The curious case of the disappearing Polish S (2015)

(aresluna.org)

188 points | by colinprince 8 hours ago

15 comments

  • quibono 6 hours ago
    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).
    • keiferski 5 hours ago
      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.
    • reddalo 3 hours ago
      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...

      • cynicalsecurity 2 hours ago
        Ukraine absolutely must ditch Cyrillic alphabet, after the war. There will be plenty of things to change.
        • jagaerglad 1 hour ago
          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
          • toast0 19 minutes ago
            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.

    • wolvesechoes 1 hour ago
      > I think the average Pole is much closer culturally to the Western neighbours than to a Ukrainian or Russian (maybe apart from cuisine).

      Not really. Poles share much more with Ukrainians and Russians that they like to admit. And I am Polish.

      "A Pole is a Russian who thinks he's French."

    • gedy 6 hours ago
      Being Catholic helps too
    • q3k 6 hours ago
      Polish cuisine is very similar to German cuisine.

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

      • jyounker 8 minutes ago
        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.
      • grvbck 6 hours ago
        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.

      • broken-kebab 5 hours ago
        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.
        • rconti 4 hours ago
          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
          • bleepblap 55 minutes ago
            And my favorite -- you need to go north from Miami to be in "the South"
          • broken-kebab 3 hours ago
            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.
        • rich_sasha 2 hours ago
          > 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?

      • CurtHagenlocher 6 hours ago
        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.
        • minkeymaniac 5 hours ago
          Same is true for Croatia.. food from Slavonia (near Zagreb) is very different from the coastal regions (Istria and Dalmatia)
      • tau255 6 hours ago
        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).
      • ck45 6 hours ago
        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_...
      • keiferski 4 hours ago
        Yes it's similar, but certainly not more than Ukrainian/Russian/Belarusian food.
  • paweladamczuk 5 hours ago
    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.
    • Random09 5 hours ago
      Every little thing like that creates a new Linux user. After switching I've never looked back.

      Posted from SteamOS.

      • raverbashing 3 hours ago
        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)

        • tremon 44 minutes ago
          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.
        • edukite 1 hour ago
          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
          • raverbashing 1 hour 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

        • kevin_thibedeau 2 hours ago
          The US international keyboard settings suck. It's more convenient to enable a compose key and do diacritics with that.
    • SSLy 4 hours ago
      of course the absolute idiots at MSFT don't know their own APIs https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20040329-00/?p=40...
    • StefanBatory 5 hours ago
      Best part is that it installs itself automatically, without prompting me for that.

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

    • TheRealPomax 5 hours ago
      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!

  • f33d5173 4 hours ago
    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.

  • notathrowaway51 5 hours ago
    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.
    • ks2048 4 hours ago
      When a Polish speaker searches for something with “ł”, do they expect to also see “l”?
      • kuboble 3 hours ago
        No.

        But the other way around sometimes yes.

  • TRiG_Ireland 6 hours ago
    The linguistic, historical, and cultural information is so fascinating, and really well explained.
  • mlukaszek 1 hour ago
    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.
    • maciejw 0 minutes ago
      I noticed it too, but for Teams. Is it because they are both MS apps?
  • edukite 2 hours ago
    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.

  • egorfine 4 hours 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 4 hours 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 4 hours ago
        Problem is that language debate in Ukraine is extremely heated and thus self-censoring kicks in. Let's just say I personally believe that there are very few native Ukrainian speakers and let me say in advance that of course I am obviously very wrong here.
        • demetrius 1 hour 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 1 hour ago
            Agree. Especially in Ukraine where the term "native speaker" has been politically charged to an insane level.

            I prefer mother tongue.

        • fsckboy 7 minutes ago
          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?

  • nashashmi 6 hours ago
    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.

    • TheRealPomax 5 hours ago
      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.

      • nashashmi 3 hours ago
        Fair enough. Though as a laptop user, I didnt consider any emphasis on the right alt.
  • pzel_ 4 hours ago
    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
  • athrow 2 hours 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.

  • smitty1e 6 hours ago
    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.

  • atombender 6 hours ago
    (2015)
  • 0bytes 6 hours ago
    “Polish uses the English/Latin alphabet” - was it developed back when the US and Italy were allies in ancient Roman times?
    • gdwatson 6 hours ago
      I stumbled over that too, but it makes sense when you finish the article. The ancient Romans didn’t build a lot of keyboards.
    • milkshakeyeah 6 hours ago
      What’s hard to understand here?