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).
REreddalo1 天前
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...
PNpndy1 天前
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/
XDxdennis1 天前
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
CYcynicalsecurity1 天前
Ukraine absolutely must ditch Cyrillic alphabet, after the war. There will be plenty of things to change.
JAjagaerglad1 天前
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
TOtoast01 天前
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.
JMjmalicki1 天前
> without creating a huge rift between a big population and years of literature, material etc etc
Sometimes, that is the point.
WOwoozlewuzzle1 天前
Out of curiosity, what's the proposed replacement script?
XDxdennis1 天前
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.
YIYizahi12 小时前
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.
REreddalo1 天前
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.
DEdemetrius1 天前
Cyrillic didn't prevent Bulgaria from joining EU, why should it be a problem for Ukraine?
ONoneshtein1 天前
Ukraine is in Europe. You mean, to better align with Germany?
KEkeiferski1 天前
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.
DHdhosek1 天前
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.
PNpndy1 天前
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.
KEkeiferski1 天前
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.
GEgedy1 天前
Being Catholic helps too
Q3q3k1 天前
Polish cuisine is very similar to German cuisine.
(This comment will make a lot of Polish people very upset.)
GRgrvbck1 天前
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.
BRbroken-kebab1 天前
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.
RCrconti1 天前
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
BLbleepblap1 天前
And my favorite -- you need to go north from Miami to be in "the South"
BRbroken-kebab1 天前
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.
RIrich_sasha1 天前
> 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?
CUCurtHagenlocher1 天前
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.
TAtannenfreund871 天前
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.
MIminkeymaniac1 天前
Same is true for Croatia.. food from Slavonia (near Zagreb) is very different from the coastal regions (Istria and Dalmatia)
TAtau2551 天前
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).
CKck451 天前
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_...
JYjyounker1 天前
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.
TAtannenfreund871 天前
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.
MOmorsch1 天前
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.
KEkeiferski1 天前
Yes it's similar, but certainly not more than Ukrainian/Russian/Belarusian food.
WOwolvesechoes1 天前
[deleted]
F3f33d51731 天前
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.
ALalasdairking1 天前
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/...
F3f33d517313 小时前
> the accesskey attribute
Holy crow what a mess. No wonder I'd never heard of this.
PApaweladamczuk1 天前
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.
RARandom091 天前
Every little thing like that creates a new Linux user.
After switching I've never looked back.
Posted from SteamOS.
RAraverbashing1 天前
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)
KEkevin_thibedeau1 天前
The US international keyboard settings suck. It's more convenient to enable a compose key and do diacritics with that.
EDedukite1 天前
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
RAraverbashing1 天前
> 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
of course the absolute idiots at MSFT don't know their own APIs https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20040329-00/?p=40...
RFrf151 天前
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...
ELElfener23 小时前
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.
STStefanBatory1 天前
Best part is that it installs itself automatically, without prompting me for that.
Thank you Microsoft; nice to see your QA works well.
PNpndy1 天前
Remember how alt+c used to launch ATI Catalyst Control Center instead of "ć"?
THTheRealPomax1 天前
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!
NOnotathrowaway511 天前
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.
DHdhosek1 天前
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.
KSks20481 天前
When a Polish speaker searches for something with “ł”, do they expect to also see “l”?
KUkuboble1 天前
No.
But the other way around sometimes yes.
TRTRiG_Ireland1 天前
The linguistic, historical, and cultural information is so fascinating, and really well explained.
EGegorfine1 天前
> 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.
ORorthoxerox1 天前
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.
UNunknown14 小时前
[deleted]
EGegorfine1 天前
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.
UNunknown1 天前
[deleted]
FSfsckboy1 天前
>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.
EGegorfine1 天前
[deleted]
DEdemetrius1 天前
"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.
