
Sabotaged by Polish orthography - gbacon
http://blog.plover.com/lang/ogonek.html
======
idlewords
While we're in this thread: notice that pączki is a plural. Please remember
this and don't say 'pierogies'—it's just pierogi.

There's no need to know the singular for pierogi, because no one has ever
eaten just one.

In return, I promise to continue working to stop Polish people from
pluralizing potato chips as "chipsy".

~~~
oz
> There's no need to know the singular for pierogi, because no one has ever
> eaten just one.

Ain't that the truth! My Polish friend also introduced me to 'pierogi rooski'?
Apparently, a Russian take on pierogi, with more meat. Do I have the spelling
correct?

> In return, I promise to continue working to stop Polish people from
> pluralizing potato chips as "chipsy".

As a Jamaican, where banana chips are like a national snack, it was amusing to
see "chipsy bananowe" for sale. Fun times; I plan to go back.

~~~
dozzie
> My Polish friend also introduced me to 'pierogi rooski'? Apparently, a
> Russian take on pierogi, with more meat.

If you mean "pierogi ruskie", they don't have any meat in them, just quark
with potatoes and onion, though they're often served with bacon. And this dish
comes from "Ruś" (now Ukraine), not "Rosja", otherwise it would be called
"pierogi rosyjskie". I hear that in Ukraine they call this dish "Polish
pierogi".

> As a Jamaican, [...], it was amusing to see "chipsy bananowe" for sale.

I believe "it" was not a Jamaican, however amusing it was.

~~~
jwilk
> "pierogi ruskie" [...], though they're often served with bacon

Blasphemy!

------
idlewords
Polish orthography is a disaster partly because of the choice of Latin over
Cyrillic. The latter would have been a much better fit for the sounds in the
language.

Making matters worse, there are homophones ( _ż_ and _rz_ , _u_ and _ó_ , _ch_
and _h_ ) that depend on when the word entered the language.

Like so many things wrong with the country, you can comfortably blame the
Catholic Church for this orthographic train wreck.

~~~
mootothemax
And yet - somewhat hilariously, Polish is one of the easiest languages out
there in terms of knowing how to pronounce the written word.

Spend a week or two practising a pronunciation guide and that's pretty much
well it.

Reading something out loud for the first time? Native level accuracy 95% of
the time, easy.

Compared with the absolute crap shoot which is English or - my nightmare -
French, reading Polish out loud is an absolute walk in the park.

~~~
magic_beans
My mouth actually hurts when I speak French. Such unusual shapes for a native
English speaker :\

~~~
yetihehe
In a famous polish novel "Krzyżacy" French language is compared to shaking of
tin bowls, so even Polish speakers have troubles.

------
idlewords
A small correction to the OP: _paczki_ means packages and not boxes (
_pudełka_ ). It used to be a much more common sign in Polish neighborhoods in
the US before Poland leveled up to the first world.

~~~
joering2
.. and the of course it depends how you want to use the objective boxes
(pudełka).

I will throw you some pudełka. I am busy with those pudełkami. There is
something wrong with those pudełkom. Whats the size of these pudełek?

And its funny: the newest IOs still don't have "ą"

------
mirekrusin
In comments poles often omit those squiggles which lead to interesting
nuances:

"Laske mi robi." means "to condescend/deign to do something for somebody" (ł)
or "to do a blowjob" (l).

------
nathancahill
Similar to how Spanish will not accent capital letters. The México passport
for example says MEXICO on the front.

~~~
eesmith
How strong a rule is this? Or is it regional?

[http://buscon.rae.es/dpd/srv/search?id=BapzSnotjD6n0vZiTp](http://buscon.rae.es/dpd/srv/search?id=BapzSnotjD6n0vZiTp)
is from the Diccionario panhispánico de dudas, 2005. It shows several examples
of accented capital letters, like LA NACIÓN in the headline of a newspaper,
and the phrase "ESTÁ PROHIBIDO FUMAR DENTRO DE LAS DEPENDENCIAS DE LA
EMPRESA."

That said, La Nación itself doesn't use accents when capitalized. On the other
hand, you can see "EL PAÍS" several times at
[https://elpais.com/](https://elpais.com/) . On the third hand, the El País in
Uruguay doesn't use the accent
[http://www.elpais.com.uy/](http://www.elpais.com.uy/) . But it does uses
ALCANZÓ in a headline
[http://a2010.kiosko.net/02/06/uy/uy_elpais.750.jpg](http://a2010.kiosko.net/02/06/uy/uy_elpais.750.jpg)
.

[http://procedimientospolicialesargentina.blogspot.de/2016/04...](http://procedimientospolicialesargentina.blogspot.de/2016/04/19-de-
abril-dia-de-la-policia-de-la.html) has an interesting mix with the blog title
"DIA DE LA POLICIA DE LA NACION ARGENTINA" and a poster image saying "DIÁ
NACIONAL DEL POLICÍA".

~~~
nathancahill
The reason it's similar is because it's not a rule. It's just sometimes left
off.

~~~
eesmith
My apology, I misinterpreted "will not accent" as implying some sort of rule.

------
pavlov
For the benefit of French speakers, the ą in Polish seems to be pronounced
like the "on" sound.

