Hacker News

The curious case of the disappearing Polish S (2015)

171 points by colinprince 6 hours ago | 38 comments

quibono 5 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 4 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 41 minutes 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...

gedy 4 hours ago

Being Catholic helps too

q3k 4 hours ago

Polish cuisine is very similar to German cuisine.

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

grvbck 4 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.

CurtHagenlocher 4 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 3 hours ago

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

broken-kebab 3 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 2 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

broken-kebab 57 minutes 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.

tau255 4 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 4 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 2 hours ago

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

paweladamczuk 4 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 3 hours ago

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

Posted from SteamOS.

raverbashing 24 minutes 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)

SSLy 2 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 4 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 3 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 3 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 4 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 2 hours ago

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

kuboble 55 minutes ago

No.

But the other way around sometimes yes.

TRiG_Ireland 4 hours ago

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

egorfine 3 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 3 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 2 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.

pzel_ 2 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

nashashmi 4 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 3 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 32 minutes ago

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

smitty1e 4 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.

npodbielski 52 minutes ago

What?

atombender 4 hours ago

(2015)

0bytes 4 hours ago

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

gdwatson 4 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 4 hours ago

What’s hard to understand here?