TAtannenfreund871 天前
I grew up in southern Germany, speaking the local dialect. As a young adult, I thought I could speak accent free German. I couldn't have been more wrong. Many people in Hamburg and Berlin rightfully guessed that I'm from Bavaria. Closely related languages and dialects exist in a continuum ((Max Weinreich: "a language is a dialect with an army an a navy"). Many people in Ukraine spoke and speak "surzhyk", depending on the political climate, they could claim to speak Russian or Ukrainian. Then Russian and Ukrainian, together with Belarusian form a dialect continuum. You can easily understand you neighboring village, but it gets harder and harder, the further you are apart until there's very little mutual intelligibility.
EGegorfine1 天前
Agree. Especially in Ukraine where the term "native speaker" has been politically charged to an insane level.
I prefer mother tongue.
FSfsckboy1 天前
Original statements that led to this discussion
>>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.
The language debate about whether Ukraine is third behind Russian and Polish does not get heated till somebody here proposes a Slavic language that would have more speakers than Ukrainian does.
Here you go, stats, you see that Ukraine has a 7m larger population than Poland, but it's already conceded that not everybody there speaks Ukrainian, putting Ukrainian into 3rd place. Are you claiming that 36 million Ukrainians speak Russian and not Ukrainian which would put Czechia in 3rd place with 10 million speakers?
Put up or shut up.
Russia 143,500,000
Ukraine 45,490,000
Poland 38,530,000
Czechia 10,200,000
Belarus 9,498,700
Bulgaria 7,265,000
Serbia 7,164,000
Slovakia 5,414,000
Croatia 4,253,000
Bosnia and 3,829,000
Herzegovina
Slovenia 2,060,000
Montenegro 621,383
The people here ranting about how heated the topic is seem to be the people who want the topic to be heated, I'm thinking Putin knob polishers.
What Slavic languages are spoken by more people than Ukrainian?
Wikipedia says https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Ukraine (with a dozen other languages under 1% each) top two:
Ukrainian 32,577,468 67.53%
Russian 14,273,670 29.59%
wikipedia also says as of 2023 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukrainian_language
32 million Ukrainian as 1st language
6.9 million Ukrainian as 2nd language
you see? nobody is heated up. And soon, the remaining Russian speakers will be able to learn Ukrainian in school making the problem go away completely.
EGegorfine1 天前
> Are you claiming that 36 million Ukrainians speak Russian and not Ukrainian
Basically this but not exactly.
Number are up for debate because none of the sane estimates put the count of Ukrainians at 45m. It's closer to 37m or even <30m if we discount those who left Ukraine.
But yeah, the vast majority of urban population thinks in Russian.
Also see an adjacent comment in this thread: if we sum up the predominantly ukrainian-speaking urban centers' population we get to a bit over 11m people which is basically the same figure as Czech language.
Thus putting Ukrainian language to the second place even by conservative estimate.
Which makes my original point incorrect.
MLmlukaszek1 天前
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.
MAmaciejw1 天前
I noticed it too, but for Teams. Is it because they are both MS apps?
MLmlukaszek1 天前
Yep. No one else would shove bing search down your throat. https://learn.microsoft.com/pl-pl/answers/questions/5658359/...
MImichalpleban1 天前
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.
KRkrawcu22 小时前
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..
NAnashashmi1 天前
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.
THTheRealPomax1 天前
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.
NAnashashmi1 天前
Fair enough. Though as a laptop user, I didnt consider any emphasis on the right alt.
THTheRealPomax14 小时前
Not if you had a non-US laptop. Almost every laptop keyboard except for US models have an AltGr on the right.
PZpzel_1 天前
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
MDmDyJzDPmBdG1 天前
Oh, that explains why I accidentally triggered Claude with alt+space, despite it being configured as alt+ctrl+space.
EDedukite1 天前
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.
0B0bytes1 天前
“Polish uses the English/Latin alphabet” - was it developed back when the US and Italy were allies in ancient Roman times?
GDgdwatson1 天前
I stumbled over that too, but it makes sense when you finish the article. The ancient Romans didn’t build a lot of keyboards.
MImilkshakeyeah1 天前
What’s hard to understand here?
SMsmitty1e1 天前
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.
NPnpodbielski1 天前
What?
