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That's a very nicely written and interesting article, bravo! Exactly why I come to Hacker News! I always felt that Polish words were just too long because some

That's a very nicely written and interesting article, bravo! Exactly why I come to Hacker News! I always felt that Polish words were just too long because some many consonants are required to transport all the different sounds! I personally felt that Cyrillic would be a better fit, but obviously don't know the specifics having never learnt Polish (only a bit of Russian). The choice of the old church symbols seems odd to me because they are so unwritable in handwriting and --- checking Wikipedia --- unsurprisingly evolved to look very different in cursive.

rathel 6y ago
I think Poland is better off not using Cyrillic for political reasons. One less reason for Russia to exert its influence by preaching pan-slavism and "russkiy mir". On a practical side - even if you know Cyrillic, lowercase letters are kinda awkward to read at a glance - very blocky, way less a/descenders, many look alike and they are a lazy copy of upper case. And Cyrillic cursive is a nightmare.
- phoronixrly 6y ago
  > I think Poland is better off not using Cyrillic for political reasons Not sure anyone implied that Poland should use the Cyrillic alphabet... > On a practical side - even if you know Cyrillic, lowercase letters are kinda awkward to read at a glance - very blocky, way less a/descenders, many look alike and they are a lazy copy of upper case. That's both pretty subjective, and partly incorrect, given the latest tendencies in type design: https://www.lettersoup.de/what-shall-be-done-for-bulgarian-cyrillic-loclbgr/ https://www.lettersoup.de/what-shall-be-done-for-bulgarian-c... > And Cyrillic cursive is a nightmare. Sorry but Cyrillic cursive is 90% the same as Latin cursive
- qwerty456127 6y ago
  > Poland is better off not using Cyrillic for political reasons What about Bulgaria? Or Ukraine?
  - keiferski 6y ago
    Both are Orthodox Christian countries, whereas Poland is strongly Roman Catholic. Ergo Poland has always been more connected politically and culturally to the West / the Roman Church, whereas Bulgaria and Ukraine have been more connected to Russia.
    - disown 6y ago
      > Ergo Poland has always been more connected politically and culturally to the West Politically and religiously more connected to Rome, not the West as Rome stopped being the head of the West for centuries now. But Poland is also ethnically, linguistically and culturally closer to the slavic nations.
      - krzyk 6y ago
        Yes, Poland is closer to slavic countries. More specifically to west slavic ones - Czech, Slovakia. Vs.The the east slavic and south slavic ones. Notice that similarly to other west slavs we are Roman Catholic. As for political connection, Rome was almost non existent for centuries.
        woofie11 6y ago
        Poland was closest to west Slavic countries, but until recently, it's been culturally closer to east slavic/south slavic than to Western Europe. Rome has been nonexistent for centuries, but the foundations of cultures for most of Europe except the Slavic countries come from the interactions between Rome and the Germanic tribes. Roman tradition (Western Europe): Legal behavior is ethical behavior. Slavic/Polish: Laws and ethics are two different things. Roman: Behaving politely is paramount and one needs to maintain decorum. Positivity. Slavic: People express themselves plainly and openly; complaining, criticizing, negativity, and rudeness are okay if that's how people feel. Roman: Imperialism and cultural imperialism. One should help others by spreading their superior culture. Slavic: Acceptance, tolerance, and fitting in. Polish people adapt to cultures they go to, and for most of history, oppressed groups (like Jews) flocked to Poland for their (relative) tolerance. Etc.
