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I, too, have the Ł letter in my name, and yes, it is a sick joke that so many things even in a supposedly modern systems make an assumption that the world runs
by mkotowski 5y ago
I, too, have the Ł letter in my name, and yes, it is a sick joke that so many things even in a supposedly modern systems make an assumption that the world runs on ASCII.
In the case of the Windows operating system, the worst fact is that every single part of it behaves differently. Some parts display the path with a wrong encoding, but handle it correctly. A third-party app can display it correctly, but fails while trying to access any file. From what I remember, even the built-in PATH variable editor/manager goes through some arcane steps to display the letters in a wrong way, but getting them to work sometimes.
I can only imagine how much more pain it is for someone using any of the less widely-used writing systems or those with more advanced features compared to ASCII (Hebrew’s RTL, Arabic scripts mid- and final forms, etcetera).
- gerdesj 5y agoCan Ł have an alternative representation? For example the German ß => ss. Also I think ö can be written as oe. In English we simply shake the big bag of letters, pick a few at random and then throw them at the page until a few stick.
- q3k 5y ago> Can Ł have an alternative representation? Nope. Neither can ź, ć, ś, ą or ę. You can, and people do write them as z, c, s, a and e when writing in a restriced character set, but that is not 'correct' and is not a bijection, ie. „półka” and „polka” mean two different things. There's also the case of technically-same-sounding-especially-recently ż/rz and ó/u (whose replacement would let you get rid of two 'non standard' characters), but for historical reasons these are not interchangeable.
- gerdesj 5y agoI do find this sort of stuff fascinating and also faintly frustrating but of course my mother tongue is (in)famous for being a bit loose at first sight. According to one of my employees (Polish) Ł sounds roughly like w as in win or water but not as in what. A quick read of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%81 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%81 doesn't help too much. Does enforcing Ł instead of say w cause your written language to fail in some way? I don't want to cause offense, I want to understand the causes of difference.
- ByteJockey 5y agoI think I just learned that some dialects/accents don't pronounce the w in water and the w in what the same way. What's the difference?
- mkotowski 5y agoThe «wh» in words like when, why, what can be pronounced as a voiceless labial–velar fricative (IPA sign: ʍ). For more detailed explanation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pronunciation_of_English_%E2%9F%A8wh%E2%9F%A9 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pronunciation_of_English_%E2%9...
- gerdesj 5y agoWhat can be pronounced as "wot" or something like "hwot". I can't recall the technical term.
- q3k 5y ago'W' in Polish is already used, but for a different sound - it's pronounced like the English 'v'. 'V' in turn is not present the Polish alphabet (in the sense of it not being present in words of Polish origin). If you wanna change that, you might as well change the entire writing system of the language, eg. to be more in line with some other, more common writing system (ie. other latin alphabets or the cyrillic alphabet which would probably make the most sense phonetically). But no-one's gonna go for that any time soon.
- gerdesj 5y ago"If you wanna change". I think we have found the disconnect: you quite happily use a word like "wanna" which is nonsense in English. Its allowed because it is understandable. Wanna is "want to". Ooh, "gonna": That'll be "going to". What's gonna to you is l bar for me or vice versa or something 8)
- q3k 5y agoThis post is a good reminder to never fall for “I don't want to cause offense, I want to understand the causes of difference.” again.