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The curious case of the disappearing Polish S (2015)
- atombender 4mo ago(2015)
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- TRiG_Ireland 4mo agoThat perhaps explains why I vaguely recall reading it before.
- quibono 4mo agoI believe the fact that Polish uses the Latin alphabet (with a small Slavic twist to express the extra sounds) meant it was much easier for Poland to align itself westward. I think the average Pole is much closer culturally to the Western neighbours than to a Ukrainian or Russian (maybe apart from cuisine).
- q3k 4mo agoPolish cuisine is very similar to German cuisine. (This comment will make a lot of Polish people very upset.)
- ck45 4mo agoLots of common main ingredients like potatoes, beets, cabbage, and sausages. It could also have a different reason, like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Former_eastern_territories_of_Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Former_eastern_territories_of_...
- grvbck 4mo agoSure, a common use of bread, potatoes, cabbage/other vegetables, hearty meat dishes etc but the Polish kitchen is closer to Ukrainian/Russian in technique/ingredients. Barszcz, pierogi, fermented everything, pickles, sour rye, and many dishes built around wheat/rye, mushrooms, dairy, and Eastern-style fillings are much more like Ukrainian/Belarusian/Russian food. The biggest German influences are probably the sausages and the beer culture.
- CurtHagenlocher 4mo agoHow reasonably can German cuisine be described as a single unified thing? My mother was from East Prussia and my father from Swabia and their "home" cuisines were pretty dissimilar -- if for no other reason than climate.
- minkeymaniac 4mo agoSame is true for Croatia.. food from Slavonia (near Zagreb) is very different from the coastal regions (Istria and Dalmatia)
- tannenfreund87 4mo agoCuisine in Europe is shaped by climate, soil and former political entities. You'll find similar cuisine in and around the alps, along the north sea coast and around the baltic sea. While the people eating the same food speak a dozen different languages.
- tau255 4mo agoDue to Partitions of Poland a lot of of territory was under Prussian influence for over a century - that had to have some culinary effect (other than forced germanization).
- broken-kebab 4mo agoIt's also true for Belarus, Baltics, and some parts of Ukraine. Generally, we can speak about North-Eastern European cuisine with potatoes, secale flour breads, and various pickled things. And that name will make a lot of everybody upset, cause everybody in those lands pretend they are "Central". Americans would not believe how many "geographical centers of Europe" are claimed there.
- rconti 4mo agoI'm not sure how surprised Americans would be to learn that there are so many "centers of Europe". After all, we all know that Colorado is in "the west", Texas in the "southwest", and, clearly, "the South" is located in the geographical southeast :D
- broken-kebab 4mo agoThese American peculiarities are funny too, but they are mostly historical, and from that perspective have reasonable explanation. In turn "we are not Eastern, but Central" is relatively recent PR-born madness. Somebody decided that EE often associates with questionable things like alcohol consumption somehow, so the solution is to separate yourself from other drinkers by claiming being completely different "Central" kind. Nobody stops drinking meanwhile, because why would you? I simplify the story, of course, but the logic is exactly like that.
- rconti 4mo agoAlso, I imagine that the expansion and reduction in size of the Soviet empire over the decades has played a part, not to mention a certain provincialism among (western) European powers in terms of what they consider to be "real" Europe. When it was a poor backwater "somewhere over there", it wasn't part of Europe. When it was Soviet, it wasn't Europe. Now that it's a bulwark against a militaristic Russia and a convenient place to do lower-cost manufacturing: "Hello, my European compatriots!"
- bleepblap 4mo agoAnd my favorite -- you need to go north from Miami to be in "the South"
- keiferski 4mo agoYes it's similar, but certainly not more than Ukrainian/Russian/Belarusian food.
- jyounker 4mo agoI don't see why. A lot of Western Poland used to be German, and it's not like there's one German cuisine either. You don't get many Bavarians eating pickled herring with beets, but's it's classic cuisine in Berlin.
- tannenfreund87 4mo agoWestern Poland used to be German, but all the Germans left/got expelled. After WW2 it was resettled with Poles from Eastern Poland, nowadays Ukraine and Belarus. Which makes traveling from Berlin to Poznan or Wroclaw an interesting experience. Directly at the German-Polish border, you'll enter Eastern Europe, then when you arrive in the mentioned cities, you're suddenly back in Central Europe. Also, you'd be surprised at how widespread pickled herring is in Bavaria. Herring has been a trading good for millennia in Europe, was and is still consumed in the winter months in Bavaria. You can easily get a "Fischsemmel" at the Oktoberfest in Munich. Bavarians also used to pickle everything for the winter: cucumbers, beets, cabbage, beans.