- CGamesPlay 6y ago
  I agree with you on your latter two points, but I have found that interestingly the italics (or "handwriting") variants of lowercase Cyrillic letters appear to be much better designed/less ambiguous than the "printed" variants.
- woofie11 6y ago
  > One less reason for Russia to exert its influence by preaching pan-slavism and "russkiy mir". Pan-slavism isn't a bad idea. The bad idea is dominance of pan-slavism by Putin or the latest incarnation of the USSR / Russian Empire.
  - Nginx487 6y ago
    But we did not experience any other incarnation of it...
    - woofie11 6y ago
      We did, although we didn't experience great incarnations. The Polish-Lithuanian Empire had some aspirations along those lines, but was dominated by Poland. Most of the Slavic cultures are culturally closer to each other than to Western Europe, although Poland has really (and rather unfortunately) westernizing since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the rise of the EU, etc. Polish culture is being replaced by Germanic culture, which is quite sad to see. A modern pan-slavic incarnation would likely look like the USA, the EU, or some of the partnerships of African countries, where there is free trade and some degree of free travel. I think prerequisite to that would be to fix some of the governance issues in Slavic countries, though. Right now, the concern would be that any such partnership would be bullied around by Putin.
- aschatten 6y ago
  Ignoring your political reason as completely unrelated to the article. On the practical side, do you know any language that uses Cyrillic alphabet? If no, then you are not used to it and this is why it looks awkward, blocky, etc. and cursive is not a nightmare and is very readable, much so like cursive text written in English. If you do know any language that uses Cyrillic, can you provide examples to support your characterizations?
emmelaich 6y ago
> I always felt that Polish words were just too long You might like the movie about Grzegorz Brzęczyszczykiewicz: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AfKZclMWS1U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AfKZclMWS1U
pawel_dyda 6y ago
I have to disagree completely. Problem is, I am native speaker... I presume it was written by the Dutchman. Well, there are reasons why we keep ó and u and treat it separately. The reason is, it's a different phoneme. ó is open, said with round lips, while u is posterior syllable. Totally different sound. The same goes with other phonemes that are simply not represented in Cyrillic, such as ch (posterior version of h). Political reasons apart (Russians actually tried to impose there spelling here and it didn't go well; see metrical books written in Cyrillic - incorrect spelling, translating first names, etc.), there are reasons why we keep our specific spellings. Personally, I can't see why we keep using cz instead of č or sz instead of š. But I know that historically speaking we did. It came from Czech. There are few remains, for instance ł (which does not sound like l, it sounds more like wh in which, what, why ;) ). The funny thing Czech people dropped it :) But this is another story; it probably has something to do with national pride. To some extent Cyrillic might have something to do with pride and independence, but the fact is Polish is very far from Russian (it's Western Slavonic language after all) and there are many sounds that there is no way to properly describe in it. Problem is, these sound might be hard to distinguish for people that does not use Polish as their mother tongue... Tough luck :)

