguistics, the asterisk means "This form is not attested (we don't have examples of people using it)" or "This form would be considered mistaken by speakers". That means that the forum usage of asterisks is something like "I should have said X" while the linguistics use of asterisks is something like "I shouldn't have said X". :-( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asterisk#Linguistics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asterisk#Linguistics "In linguistics, an asterisk is placed before a word or phrase to indicate that it is not used, or there are no records of it being in use." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asterisk#Typography https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asterisk#Typography "Asterisks may denote corrections to misspelling or misstatements in previous electronic messages"
- mszcz 9y agoUgh, this reminds me of character encoding issues... I hope I never meet the guy who invented ISO-8859-2 or CP1250 or other such nonsense for that guy's sake...
- pavlov 9y agoFor the benefit of French speakers, the ą in Polish seems to be pronounced like the "on" sound. So "pączki" is pronounced "pon-tch-qui" while "paczki" is "patch-qui".
- zokier 9y agoIts curious how simultaneously we are stubbornly holding onto diacritics (and current orthography in general) while also having continuously lots of issues actually reproducing/handling them. One would think that we either would have gotten better at dealing with them, or dropped them altogether. Especially considering that modern fixed orthographies are generally relatively recent phenomenon.
- schoen 9y agoUsually the diacritics exist because of something that is contrastive in the language's phonology. This post is mainly about a concrete example of this, where pączki and paczki refer to two different things that a shop could sell. So it's super-helpful that shops can make that distinction in writing! Or for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimal_pair#Stress https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimal_pair#Stress In Portuguese, my strongest foreign language, I can think of examples like a 'the (feminine)' / à 'at the (feminine)' nó 'knot' / no 'in the' dá 'gives' / da 'of the' nós 'we' / nos 'in the (plural)' sê 'I should be' / se 'oneself' / sé 'see (Catholic)' pode 'can' / pôde 'could (past)' avô 'grandfather' / avó 'grandmother' tem 'he/she has' / têm 'they have' among many others. At least a couple of these reflect vowel differences, although some would be homophones in speech. Every language that holds on to diacritics would have pairs like this where the diacritics make a difference to the meaning. So people may really appreciate having writing systems that can reflect these differences in order to avoid confusions that would otherwise occur.
- zokier 9y agoObviously naively just stripping diacritics won't work. But that doesn't mean that diacritics are the only option for orthography; for example in nordics ä and ö (or the equivalent norwegian/danish ones) could be substituted with ae and oe, because those do not occur otherwise in the language, and so the orthography remains unambiguous. Maybe a good example of related development is the disappearance of Þ (thorn) from english orthography, being replaced with th.
- jdmichal 9y ago
- ChrisArchitect 9y agothis reminds me of what seems like a neverending debate about the actual pronounciation of paczki. Is it 'pawnch-kee' or 'poonch-kee'. haha. Which lead me to this interpretation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdNsFOPYMzE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdNsFOPYMzE
- jdmichal 9y agoIt should be a vowel sound similar to the English words "thought", "dawn", "fall", and "straw", except nasalized. So "pawn" is probably closer than "poon". (If any one of those have a different vowel sound than the others in your dialect, use the more popular version.)
- danielam 9y agoFYI: The way I explain it to those who speak French is that "ą" is similar to the French "on".
- mirekrusin 9y agoIn comments poles often omit those squiggles which lead to interesting nuances: "Laske mi robi." means "to condescend/deign to do something for somebody" (ł) or "to do a blowjob" (l).
- changs 9y agoThis brings the memory of Internet chats in the 90s when almost nobody used Polish letters with diacritics (because it is faster to type without them and there were a lot of different incompatible encodings). Usually you can understand the meaning from the context but sometimes the same kind of funny misunderstanding would happen as there are quite a few words that without diacritics become completely different but valid words.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- ninly 9y agoI lived in a Polish neighborhood in Brooklyn for a few years, and absorbed as much orthography and pronunciation as I could during that time. I ate a few pączki, too. While I learned to speak a little bit, it was not enough to be functional beyond basic greetings and ordering food. It was always a lot of interesting fun, though. The main outcome of all this is that for ten years, whenever I see a Toyota Camry, my weird brain thinks "hmm... tsahm-rih..." and I roll my eyes at it.