The curious case of the disappearing Polish S (2015) | Hacker News Reader

The curious case of the disappearing Polish S (2015)

aresluna.org

260 pointscolinprince115 comments

I 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).

Like 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-ch...

Curiously enough, Romanian, though a Romance language, was also spelt with the Cyrillic alphabet. Probably because we were under the Bulgarian empire (the ones who invented Cyrillic).

In the 1800s when we switched to Latin, it didn't happen abruptly, there were several intermediary alphabets which mixed Latin an Cyrillic[1].

Example:

    ши се варсъ (Cyrillic) 
    шi se вapsъ (transition alphabet)
    și se varsă (Latin)
    ʃi se varsə (IPA for reference)

When Russia annexed eastern Moldova, it forced them to switch back to Cyrillic, but with a monstrous alphabet derived from Russian instead of the old Romanian alphabet. The Russians forced Romanians to use this:

    ши се варсэ

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanian_transitional_alphabet

Somehow related: there's browser extension called "Ukraïnsjka Latynka" [1] that transliterates on the fly Cyrillic script to Latin using various systems. It's quite helpful (especially nowadays) for someone who never had chance to familiarize with that script.

[1] - https://paiv.github.io/latynka/en/

Kazakhstan decided to do so, but Poland always had Latin alphabet.

Ukraine always had Cyrillic alphabet. There is no way, they will reject their culture just to punish foe. Also Cyrillics is tied to orthodox Christianity which has very big role in Ukraine.

In that context is more interesting that way more pro-russian Belarus, has some use of Latin (mostly in geographical standards) based on Latin variant, heavily inspired by Polish language.

By the way, parent of Belarusian and Ukrainian, the Ruthenian language (not related to Russian, Ruthenian was the second language of PLC), has a lot of alphabets including Latin and Arabics. First was caused by spread of Polish language, and second by large number of Tatar Muslims settled there.

Ukraine absolutely must ditch Cyrillic alphabet, after the war. There will be plenty of things to change.

I 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

Probably because Persian is an Indo-European language, and alphabets are better than abjads (alphabet without vowels) for it.

Semitic languages are easy to write without vowels because the meaning is very obvious even if you omit the vowels, but in many languages you have a great deal of collisions if you omit vowels.

It's the same reason Chinese characters are a poor fit for Korean and Japanese. Chinese is not an inflected language so one symbol for a word works quite nicely, but other languages need a way to add prefixes and suffixes to works.

You are entirely free to put vowel diacritics when writing with the perso-arabic script and it's done in children's books. By that logic Vietnamese shouldn't be written with the latin script since it's sino-tibetian

Also, middle persian had a native abjad [1]. (As well as a derived alphabet [2])

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pahlavi_scripts

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avestan_alphabet

Sharing 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.

Latin 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.

Certainly, I don't expect the average English only speaker to be able to properly pronounce Gaelic, Polish, or Vietnamese words, or frankly even obscure English words by sight.

The results are likely much better than random texts using cyrillic, greek, arabic, hangul, etc.

Otoh, If they're typists, I expect they can likely type them into a search, probably sans diacritics, but that's likely good enough for searching or looking through a translation dictionary.

Greek and Cyrillic may share enough symbols that a latin script user can make due with an onscreen keyboard or a dictionary with great effort. But a completely different script would need even more effort.

Language in the scope of a cultural phenomenon is something way beyond just cost or efficiency in communication

thats way wi dont rayt English veri efishent ither

> without creating a huge rift between a big population and years of literature, material etc etc

Sometimes, that is the point.

Out of curiosity, what's the proposed replacement script?

mostly latin with a sprinkle of proposals to revive the avestan alphabet or middle persian script. I wouldn't say it's a huge debate at all in general though

As a Ukrainian learning Polish right now - absolutely not. Until any scientist actually proves with numbers that latinization of a Slavic language script provides ANY benefit AT ALL, let alone outweighing the negatives of conversion. If I had to guess the purported benefits of such switch are a pure fantasy and an urban myth repeated by people without any basis in reality.

Yes. They have to change a lot of things to better align with Europe, especially if they join the EU.

They're already working on moving to the European train gauge, they set Christmas to December 25th, etc. but there's still a long way to go.

