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An interesting fact for non Polish speaking readers: for non-official writing we often don't use diacritic characters at all. It makes writing faster. With the
by tomaszs 5y ago
An interesting fact for non Polish speaking readers: for non-official writing we often don't use diacritic characters at all. It makes writing faster. With the raise of spell checkers it fades out, but still, if you write without diacritics often you will be well understood.
Second interesting fact: it is very popular for software and online apps, especially not developed in Europe to ignore diacritics. Not only polish ones, but also french, german etc. You get weird characters instead or can not write properly altogether. I hope the article will put a highlight on the issue.
- Tade0 5y agoI've noticed that I automatically lose some respect towards a person if I find that they don't use diacritics in their writing. Especially in a professional setting.
- mirekrusin 5y ago1. łaskę mi robisz 2. laske mi robisz -- 1. you are (not really, pejorative) doing me a favor 2. you are doing me a blowjob ...must be one of better ones.
- 988747 5y agoSure, but sometimes leaving out Polish diacritics makes the whole sentence ambiguous, or at the very least harder to read. I personally despise people doing that. More to the article's point: there were countless times where I accidentaly sent unfinished email by trying to type "ś".
- crazygringo 5y agoI feel like that's pretty true worldwide for languages with diacritics, at least for all the Latin-script languages I'm familiar with. It's really no different from people in English shortening "you" to "u" in texting as well, or "lol". Everybody saves keystrokes wherever they can.
- danijelb 5y agoIt's popular for some reason even in countries where it doesn't save keystrokes. For example in Croatia we have 5 characters with diacritics (š, đ, č, ć, ž), all of them have dedicated keys on the keyboard and yet many people have a habit of simply not using them.
- ygra 5y agoIn German, ä would never be replaced by a (if all you have is ASCII the proper replacement is ae), except by foreigners who assume that diacritics don't matter.
- inglor_cz 5y agoCzechs sometimes write without diacritics as well, but the resulting ambiguities are funny. For example, a customer of my e-shop gave his street as "Skretova". So, is it "Škrétova" (named after a famous Baroque painter) or "Skřetova" (Goblin's street?) Of course, most Czech cities do not honor goblins in their street plan...
- dhosek 5y agoIt's surprising how much software (mostly on Windows) doesn't properly handle Unicode in 2021. With something working in Unicode, it's not that big of a deal to both handle letters like Ł or ż and also to run normalization on text strings so that you can (if desired) treat Łódź and Lodz as identical (e.g., for text searching).
- bobbylarrybobby 5y agoJust a note that normalization is not the same as diacritic insensitivity. Normalization is the process by which strings that are semantically equivalent (by some standard), yet have different underlying byte sequences, are transformed to have the same underlying byte sequence. For instance, replacing “e, combining acute accent” with “e with acute accent”.
- dhosek 5y agoYes, I should clarify that the process is to normalize to letter+combining accent and then strip out the accents, e.g., in Java: Normalizer.normalize(text, Normalizer.Form.NFD).replaceAll("\\p{M}", ""); (I hope I got this right—I adapted it from some code which actually strips out some other bits of text to turn, e.g., F. Janaček into FJanacek.)
- danijelb 5y agoTyping without diacritics is also popular in Croatia in casual scenarios
- xenadu02 5y agoI wonder how much computers and spell-checkers are reducing the evolution of writing systems? In the past people could naturally stop using diacritics or make letter substitutions. Over time the language might eliminate their use. That seems less likely now. Similarly introducing a new letter seems rather difficult in the computer age.