rathel 6y ago

I think Poland is better off not using Cyrillic for political reasons. One less reason for Russia to exert its influence by preaching pan-slavism and "russkiy mir". On a practical side - even if you know Cyrillic, lowercase letters are kinda awkward to read at a glance - very blocky, way less a/descenders, many look alike and they are a lazy copy of upper case. And Cyrillic cursive is a nightmare.

phoronixrly 6y ago
> I think Poland is better off not using Cyrillic for political reasons Not sure anyone implied that Poland should use the Cyrillic alphabet... > On a practical side - even if you know Cyrillic, lowercase letters are kinda awkward to read at a glance - very blocky, way less a/descenders, many look alike and they are a lazy copy of upper case. That's both pretty subjective, and partly incorrect, given the latest tendencies in type design: https://www.lettersoup.de/what-shall-be-done-for-bulgarian-cyrillic-loclbgr/ https://www.lettersoup.de/what-shall-be-done-for-bulgarian-c... > And Cyrillic cursive is a nightmare. Sorry but Cyrillic cursive is 90% the same as Latin cursive
qwerty456127 6y ago
> Poland is better off not using Cyrillic for political reasons What about Bulgaria? Or Ukraine?
- keiferski 6y ago
  Both are Orthodox Christian countries, whereas Poland is strongly Roman Catholic. Ergo Poland has always been more connected politically and culturally to the West / the Roman Church, whereas Bulgaria and Ukraine have been more connected to Russia.
  - disown 6y ago
    > Ergo Poland has always been more connected politically and culturally to the West Politically and religiously more connected to Rome, not the West as Rome stopped being the head of the West for centuries now. But Poland is also ethnically, linguistically and culturally closer to the slavic nations.
    - krzyk 6y ago
      Yes, Poland is closer to slavic countries. More specifically to west slavic ones - Czech, Slovakia. Vs.The the east slavic and south slavic ones. Notice that similarly to other west slavs we are Roman Catholic. As for political connection, Rome was almost non existent for centuries.
      - woofie11 6y ago
        Poland was closest to west Slavic countries, but until recently, it's been culturally closer to east slavic/south slavic than to Western Europe. Rome has been nonexistent for centuries, but the foundations of cultures for most of Europe except the Slavic countries come from the interactions between Rome and the Germanic tribes. Roman tradition (Western Europe): Legal behavior is ethical behavior. Slavic/Polish: Laws and ethics are two different things. Roman: Behaving politely is paramount and one needs to maintain decorum. Positivity. Slavic: People express themselves plainly and openly; complaining, criticizing, negativity, and rudeness are okay if that's how people feel. Roman: Imperialism and cultural imperialism. One should help others by spreading their superior culture. Slavic: Acceptance, tolerance, and fitting in. Polish people adapt to cultures they go to, and for most of history, oppressed groups (like Jews) flocked to Poland for their (relative) tolerance. Etc.
CGamesPlay 6y ago
I agree with you on your latter two points, but I have found that interestingly the italics (or "handwriting") variants of lowercase Cyrillic letters appear to be much better designed/less ambiguous than the "printed" variants.
woofie11 6y ago
> One less reason for Russia to exert its influence by preaching pan-slavism and "russkiy mir". Pan-slavism isn't a bad idea. The bad idea is dominance of pan-slavism by Putin or the latest incarnation of the USSR / Russian Empire.
- Nginx487 6y ago
  But we did not experience any other incarnation of it...
  - woofie11 6y ago
    We did, although we didn't experience great incarnations. The Polish-Lithuanian Empire had some aspirations along those lines, but was dominated by Poland. Most of the Slavic cultures are culturally closer to each other than to Western Europe, although Poland has really (and rather unfortunately) westernizing since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the rise of the EU, etc. Polish culture is being replaced by Germanic culture, which is quite sad to see. A modern pan-slavic incarnation would likely look like the USA, the EU, or some of the partnerships of African countries, where there is free trade and some degree of free travel. I think prerequisite to that would be to fix some of the governance issues in Slavic countries, though. Right now, the concern would be that any such partnership would be bullied around by Putin.
aschatten 6y ago
Ignoring your political reason as completely unrelated to the article. On the practical side, do you know any language that uses Cyrillic alphabet? If no, then you are not used to it and this is why it looks awkward, blocky, etc. and cursive is not a nightmare and is very readable, much so like cursive text written in English. If you do know any language that uses Cyrillic, can you provide examples to support your characterizations?

emmelaich 6y ago

> I always felt that Polish words were just too long You might like the movie about Grzegorz Brzęczyszczykiewicz: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AfKZclMWS1U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AfKZclMWS1U

pawel_dyda 6y ago

I have to disagree completely. Problem is, I am native speaker... I presume it was written by the Dutchman. Well, there are reasons why we keep ó and u and treat it separately. The reason is, it's a different phoneme. ó is open, said with round lips, while u is posterior syllable. Totally different sound. The same goes with other phonemes that are simply not represented in Cyrillic, such as ch (posterior version of h). Political reasons apart (Russians actually tried to impose there spelling here and it didn't go well; see metrical books written in Cyrillic - incorrect spelling, translating first names, etc.), there are reasons why we keep our specific spellings. Personally, I can't see why we keep using cz instead of č or sz instead of š. But I know that historically speaking we did. It came from Czech. There are few remains, for instance ł (which does not sound like l, it sounds more like wh in which, what, why ;) ). The funny thing Czech people dropped it :) But this is another story; it probably has something to do with national pride. To some extent Cyrillic might have something to do with pride and independence, but the fact is Polish is very far from Russian (it's Western Slavonic language after all) and there are many sounds that there is no way to properly describe in it. Problem is, these sound might be hard to distinguish for people that does not use Polish as their mother tongue... Tough luck :)