I think the idea of a Cyrillic orthography for Polish is about as comforting to most Poles as the idea of spelling English using Spanish orthography is to those Jingo-Americans who drive around with bumper stickers that say "if you can read this in English, thank a soldier."
The orthography for Gaelic, which is an innate language of the british Isles (Ireland, Scotland, parts both) comes to mind here.
Or, the 1911-> history of Sütterlinschrift -These initiatives have consequences
The Polish one, is obviously more politicized because of partition of Poland by occupiers who used Cyrillic, but it is notable that Turkey survived a re-othrography, and China seriously considered it.
That letter came to Belarusian Cyrillic script after the Polish Cyrillic project had been well underway. (They had a letter for that sound before that, of course, but it wasn’t Cyrillic)
Not really. That would represent the currently (starting somewhere in the 16th century IIRC) popular pronunciation norm (which isn't even the only existing nor the only "correct" one) but would discard some significant semantic value. Roughly like replacing g with j wherever g sounds ⟨ʤ⟩ in English.
That's a very nicely written and interesting article, bravo! Exactly why I come to Hacker News!
I always felt that Polish words were just too long because some many consonants are required to transport all the different sounds! I personally felt that Cyrillic would be a better fit, but obviously don't know the specifics having never learnt Polish (only a bit of Russian).
The choice of the old church symbols seems odd to me because they are so unwritable in handwriting and --- checking Wikipedia --- unsurprisingly evolved to look very different in cursive.
I think Poland is better off not using Cyrillic for political reasons. One less reason for Russia to exert its influence by preaching pan-slavism and "russkiy mir".
On a practical side - even if you know Cyrillic, lowercase letters are kinda awkward to read at a glance - very blocky, way less a/descenders, many look alike and they are a lazy copy of upper case.
> I think Poland is better off not using Cyrillic for political reasons
Not sure anyone implied that Poland should use the Cyrillic alphabet...
> On a practical side - even if you know Cyrillic, lowercase letters are kinda awkward to read at a glance - very blocky, way less a/descenders, many look alike and they are a lazy copy of upper case.
Both are Orthodox Christian countries, whereas Poland is strongly Roman Catholic. Ergo Poland has always been more connected politically and culturally to the West / the Roman Church, whereas Bulgaria and Ukraine have been more connected to Russia.
> Ergo Poland has always been more connected politically and culturally to the West
Politically and religiously more connected to Rome, not the West as Rome stopped being the head of the West for centuries now. But Poland is also ethnically, linguistically and culturally closer to the slavic nations.
Poland was closest to west Slavic countries, but until recently, it's been culturally closer to east slavic/south slavic than to Western Europe.
Rome has been nonexistent for centuries, but the foundations of cultures for most of Europe except the Slavic countries come from the interactions between Rome and the Germanic tribes.
Roman tradition (Western Europe): Legal behavior is ethical behavior.
Slavic/Polish: Laws and ethics are two different things.
Roman: Behaving politely is paramount and one needs to maintain decorum. Positivity.
Slavic: People express themselves plainly and openly; complaining, criticizing, negativity, and rudeness are okay if that's how people feel.
Roman: Imperialism and cultural imperialism. One should help others by spreading their superior culture.
Slavic: Acceptance, tolerance, and fitting in. Polish people adapt to cultures they go to, and for most of history, oppressed groups (like Jews) flocked to Poland for their (relative) tolerance.
Ethnically (genetically) we're more closer to Russians and Ukrainians (much more than Czechs or Slovaks). Linguistically we are very close to Serbs and Croatians, then Czechs and Slovaks and not very close to Russians (there are important differences), but obviously as Slaves we have to be closer to other Slaves.
However, when it comes to social psychology we're much closer to Americans. If we talking about cultural inspirations, we are much more influenced by ancient Rome and Greece, classical literature and arts than to other Slavic nations.
My point wasn't about which slavic groups poland is more closer to. The point is that poland is a slavic nation and hence far more closer to other slavic nations than to italy/rome/etc.
> If we talking about cultural inspirations, we are much more influenced by ancient Rome and Greece, classical literature and arts than to other Slavic nations.
All slavic nations are more influenced by ancient rome and greece than each other because the slavic nations didn't contribute much to literature/arts until fairly recently. Russian leaders didn't call themselves tsars ( russianized caesar ) for no reason. And it's not an accident that cryllic alphabet looks awfully like the greek alphabet.
Your point is true of all northern europe really as northern europe didn't produce any meaningful culture until the past few hundred years. Prior to that, northern europe had to rely on roman/greek arts because northern europe was lacking in culture/art.
Sure poland is more influenced by rome/greece than by russia or ukraine. But that's the same for russia/ukraine. They are more "inspired" by rome/greece than poland. Doesn't change the fact that they are all slavic nations though.
Yeah, it was originally a religious thing. It's why Croats use the Latin alphabet and Serbs Cyrillic to write essentially the same language -- because Croats tended to be Catholic and Serbs tended to be Orthodox. Czechs and Poles use the Latin alphabet too because likewise they are Catholics for the most part.
