3 ms·

Polish letters on top of Latin are no worse than German (ä, ö, ü, ß), or French (é, à, è, ù, â, ê, î, ô, û, ë, ï, ü, ÿ, ç). Cyrillic is not the answer, as each

Polish letters on top of Latin are no worse than German (ä, ö, ü, ß), or French (é, à, è, ù, â, ê, î, ô, û, ë, ï, ü, ÿ, ç). Cyrillic is not the answer, as each Cyrillic country has own variations, own letters. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Cyrillic_letters https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Cyrillic_letters Regarding homophones, this is not 'when word entered the language' but rather, the change of pronunciation no longer matching the phonetic writing. The 'ó' vs 'u' is homophone because the sound now is the same. However, historically it wasn't. Additionally, since historically it was different sound, it also had different rules for how it morphed during declension. Similar situation is with 'ż' and 'rz'. There are even cool words that due to declension we can see where they originated from. For example two declensioned words have same pronunciation: 'każe' and 'karze'. The first comes from root word 'kazać' as in tell people what to do. The second comes from root word 'karać' meaning punish. I would wager that 'ch' and 'h' is the most recent homophone. Some people still alive were taught to use correct hard 'H' vs soft 'CH' when pronouncing words.

idlewords 9y ago
Thanks for this correction! I would say citing all those French diacritics is cheating a bit. The diaeresis is just used to indicate separate syllables, and ù and ÿ are not a thing in standard French. Polish is uniquely bad not because of the diacritics, but because of the special phonetic behavior of digraphs ('si', 'ci', 'zi', 'rz', 'sz', 'cz', 'ch', 'dż', 'dź', 'dzi').
- adamzochowski 9y ago
  To strengthen your argument there is another digraph 'ni'. But this is now approaching discussion that writing doesn't match phonetic. Pronunciation shifts. Words change. Brother Grimms (famous for fables) were linguists studying how consonants use has changed. They talk how 'pater' (like paternity) shifted to 'father'. But Polish has own such shifts. Take a word like 'jabłko', which many people pronounce 'japko' or 'śliwka' that is pronounced as 'ślifka'. There is even a branch discussing how people using correct pronunciation are HyperCorrect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypercorrection#Polish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypercorrection#Polish
  - evincarofautumn 9y ago
    I wouldn’t call it “using correct pronunciation”—the whole idea of hypercorrection is that the result is not correct, because some perceived rule was mistakenly over-applied, like in English * “He gave it to Sam and I”. (Plus I’m guessing that sound change happened pretty early on, because as far as I know, all Polish consonant clusters obey that rule of voicing & devoicing obstruents.)
- tomaszj 9y ago
  Digraphs aren't unique to Polish, though. Take Hungarian as an example ('cs' or 'zs' to start with).
- glandium 9y ago
  There's at least one word that uses ù in French: où (where, as opposed to ou, or)
- BrandoElFollito 9y ago
  I drove today next to the "nonstandard" Haÿ-les-Roses (south of Paris)
int_19h 9y ago
The curious thing about Cyrillic is that, at least in Slavic languages, the correspondence between phonemes and letters is much more uniform than in Slavic languages that use Latin. For example, "ч" is always the "ch" or "tsh" sound, whether we're talking about Russian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian or Serbian. OTOH, in Polish you use "cz" for it, while in Czech and Serbian it's "č". It's not an inherent advantage of Cyrillic, of course, it's just that, by virtue of being designed specifically for Slavic languages, it had certain letters designated from the get go, while adopting Latin allowed for a lot more leeway in deciding how to represent sounds, and different languages did it differently.
- taejo 9y ago
  It's not only that Cyrillic is designed specifically for Slavic languages, but also that the general tradition around Cyrillic is to make up new letters when adapting it to a new language, as oppposed to the Latin alphabet where the two traditions are to use digraphs and to add diacritics. This choice between two possibilities is already causing the problem of "cz" vs. "č", but within those there are still the choices of "cz", "ch", "tsh", "tch", ... and "č", "ç", "ĉ", ...
  - int_19h 9y ago
    I think the line between "making up new letters" and "adding diacritics" is rather blurry, and really hinges on your definition of "new letter", which is largely defined by convention. Most (all? I can't think of any that don't) Cyrillic alphabets have some letters with diacritics - ё and й in Russian; й, i and ї in Ukrainian; j in Serbian etc. But speakers of those languages don't consider the diacritics to be a modifier in this case - we treat them as completely separate letters, that just have a disjoint element in their overall shape. I don't see why e.g. c vs č can't be treated in the same exact way as и vs й (and indeed, I wonder if Czech don't already do that?).