- morsch 4mo agoYou can also get jiaozi and tempura shrimp at the Oktoberfest, that doesn't make them traditional Alpine food. > Directly at the German-Polish border, you'll enter Eastern Europe, then when you arrive in the mentioned cities, you're suddenly back in Central Europe. I mean I get that impression even before crossing the border to Poland. It's just very rural and not exactly wealthy on either side of the border.
- jyounker 4mo agoThat about sums it up. If it weren't for the Oder river, it would be hard to tell where one ends and the other begins. There are some places on the border where the only signs that you've changed countries are... the signs. (Specifically I'm thinking of Gorlitz/Zgorzelec.)
- jyounker 4mo agoI know you can get herring in Bayern, and I know you can get a Weisswurst in Berlin. That doesn't change the fact that they're represented differently in the regional cuisines. The cuisine up here in Berlin/Brandenburg is much closer to that of Poland than it is to that of Bavaria. I say that as a person who lives in Berlin with Polish roommate, and travels pretty regularly to visit friends in Munich.
- gedy 4mo agoBeing Catholic helps too
- keiferski 4mo agoThe adoption of the Latin alphabet was itself a move to align itself westward, with kingdoms in the Latin world, not the Byzantine one, and tied to adopting Catholicism rather than Orthodoxy.
- dhosek 4mo agoIn fact, the Slavic countries which use Latin are all predominantly Catholic, with Bosnia being an outlier in using both Latin and Cyrillic while also being roughly half Muslim.
- reddalo 4mo agoLike Kazakhstan, which decided to switch from Cyrillic to the Latin alphabet [1] in order to align more with Europe and less with Russia. I wonder if Ukraine will do the same in a distant future... [1] https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20180424-the-cost-of-changing-an-entire-countrys-alphabet https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20180424-the-cost-of-ch...
- cynicalsecurity 4mo agoUkraine absolutely must ditch Cyrillic alphabet, after the war. There will be plenty of things to change.
- jagaerglad 4mo agoI sometimes hear the same in my circles about Persian ditching the perso-arabic script. I don't get it, why can't you align a country however you like without creating a huge rift between a big population and years of literature, material etc etc? One can learn multiple scripts and almost all literate people know the latin script globally nowadays. Besides, sad to see the whole world just use the latin script in the end but that's not the point
- toast0 4mo agoSharing a writing system helps with communication across cultures, even when there isn't a shared language. > One can learn multiple scripts and almost all literate people know the latin script globally nowadays. If almost all literate people know the latin script, there's a benefit to writing your language in it. Of course, the switching cost is high.
- oneshtein 4mo agoLatin script creates lot of confusion in mixed environments. For example, even native speakers of English language, major language of the world, have no clue how to read aloud random texts written using Latin alphabet.
- wolvesechoes 4mo ago[flagged]
- pndy 4mo agoDirty summary (not involving AI): Just like Christianity arrived in Poland by marriage of Mieszko with Czech princess Doubravka/Dobrawa in 10th century, we also adapted Czech alphabet (and thus Latin) from Jan Hus efforts of codifying Czech language. Scholars believe that around same time Polish began to develop as a separate language. And up until the 13th century it was still possible to communicate with southern neighbors without much of issues. Between 15th and 16th century Polish orthography forms; Stanisław Zaborowski and Jan Kochanowski tried to customize alphabet by introducing letters that would accurately reflected Polish phonology at that time - their alphabets proposals were really long. Jumping to the Partitions period, where heavy russification aims at eradicating the Polish language and culture. There were attempts of introducing Cyrillic script but occupier's efforts eventually failed - Polish people stood up; literature of these times was full of titles exploring patriotism, love for homeland as a theme. Linguistic reform of 1936 molds language to what we know today. The communistic period introduced second person plural within the public language, which naturally exists today in Czech and Slovak (vykání). Here it didn't lasted as it was unnatural and politically branded. While Polish language divides into dialects, that time also forms the standard Polish dialect, as post-WW2 migrations blurred the differences. Today our language is heavily populated with borrowed words and terms from English, which in some case become "naturalized" - hater become hejter.
- keiferski 4mo agoThe most ironic part of this story is that Czechia is rather a-religious nowadays, primarily from “Catholic imperialism” from the Austrian empire and from the communist era. So the country Poland got Christianity from is no longer interested in it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_the_Czech_Republic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_the_Czech_Republic Poland on the other hand has Catholicism as a key identity marker, although IME living in Poland for a decade, this is fading rapidly with younger people.
- 0bytes 4mo ago“Polish uses the English/Latin alphabet” - was it developed back when the US and Italy were allies in ancient Roman times?