According to Wikipedia, the majority of Czechs are atheists. Only 10% are Catholics (1) and there is a reason for that:
"Ever since the 1620 Battle of White Mountain, the Czech people have been historically characterised as "tolerant and even indifferent towards religion"."
"Pew Research Center found in 2015 that 72% of the population of Czech Republic declared to be irreligious"
Also (2):
"With the fall of the Habsburgs in 1918, more than a million Czechs (including 300 priests) left the Roman Catholic Church. Most chose not to affiliate with another church."
Why such a reaction? In (1) we read how the Catholic Church and the rulers behaved before, under the Habsburgs control:
"the whole population was forcibly converted to Roman Catholicism—even the Utraquist Hussites. All kinds of Protestant communities including the various branches of Hussites, Lutherans and Reformed were either expelled, killed, or converted to Roman Catholicism."
Also (3)
"Royal decrees pertaining to religion granted Protestant lords, knights, and burghers the right to choose either conversion or emigration. Only about one-quarter of the noble families living in Bohemia and Moravia prior to 1620 remained"
"The emigrations devastated Bohemia and Moravia, which may have lost as much as one-half of their population."
Then in 1781 Joseph II "abolished restrictions on the personal freedom (serfdom) of the peasants, and he granted religious toleration."
I believe that can't explain the difference in the religious feelings in Poland and Czechia, both being in the same block during the same time after the WW II? I'd say Albania is not comparable, having completely different historical and cultural background and also the political separation from the block during the same years under much more extreme regime.
It's an immensely complex situation and I can't explain it all in a HN comment, but the importance of the Catholic Church in contemporary Polish culture goes back to at least 1772, when the Partitions began. Czechs didn't have this same experience and were more "integrated" into Germanic and Habsburg Europe, Czechia wasn't completely razed during WW2, and the Soviets were, shall we say, less harsh on them than on the Poles.
In short, communism simultaneously increased Czech tradition religious apatheticism and Polish Catholicism.
> the importance of the Catholic Church in contemporary Polish culture goes back to at least 1772, when the Partitions began.
And the serious distancing from the same church by Czechs goes back even to centuries before that, as I've quoted before. Also note how Joseph II helped there only 9 years after that 1772 you mention.
Poland has been in an awkward position where it was politically allied with the West, but culturally similar to the East. The Eastern countries weren't ones one wanted to be politically or economically connected to, though.
This gave Poland a position where it had strong economic progress, both due to an excellent school system and membership in the EU, but where it was discriminated against by Western powers which pushed Greco-Roman-Germanic culture, which is quite distinct and different from Slavic culture. Many Poles have an unwarranted inferiority complex, and many Western Europeans have a superiority complex.
Those were probably Greek Rite Catholics, which is also popular in the Rusyn ethnicity (a Slavic group in the areas between Poland, Ukraine and Slovakia.) Different history than Polish Catholics.
Bulgaria is a country where Cyrillic alphabet came from. Ukraine already experienced Russian aggression, including sick reasoning like "it's our sphere of influence, because we don't let our Slav brothers leave it"
That's exactly why I have mentioned both. Obviously, today the Cyrillic script is politically associated with Russia. None of economically-developed countries besides Russia use it. Migrating to the Latin script feels like abandoning the association with the Soviet influence legacy. Yet, Bulgaria's usage of the Cyrillic script actually has nothing to do with Russia and Ukraine seems very willing to distance from Russia and its Soviet past.
Wouldn't it be "better off not using Cyrillic for political reasons" for Bulgaria? Hardly. But why is it for Poland then?
Wouldn't it be "better off not using Cyrillic for political reasons" for Ukraine? I'm sure many people believe so (I personally met Ukrainians who started using DIY Latin-based script after 2014). Yet no officials seem to consider this seriously.
I agree with you on your latter two points, but I have found that interestingly the italics (or "handwriting") variants of lowercase Cyrillic letters appear to be much better designed/less ambiguous than the "printed" variants.
We did, although we didn't experience great incarnations. The Polish-Lithuanian Empire had some aspirations along those lines, but was dominated by Poland.
Most of the Slavic cultures are culturally closer to each other than to Western Europe, although Poland has really (and rather unfortunately) westernizing since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the rise of the EU, etc. Polish culture is being replaced by Germanic culture, which is quite sad to see.
A modern pan-slavic incarnation would likely look like the USA, the EU, or some of the partnerships of African countries, where there is free trade and some degree of free travel. I think prerequisite to that would be to fix some of the governance issues in Slavic countries, though. Right now, the concern would be that any such partnership would be bullied around by Putin.
Ignoring your political reason as completely unrelated to the article.
On the practical side, do you know any language that uses Cyrillic alphabet? If no, then you are not used to it and this is why it looks awkward, blocky, etc. and cursive is not a nightmare and is very readable, much so like cursive text written in English.