Cyrillic didn't prevent Bulgaria from joining EU, why should it be a problem for Ukraine?

Cyrillic is not a problem for joining the EU. But adopting Latin script would help Ukraine "move away" from Russia even more.

> But adopting Latin script would help Ukraine "move away" from Russia even more.

That might be true, but Latin script is not a neutral option. It has its own problematic history in Ukraine.

Historically, Latin script for Ukrainian (abecadło) was associated with polonisation. While Ukrainian-Polish relationships are quite good now, this history is not easy to discard. This history still affects politics (the recent debacle with the Order of the White Eagle is a good example).

So, I don’t see Ukrainian ditching Cyrillic anytime soon.

I do, however, expect Ukrainians to eventually develop their own style of Cyrillic. I totally expect Ukrainian fonts to drift away from Russian ones. There are already steps in that direction. E.g. the font e-Ukraine Head seen on many official websites introduces Latin-like к (curiously, that’s how my great grandmother used to write к — she went to a Polish school in Western Ukraine) and ȣ-like у. I expect to see more of that. There’s a enough of interest in a distinct visual identity for Ukrainian, and there are talented designers working on it.

Ukraine is the Russia (882-1237), Russian Empire and Russian Federation are Russian.

It's like to say that Britain must adopt Cyrillic to move away from USA because they both use English language. :-/

> Ukraine is the Russia (882-1237)

Only in the world where Britain is in France.

Ukraine traces its lineage to Ruthenia (Русь), not to Russia (Росія). These words are related etymologically, but so are Brittany and Britain, or Cornouaille and Cornwall. You can’t just treat Ruthenia and Russia as the same thing — just like you can’t treat Brittany and Britain as the same thing.

Quote:

> During its existence, Kievan Rus' was known as rusĭskaja zemlja, translated as the "land of Rus'",[21] or the "Rus' land" (Old East Slavic: роу́сьскаꙗ землꙗ́), with Rus' being derived from the ethnonym Роусь, Rusĭ (Medieval Greek: Ῥῶς, romanized: Rhos; Arabic: الروس, romanized: ar-Rūs), in Greek as Ῥωσία, Rhosia, in Old French as Russie, Rossie, in Latin as Rusia or Russia (with local German spelling variants Ruscia and Ruzzia), and from the 12th century also as Ruthenia or Rutenia.[22][23]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kievan_Rus%27

So what? Old French Bretaigne referred both to Britain and Brittany, Old French Russie referred to both Russia (maybe, haven't done research on this) and Ruthenia.

But we're not speaking Old French, we're speaking 21-century English. In 21-century English, Russia ≠ Ruthenia, Brittany ≠ Britain.

The quote you've provided is irrelevant.

In your version of English, Russia == Russian Federation. Right?

Ukraine is in Europe. You mean, to better align with Germany?

"to better align with the EU", or "with Western Europe", would have been better.

The 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.

In 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.

Polish cuisine is very similar to German cuisine.

(This comment will make a lot of Polish people very upset.)

Sure, 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.

It'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.

I'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

And my favorite -- you need to go north from Miami to be in "the South"

Here in Scotland, if you start at the famous Gretna Green on the west coast (it's on the estuary of the River Esk) and drive more-or-less dead north up the A7 (it's quite wiggly) until you hit the next beach, you're on the east coast at Portobello.

Miami is a latin American city that happens to be part of the US.

These 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.

Also, 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!"

> Americans would not believe how many "geographical centers of Europe" are claimed there.

They have their own weirdnesses. How is Chicago "mid-west" when it is so far east? How is Virginia south?

How 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.

Cuisine 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.

Same is true for Croatia.. food from Slavonia (near Zagreb) is very different from the coastal regions (Istria and Dalmatia)

Due 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).

Lots 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_...

I 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.

Western 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.

I 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.

You 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.

That 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.)

Yes it's similar, but certainly not more than Ukrainian/Russian/Belarusian food.

Being Catholic helps too

Dirty 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.

The 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

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.

The 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.

This 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/...

> the accesskey attribute

Holy crow what a mess. No wonder I'd never heard of this.

It's just like the new Copilot 365. Every time I try to type "Ć", Copilot pops up. I have to close the app constantly.