SMsmitty1e1 天前
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.
NPnpodbielski1 天前
And how does it relate to Medium?
HAHackerThemAll1 天前
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.
ATathrow1 天前
> 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.
JPjpfromlondon1 天前
Both actually.
ATatombender1 天前
(2015)
TRTRiG_Ireland1 天前
That perhaps explains why I vaguely recall reading it before.
评论
19 条顶层评论请先登录 h4cker 账号，然后连接 Hacker News 后发表评论。
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...
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/
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
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
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.
> 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?
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.
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?
Ukraine is in Europe. You mean, to better align with Germany?
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.
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.
Being Catholic helps too
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"
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.
> 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.
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.
Yes it's similar, but certainly not more than Ukrainian/Russian/Belarusian food.
[deleted]
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
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...
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.
Best part is that it installs itself automatically, without prompting me for that. Thank you Microsoft; nice to see your QA works well.
Remember how alt+c used to launch ATI Catalyst Control Center instead of "ć"?
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!
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.
[deleted]
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.
[deleted]
>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.
[deleted]
"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.
I grew up in southern Germany, speaking the local dialect. As a young adult, I thought I could speak accent free German. I couldn't have been more wrong. Many people in Hamburg and Berlin rightfully guessed that I'm from Bavaria. Closely related languages and dialects exist in a continuum ((Max Weinreich: "a language is a dialect with an army an a navy"). Many people in Ukraine spoke and speak "surzhyk", depending on the political climate, they could claim to speak Russian or Ukrainian. Then Russian and Ukrainian, together with Belarusian form a dialect continuum. You can easily understand you neighboring village, but it gets harder and harder, the further you are apart until there's very little mutual intelligibility.
Agree. Especially in Ukraine where the term "native speaker" has been politically charged to an insane level. I prefer mother tongue.
Original statements that led to this discussion >>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. The language debate about whether Ukraine is third behind Russian and Polish does not get heated till somebody here proposes a Slavic language that would have more speakers than Ukrainian does. Here you go, stats, you see that Ukraine has a 7m larger population than Poland, but it's already conceded that not everybody there speaks Ukrainian, putting Ukrainian into 3rd place. Are you claiming that 36 million Ukrainians speak Russian and not Ukrainian which would put Czechia in 3rd place with 10 million speakers? Put up or shut up. Russia 143,500,000 Ukraine 45,490,000 Poland 38,530,000 Czechia 10,200,000 Belarus 9,498,700 Bulgaria 7,265,000 Serbia 7,164,000 Slovakia 5,414,000 Croatia 4,253,000 Bosnia and 3,829,000 Herzegovina Slovenia 2,060,000 Montenegro 621,383 The people here ranting about how heated the topic is seem to be the people who want the topic to be heated, I'm thinking Putin knob polishers. What Slavic languages are spoken by more people than Ukrainian? Wikipedia says https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Ukraine (with a dozen other languages under 1% each) top two: Ukrainian 32,577,468 67.53% Russian 14,273,670 29.59% wikipedia also says as of 2023 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukrainian_language 32 million Ukrainian as 1st language 6.9 million Ukrainian as 2nd language you see? nobody is heated up. And soon, the remaining Russian speakers will be able to learn Ukrainian in school making the problem go away completely.
> Are you claiming that 36 million Ukrainians speak Russian and not Ukrainian Basically this but not exactly. Number are up for debate because none of the sane estimates put the count of Ukrainians at 45m. It's closer to 37m or even <30m if we discount those who left Ukraine. But yeah, the vast majority of urban population thinks in Russian. Also see an adjacent comment in this thread: if we sum up the predominantly ukrainian-speaking urban centers' population we get to a bit over 11m people which is basically the same figure as Czech language. Thus putting Ukrainian language to the second place even by conservative estimate. Which makes my original point incorrect.
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/...
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.
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..
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.
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
Oh, that explains why I accidentally triggered Claude with alt+space, despite it being configured as alt+ctrl+space.
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.
“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?
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?
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.
> 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.
[deleted]
[deleted]