4 ms·
> 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 restrice
by 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)