idlewords 9y ago

Thanks for this correction! I would say citing all those French diacritics is cheating a bit. The diaeresis is just used to indicate separate syllables, and ù and ÿ are not a thing in standard French. Polish is uniquely bad not because of the diacritics, but because of the special phonetic behavior of digraphs ('si', 'ci', 'zi', 'rz', 'sz', 'cz', 'ch', 'dż', 'dź', 'dzi').

adamzochowski 9y ago
To strengthen your argument there is another digraph 'ni'. But this is now approaching discussion that writing doesn't match phonetic. Pronunciation shifts. Words change. Brother Grimms (famous for fables) were linguists studying how consonants use has changed. They talk how 'pater' (like paternity) shifted to 'father'. But Polish has own such shifts. Take a word like 'jabłko', which many people pronounce 'japko' or 'śliwka' that is pronounced as 'ślifka'. There is even a branch discussing how people using correct pronunciation are HyperCorrect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypercorrection#Polish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypercorrection#Polish
- evincarofautumn 9y ago
  I wouldn’t call it “using correct pronunciation”—the whole idea of hypercorrection is that the result is not correct, because some perceived rule was mistakenly over-applied, like in English * “He gave it to Sam and I”. (Plus I’m guessing that sound change happened pretty early on, because as far as I know, all Polish consonant clusters obey that rule of voicing & devoicing obstruents.)
tomaszj 9y ago
Digraphs aren't unique to Polish, though. Take Hungarian as an example ('cs' or 'zs' to start with).
glandium 9y ago
There's at least one word that uses ù in French: où (where, as opposed to ou, or)
BrandoElFollito 9y ago
I drove today next to the "nonstandard" Haÿ-les-Roses (south of Paris)

int_19h 9y ago

The curious thing about Cyrillic is that, at least in Slavic languages, the correspondence between phonemes and letters is much more uniform than in Slavic languages that use Latin. For example, "ч" is always the "ch" or "tsh" sound, whether we're talking about Russian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian or Serbian. OTOH, in Polish you use "cz" for it, while in Czech and Serbian it's "č". It's not an inherent advantage of Cyrillic, of course, it's just that, by virtue of being designed specifically for Slavic languages, it had certain letters designated from the get go, while adopting Latin allowed for a lot more leeway in deciding how to represent sounds, and different languages did it differently.

taejo 9y ago
It's not only that Cyrillic is designed specifically for Slavic languages, but also that the general tradition around Cyrillic is to make up new letters when adapting it to a new language, as oppposed to the Latin alphabet where the two traditions are to use digraphs and to add diacritics. This choice between two possibilities is already causing the problem of "cz" vs. "č", but within those there are still the choices of "cz", "ch", "tsh", "tch", ... and "č", "ç", "ĉ", ...
- int_19h 9y ago
  I think the line between "making up new letters" and "adding diacritics" is rather blurry, and really hinges on your definition of "new letter", which is largely defined by convention. Most (all? I can't think of any that don't) Cyrillic alphabets have some letters with diacritics - ё and й in Russian; й, i and ї in Ukrainian; j in Serbian etc. But speakers of those languages don't consider the diacritics to be a modifier in this case - we treat them as completely separate letters, that just have a disjoint element in their overall shape. I don't see why e.g. c vs č can't be treated in the same exact way as и vs й (and indeed, I wonder if Czech don't already do that?).