Every little thing like that creates a new Linux user. After switching I've never looked back.

Posted from SteamOS.

Lol

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)

The US international keyboard settings suck. It's more convenient to enable a compose key and do diacritics with that.

As 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

> 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

I don't get it. In Poland we use exclusively US keyboard layout. To type Polish characters we have key combinations with AltGr (as TFA explained in a lot of detail).

Some people are more accustomed with composing letters + accents instead of using key combinations with AltGr

Coming from Windows this is very common

I'm using custom split keyboard with whatever I program to Blank key and still it never crossed my mind to put any Polish character as single key.

In Poland we informally use combinations and maybe some Poles use letter per key but I my entire live I never met a single person to do so

Not sure what there is to lol about. '+c still composes to ć for me, and that makes sense to me; AltGr+, is ç, AltGr+c is © for me. But all of those symbols are outside my national script so I cannot say that any of them have been burdened by weight of expectation.

Upvote for DNA.

of course the absolute idiots at MSFT don't know their own APIs https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20040329-00/?p=40...

To be fair, you have to have a very high average IQ at a company to produce an OS nobody understands anymore. Or you know, things like the legendary five-state boolean.[1]

[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/microsoft.offic...

And every time you press it, an entire VM gets spun up, fully provisioned, and then set to LLM processing mode even though all you'll be doing is immediately closing the app again.

Thanks Microsoft, stellar!

Best part is that it installs itself automatically, without prompting me for that.

Thank you Microsoft; nice to see your QA works well.

The same thing happened to me in school (during a test...), except I tried to type & on a hungarian keyboard, which is of course also altgr+c.

Remember how alt+c used to launch ATI Catalyst Control Center instead of "ć"?

Fun 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.

I 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.

When a Polish speaker searches for something with “ł”, do they expect to also see “l”?

No.

But the other way around sometimes yes.

The linguistic, historical, and cultural information is so fascinating, and really well explained.

> 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.

There are still enough people speaking Ukrainian even if we roll back the clock to 2019.

  Lviv = 2.5m
  Vinnytsia = 1.5m
  Ivano-Frankivsk = 1.3m
  Khmelnytskyi = 1.2m
  Rivne = 1.1m
  Ternopil = 1m
  Volyn = 1m
  Chernivtsi = 0.8m
  Zakarpattia = 0.8m (I've subtracted the Hungarians)

That's 11.2 million Western Ukrainians, who are overwhelmingly Ukrophone. Even if you completely ignore the rest of the country (which definitely wasn't completely Russophone and is even less now), that's still more than the number of Czech speakers.

Well, yeah, that sounds plausible. It's in the same ballpark as Czech, and which language is more popular is largely irrelevant when they are that close in numbers.

Whether the numbers are correct is debatable but we have no way of checking that.

>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.

Meanwhile, in 2026 I suddenly cannot type capital Ś in Edge on Mac. I feel like I moved back in time 25 years or so.

I noticed it too, but for Teams. Is it because they are both MS apps?

Yep. No one else would shove bing search down your throat. https://learn.microsoft.com/pl-pl/answers/questions/5658359/...

As 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.

What?

Open 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.

And how does it relate to Medium?

I 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.

This 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.

No, 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.

Fair enough. Though as a laptop user, I didnt consider any emphasis on the right alt.

Not if you had a non-US laptop. Almost every laptop keyboard except for US models have an AltGr on the right.

Many 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.

Sadly 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.

Obligatory plug of my keyboard layout which solves the awkward right hand contortions: https://pzel.name/pl-lefty.html

It comes bundled with xorg nowadays, you can use:

  Option                "XkbVariant" "lefty"

in xorg.conf

In 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..

3/4 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.

Oh, that explains why I accidentally triggered Claude with alt+space, despite it being configured as alt+ctrl+space.

“Polish uses the English/Latin alphabet” - was it developed back when the US and Italy were allies in ancient Roman times?

I stumbled over that too, but it makes sense when you finish the article. The ancient Romans didn’t build a lot of keyboards.

What’s hard to understand here?

> 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.

Both actually.

(2015)

That perhaps explains why I vaguely recall reading it before.

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