3 ms·

For the record, it's a stark pronunciation difference as ł has drifted to a very different "w" sound

MadeThisToReply 5y ago
Yep. For example, the name of the third-largest city in Poland is "Łódź", which might look like it's pronounced "lods", but is actually pronounced more like "wootch".
- garaetjjte 5y ago
  Sometimes you end up with parcel addressed to city "??d?". Shipping systems cannot cope with non-ASCII chars more often than I would expect...
  - greenshackle2 5y ago
    I've seen shipping labels with HTML encoded characters, like é and è. I'm not sure if that's better or worse: &Lstrok;ód&zacute;
    - qwerty456127 5y ago
      This is a pretty frequent thing to encounter actually. Just some years ago many websites actually preferred to use ISO/Windows codepages to save space on multibyte Unicode symbols adding HTML entities to represent everything which is not in it the basic ASCII and their primary language alphabet. Fun fact: I was looking for an e-mail solution for a small company about a decade ago and found Zarafa. It seemed nice and I deployed it happily. Just to find out it only supports the Western European ISO codepage which was hardcoded. I hope they have switched to UTF-8 since then.
  - qwerty456127 5y ago
    Always omit diacritics when giving your address/name to foreign parties which are going to have to ship you anything or issue any documents for you.
qwerty456127 5y ago
The fact most of the speakers of the language have switched to a different accent (by the way, I feel curious why) doesn't mean a fundamental difference. Same letters and whole same words are vocalized differently in the US and the UK (and even different regional accents within both countries) and nobody thinks about them as different letters/words. Ł still is the same letter, a direct counterpart to L in English, German, almost all latin-based Slavic alphabets and pretty much everywhere. I bet almost every Mikołaj drops the slash happily (some probably even change the whole name to Nicholas which is the English counterpart) if they get a passport of an anglophone country. Nevertheless I find it absurd it's 2021 and they still have to. It's almost 30 years since the introduction of Unicode in Windows NT and NTFS, probably also close to that in Java. Pretty much every serious programming language or database supports Unicode by default today. I believe it's a bug in some app in the toolchain as Windows file system API is perfectly capable of handling non-ASCII symbols. I always cared to avoid using non-ASCII symbols and spaces in my paths (incl. always installing almost everything to a custom directory outside "Program Files") but c'mon, how many decades do we need to develop handling these reliably? I would also consider Windows' inability to optionally change the actual home directory name and distinguish between the user's full (display) name and their "username" (which are 2 distinct properties in Linux) "feature-bugs".
- ludamad 5y ago
  I actually take a hint of offense that you say "Ł still is the same letter, a direct counterpart to L". By what measure? It was always a separate phoneme. Just because it shifted to w doesn't mean it wasn't distinct to poles to begin with - just now clearly distinct to everyone as the sound has only become more distinct! Pointing to ways we poles live with the situation doesn't mean it's ideal
  - qwerty456127 5y ago
    It was not "always a separate phoneme". English-L-like hard pronunciation of Ł still is valid Polish, although rare to encounter in real life outside certain regions in the east. In fact it is even considered sort of more literate (conservative/standard) in theory. Would you also say Greek lambda has nothing to do with the English L? Or, slightly more relevant and complex example, actual Polish L with Slovak Ľ and Serbian Љ?

Yep. For example, the name of the third-largest city in Poland is "Łódź", which might look like it's pronounced "lods", but is actually pronounced more like "wootch".

garaetjjte 5y ago
Sometimes you end up with parcel addressed to city "??d?". Shipping systems cannot cope with non-ASCII chars more often than I would expect...
- greenshackle2 5y ago
  I've seen shipping labels with HTML encoded characters, like é and è. I'm not sure if that's better or worse: &Lstrok;ód&zacute;
  - qwerty456127 5y ago
    This is a pretty frequent thing to encounter actually. Just some years ago many websites actually preferred to use ISO/Windows codepages to save space on multibyte Unicode symbols adding HTML entities to represent everything which is not in it the basic ASCII and their primary language alphabet. Fun fact: I was looking for an e-mail solution for a small company about a decade ago and found Zarafa. It seemed nice and I deployed it happily. Just to find out it only supports the Western European ISO codepage which was hardcoded. I hope they have switched to UTF-8 since then.
- qwerty456127 5y ago
  Always omit diacritics when giving your address/name to foreign parties which are going to have to ship you anything or issue any documents for you.

qwerty456127 5y ago

The fact most of the speakers of the language have switched to a different accent (by the way, I feel curious why) doesn't mean a fundamental difference. Same letters and whole same words are vocalized differently in the US and the UK (and even different regional accents within both countries) and nobody thinks about them as different letters/words. Ł still is the same letter, a direct counterpart to L in English, German, almost all latin-based Slavic alphabets and pretty much everywhere. I bet almost every Mikołaj drops the slash happily (some probably even change the whole name to Nicholas which is the English counterpart) if they get a passport of an anglophone country. Nevertheless I find it absurd it's 2021 and they still have to. It's almost 30 years since the introduction of Unicode in Windows NT and NTFS, probably also close to that in Java. Pretty much every serious programming language or database supports Unicode by default today. I believe it's a bug in some app in the toolchain as Windows file system API is perfectly capable of handling non-ASCII symbols. I always cared to avoid using non-ASCII symbols and spaces in my paths (incl. always installing almost everything to a custom directory outside "Program Files") but c'mon, how many decades do we need to develop handling these reliably? I would also consider Windows' inability to optionally change the actual home directory name and distinguish between the user's full (display) name and their "username" (which are 2 distinct properties in Linux) "feature-bugs".

ludamad 5y ago
I actually take a hint of offense that you say "Ł still is the same letter, a direct counterpart to L". By what measure? It was always a separate phoneme. Just because it shifted to w doesn't mean it wasn't distinct to poles to begin with - just now clearly distinct to everyone as the sound has only become more distinct! Pointing to ways we poles live with the situation doesn't mean it's ideal
- qwerty456127 5y ago
  It was not "always a separate phoneme". English-L-like hard pronunciation of Ł still is valid Polish, although rare to encounter in real life outside certain regions in the east. In fact it is even considered sort of more literate (conservative/standard) in theory. Would you also say Greek lambda has nothing to do with the English L? Or, slightly more relevant and complex example, actual Polish L with Slovak Ľ and Serbian Љ?