- gdwatson 4mo agoI stumbled over that too, but it makes sense when you finish the article. The ancient Romans didn’t build a lot of keyboards.
- milkshakeyeah 4mo agoWhat’s hard to understand here?
- smitty1e 4mo agoAs I am fond of saying: "The good news about Open Source is that you've got the source code; the bad news about Open Source is that _you've_ got the source code." That is, you may well get sucked down a rabbit hole in order to accomplish a simple task.
- npodbielski 4mo agoWhat?
- smitty1e 4mo agoOpen Source puts the onus on the user to know what they are doing. The learning curve is not too vertical on the established components, but stand by on the New Shiny.
- npodbielski 4mo agoAnd how does it relate to Medium?
- smitty1e 4mo agoI just got a really great keyboard...except that the space bar and my Linux distro don't get along at all. So now I have a surprise deep-dive to make this thing usable. It's a Nietszchean Bargain: that which doesn't kill you makes you stronger.
- TRiG_Ireland 4mo agoThe linguistic, historical, and cultural information is so fascinating, and really well explained.
- nashashmi 4mo agoThis was a fun read. Here is the tl;dr version: > Instead of blindly and greedily blocking Ctrl S, we could block Ctrl S only if Alt key was not pressed. Ctrl alt s was the keyboard shortcut for the polish S. Ctrl s was blocked to improve saving. And this also blocked ctrl alt s too.
- TheRealPomax 4mo agoNo, the shortcut was alt+s. That's what people typed. Then on Windows, which used alt-combinations already, it became rightalt+s (as the rightalt wasn't used by Windows itself) but instead of having a dedicated rightalt code, Windows would rewrite that key into a ctrl+alt code combination. If you're going to tl;dr, at least get the most important detail right. People only ever pressed alt, and Windows went "and now you're pressing ctrl+alt", so that alt+s becomes ctrl+s with an alt that no one's looking for when it comes to intercepting and killing off key events.
- nashashmi 4mo agoFair enough. Though as a laptop user, I didnt consider any emphasis on the right alt.
- TheRealPomax 4mo agoNot if you had a non-US laptop. Almost every laptop keyboard except for US models have an AltGr on the right.
- paweladamczuk 4mo agoIt's just like the new Copilot 365. Every time I try to type "Ć", Copilot pops up. I have to close the app constantly.
- StefanBatory 4mo agoBest part is that it installs itself automatically, without prompting me for that. Thank you Microsoft; nice to see your QA works well.
- Random09 4mo agoEvery little thing like that creates a new Linux user. After switching I've never looked back. Posted from SteamOS.
- raverbashing 4mo agoLol For a good while the default US Intl keyboard in some Linux versions would give a ć instead of a ç for the combination c + ' Makes sense right? Except that made a lot of people angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move Because Brazilian users were expecting c + ' to become ç (And they had to use Alt Gr + c instead)
- kevin_thibedeau 4mo agoThe US international keyboard settings suck. It's more convenient to enable a compose key and do diacritics with that.
- edukite 4mo agoAs Pole I never had this issue. Why would you even use US Intl keyboard. Even for Arch with install everything manually I haven't any issues
- raverbashing 4mo ago> Why would you even use US Intl keyboard Because (for some reason) you don't have your "standard" keyboard - just the US ISO one Some keyboards have an extra key (or maybe more than one) and hence can't be mapped fully with a US keyboard
- notathrowaway51 4mo agoFun fact: when treated with unicode Normalization Form Canonical Decomposition, 8 out of 9 polish letters (ż,ó,ć,ę,ś,ą,ź,ń) break down into base letter + combining diacritical mark, but ł stays intact. That means you can't use sqlite's unicode61 remove_diacritics tokenizer to normalize polish text for FTS.
- ks2048 4mo agoWhen a Polish speaker searches for something with “ł”, do they expect to also see “l”?
- kuboble 4mo agoNo. But the other way around sometimes yes.
- dhosek 4mo agoI remember discovering that while writing some code for a job interview. The reason for it is simple, even though in many input systems (like the ABC International I use on my Macs) it’s a two-character sequence to enter ł, there is not actually a combining character for that line through the l. I’m not sure, but I think sqlite’s remove_diacritics works the way that I’ve implemented that functionality in some of my own software: convert to NCD then remove combining characters from the string. I would expect that a few other special cases also behave the same way, such as ħ or ø which also will not decompose.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- f33d5173 4mo agoThe real issue here is first that browsers don't expose a simple way to check for key combinations and second that developers don't bother building their own. You'll find on any number of sites that an intended key combination can also be invoked with additional modifiers of alt or shift or whatnot. Even here, the code shown only fixes the broader issue on windows; alt+cmd+s still gets blocked. There should be a proposal for browsers to expose a property on the keydown/up/press event containing a code for the key combination. Something like "CTRL+S", "CTRL+ALT+S", etc. The programmer could then switch over this property rather than having to check key codes and modifiers manually. I would also propose to any web developers that they build this property themselves in their own code and check against it instead of checking modifiers directly. Not only would it protect against bugs like in the OP, it would also be a lot more convenient to use.