So "pączki" is pronounced "pon-tch-qui" while "paczki" is "patch-qui".

------
ninly
I lived in a Polish neighborhood in Brooklyn for a few years, and absorbed as
much orthography and pronunciation as I could during that time. I ate a few
pączki, too.

While I learned to speak a little bit, it was not enough to be functional
beyond basic greetings and ordering food. It was always a lot of interesting
fun, though.

The main outcome of all this is that for ten years, whenever I see a Toyota
Camry, my weird brain thinks "hmm... tsahm-rih..." and I roll my eyes at it.

------
mszcz
Ugh, this reminds me of character encoding issues... I hope I never meet the
guy who invented ISO-8859-2 or CP1250 or other such nonsense for that guy's
sake...

------
changs
This brings the memory of Internet chats in the 90s when almost nobody used
Polish letters with diacritics (because it is faster to type without them and
there were a lot of different incompatible encodings). Usually you can
understand the meaning from the context but sometimes the same kind of funny
misunderstanding would happen as there are quite a few words that without
diacritics become completely different but valid words.

------
Symbiote
Wikipedia gives "Zażółć gęślą jaźń" as an example containing all the Polish
diacritic letters.

Is there a standard way to write this when limited to ASCII?

For example, Danish/Norwegian replace æ, ø, å with ae, oe, aa. It seems less
likely that something could exist and be reasonably readable for Polish.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_orthography](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_orthography)

~~~
warpech
It is quite common to remove the diacritics if you are lazy or don't have
access to the diacritics. That phrase becomes "Zazolc gesla jazn".

Most search engines find "Zazolc" and "Zażółć" equal because of that. This
becomes a problem in case of the words like "paczki" (boxes) and "pączki"
(donuts), which have their own separate meaning - as explained in the article.

In contrast to most European countries, in Poland we use American keyboard
layout with "Polish (programmers) layout" keyboard setting in OS.

You press ALT+A, ALT+E, ALT+L, ALT+S, ALT+C, ALT+Z, ALT+X to write "ą", "ę",
"ł", "ś", "ć", "ż", "ź", respectively.

------
zokier
Its curious how simultaneously we are stubbornly holding onto diacritics (and
current orthography in general) while also having continuously lots of issues
actually reproducing/handling them. One would think that we either would have
gotten better at dealing with them, or dropped them altogether. Especially
considering that modern fixed orthographies are generally relatively recent
phenomenon.

~~~
schoen
Usually the diacritics exist because of something that is contrastive in the
language's phonology. This post is mainly about a concrete example of this,
where pączki and paczki refer to two different things that a shop could sell.
So it's super-helpful that shops can make that distinction in writing!

Or for example

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimal_pair#Stress](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimal_pair#Stress)

In Portuguese, my strongest foreign language, I can think of examples like

a 'the (feminine)' / à 'at the (feminine)'

nó 'knot' / no 'in the'

dá 'gives' / da 'of the'

nós 'we' / nos 'in the (plural)'

sê 'I should be' / se 'oneself' / sé 'see (Catholic)'

pode 'can' / pôde 'could (past)'

avô 'grandfather' / avó 'grandmother'

tem 'he/she has' / têm 'they have'

among many others.

At least a couple of these reflect vowel differences, although some would be
homophones in speech. Every language that holds on to diacritics would have
pairs like this where the diacritics make a difference to the meaning. So
people may really appreciate having writing systems that can reflect these
differences in order to avoid confusions that would otherwise occur.

~~~
zokier
Obviously naively just stripping diacritics won't work. But that doesn't mean
that diacritics are the only option for orthography; for example in nordics ä
and ö (or the equivalent norwegian/danish ones) could be substituted with ae
and oe, because those do not occur otherwise in the language, and so the
orthography remains unambiguous.

Maybe a good example of related development is the disappearance of Þ (thorn)
from english orthography, being replaced with th.

~~~
schoen
> Maybe a good example of related development is the disappearance of Þ
> (thorn) from english orthography, being replaced with th.

This didn't have quite the full benefit that you describe, though, because of
compound words like "cathouse", "hothouse", "lighthouse", "outhouse", etc. And
of course digraphs can be extra-risky whenever languages accept loanwords.

------
avaer
Nit: it's not pawnch-kee if you're speaking American English, it's more like
pown-chkee. But still not quite.

~~~
mtrycz
Yeah, we poles are as obsessed with our prononciation as much as italians are
obsessed with their food.

People form other countries just _can 't_ get it right :)

~~~
fs111
It is pronunciation with u, not prononciation...

~~~
unkeen
I wouldn't be so sure about that.

------
ChrisArchitect
this reminds me of what seems like a neverending debate about the actual
pronounciation of paczki. Is it 'pawnch-kee' or 'poonch-kee'. haha.

Which lead me to this interpretation
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdNsFOPYMzE](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdNsFOPYMzE)

~~~
jdmichal
It should be a vowel sound similar to the English words "thought", "dawn",
"fall", and "straw", except nasalized. So "pawn" is probably closer than
"poon". (If any one of those have a different vowel sound than the others in
your dialect, use the more popular version.)

~~~
danielam
FYI: The way I explain it to those who speak French is that "ą" is similar to
the French "on".