- alasdairking 4mo agoThis bug comes from a programmer trying to fix one problem - users press Control S and get a save dialog - by altering some fundamental and bug-prone behaviour. Imagine the damage programmers could do if they had more options to meddle easily! They have low-level APIs if they need them to hook keys. Best leave it at that. Meanwhile, there is the accesskey attribute in HTML to let you customise shortcut keys: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/Global_attributes/accesskey https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/...
- f33d5173 4mo ago> the accesskey attribute Holy crow what a mess. No wonder I'd never heard of this.
- egorfine 4mo ago> Polish is the second most-used Slavic language, right after Russian and just before Ukrainian This is not exactly right regarding Ukrainian. While it is the official language of Ukraine, in reality... let's say that not all Ukrainian people are actually speaking it.
- fsckboy 4mo ago>This is not exactly right regarding Ukrainian. While it is the official language of Ukraine, in reality... let's say that not all Ukrainian people are actually speaking it. your "adjustment" didn't propose what other Slavic language would outnumber Ukrainian to be 3rd behind Polish and Russian, so you didn't move the needle.
- egorfine 4mo ago[flagged]
- demetrius 4mo ago"Native speaker" is not a very useful term: it combines a lot of criteria (first acquired language, language you know best, language you identify with, language of your parents, language of your ethnic group etc.), and each of these criteria is further very fuzzy (e.g. I know plant names better in Ukrainian, but programming terms better in Russian, which language I know better? Competency is not a single value, ethnic identification is malleable and people can have several of these, etc.) These criteria usually coincide in speakers of big languages (usually languages of [former] empires), so it's relatively easy to say who is a native speaker of Russian or English. There are a lot of people who fulfill all the criteria at once. But they rarely coincide for speakers of smaller languages (usually colonised people). When most people are bilingual, it's often harder to say who is a native speaker of Ukrainian or Belarusian. Most people fulfill some criteria but not all of them. So, the term "native speaker" is not neutral and not very useful.
- egorfine 4mo ago
- pzel_ 4mo agoObligatory plug of my keyboard layout which solves the awkward right hand contortions: https://pzel.name/pl-lefty.html https://pzel.name/pl-lefty.html It comes bundled with xorg nowadays, you can use: Option "XkbVariant" "lefty" in xorg.conf
- athrow 4mo ago> Communism in Poland meant two things: not a lot of disposable income The issue wasn’t so much the lack of income it was scarcity of items to purchase.
- jpfromlondon 4mo agoBoth actually.
- edukite 4mo ago3/4 with Ctrl+S is so me today with my :wa embedded harder in my muscle memory than washing my hands after returning from outside I don't even think about it. It's autosave without plugin.
- mlukaszek 4mo agoMeanwhile, in 2026 I suddenly cannot type capital Ś in Edge on Mac. I feel like I moved back in time 25 years or so.
- maciejw 4mo agoI noticed it too, but for Teams. Is it because they are both MS apps?
- mlukaszek 4mo agoYep. No one else would shove bing search down your throat. https://learn.microsoft.com/pl-pl/answers/questions/5658359/microsoft-edge-on-mac-os-capital-special-letter-er https://learn.microsoft.com/pl-pl/answers/questions/5658359/...
- michalpleban 4mo agoSadly it is not just Medium, but a bunch of other Windows apps too. For example, in Active Presenter, typing one of the letters (I think it is Ó) stops screen recording, which makes the program unusable in many situations - I cannot record myself typing anything in Polish. Other apps similarly assign shortcuts to Alt + Ctrl + letter, somehow overriding the keyboard layout driver.
- mDyJzDPmBdG 4mo agoOh, that explains why I accidentally triggered Claude with alt+space, despite it being configured as alt+ctrl+space.
- HackerThemAll 4mo agoMany American companies fell into that. Intel, Nvidia, AMD control panels all contained keyboard shortcut keys that interfered with Polish diacritics. Even Google at one point had the exact issue described in this article. Medium is trying to be little too convenient here. They could just save stuff automatically every few seconds, and that wouldn't require users to press any combination of keys.
- krawcu 4mo agoIn nvidia overlay there is a shortcut Alt+Z, it's pretty annoying because it triggers on both left and right alt so polish users cannot type letter "ż" without opening the overlay or rebinding it. Nvidia pls fix..