If you do know any language that uses Cyrillic, can you provide examples to support your characterizations?
I have to disagree completely. Problem is, I am native speaker...
I presume it was written by the Dutchman. Well, there are reasons why we keep ó and u and treat it separately. The reason is, it's a different phoneme. ó is open, said with round lips, while u is posterior syllable. Totally different sound.
The same goes with other phonemes that are simply not represented in Cyrillic, such as ch (posterior version of h).
Political reasons apart (Russians actually tried to impose there spelling here and it didn't go well; see metrical books written in Cyrillic - incorrect spelling, translating first names, etc.), there are reasons why we keep our specific spellings.
Personally, I can't see why we keep using cz instead of č or sz instead of š. But I know that historically speaking we did. It came from Czech. There are few remains, for instance ł (which does not sound like l, it sounds more like wh in which, what, why ;) ). The funny thing Czech people dropped it :)
But this is another story; it probably has something to do with national pride. To some extent Cyrillic might have something to do with pride and independence, but the fact is Polish is very far from Russian (it's Western Slavonic language after all) and there are many sounds that there is no way to properly describe in it. Problem is, these sound might be hard to distinguish for people that does not use Polish as their mother tongue... Tough luck :)
Really fun! I think I understand Polish more now. I like that the author chose a version of Church Slavonic letters like Ѧ Ѫ Ѩ Ѭ instead of making up new ones. This attempt also seems to try to build etymological bridges to other Slavic languages (mostly Russian, though) like for example spelling rzeki as реки, rather the more phonological жеки.
I would prefer the Ukrainian or Belarussian versions of Cyrillic were used as a model, as they are closer to Polish (with the exception of the palatalisation of е, the norm in both Polish and Russian and almost rare in Ukrainian).
> spelling rzeki as реки, rather the more phonological жеки.
I'm disappointed if it's not phonological, if it were, I believe that would be the biggest advantage of the whole approach.
Were the authors aware of these issues? Was it really to "build the bridges" or did they simply miss some nuances while making the examples?
Edit: Now I'm trying to check and I find on the page "р̌еки" with the mark, that actually keeps the phonological information, if I understand. So it seems it's not "реки."
Edit2: I'm discovering that the default rendering of the page as I saw it didn't show much of the text (!) -- I had to turn on the "reader's mode" -- so the р̌ is from the older attempt, not from the new one presented on the page. So now I see: "I wouldn't propose transcribing it to ж, for the same etymological reasons: rz comes from softened r, while ż comes from softened g. The fact that it sounds very different does not change that fact. Therefore, we simply use рь (and not this weird creation from the 19th century, р̌)."
I really like щ instead of szcz etc. Now I understand how "user unfriendly" the Latin representation of Polish is (for somebody not knowing the expected pronunciations).
Yes, реки was intentional. You can see the word in the ballad at the bottom of the page.
To transcribe using another alphabet is done often when teaching and it is I guess not that interesting to the author. But trying to answer the question of what an honest effort to adopt Cyrilic sometime in the past would look like is pretty fun.
Reading the explanation, the idea in реки is that the information about the "softening" is contained in the е that follows. So it's replaces szcz-like rules with other rules, which admittedly follow the logic of some existing rules in some languages, but which makes the result still less directly "phonological" than some other approaches could be. At least the author admits it's "primarily a thought experiment". Interesting anyway.
It might be somehow hard to believe, but Ukrainian is actually distinctive language with different words, different phonemes and orthography. It's not interchangeable with Polish.
This article was really interesting and I learned how the Old Church Slavonic Ѧ, Ѫ, Ѩ, Ѭ relate to current Polish sounds.
But ... I'm interested in how the Polish Ł "fits in" to Л. The sounds are not similar from my English-speaking perspective though I don't know how that sound developed or is thought of from a native Pole.
The phonetic relationship might be easier to see if you think about an English example. Children learning to speak, for instance, confuse and conflate these phonemes - we say things like 'wittle' for 'little' to imitate infant speech.
My grandpa is Polish but he was born in the eastern part of Poland, which is now Ukraine. The way he pronounces the ł sound is very similar to how Russian speakers pronounce Л. I am not sure this answers your question, however.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 112 ms ] threadOr, the 1911-> history of Sütterlinschrift -These initiatives have consequences
The Polish one, is obviously more politicized because of partition of Poland by occupiers who used Cyrillic, but it is notable that Turkey survived a re-othrography, and China seriously considered it.
If such extreme rules of pronunciation as in English language will be accepted, then all Cyrillic languages can be merged into one written language.
I always felt that Polish words were just too long because some many consonants are required to transport all the different sounds! I personally felt that Cyrillic would be a better fit, but obviously don't know the specifics having never learnt Polish (only a bit of Russian). The choice of the old church symbols seems odd to me because they are so unwritable in handwriting and --- checking Wikipedia --- unsurprisingly evolved to look very different in cursive.
On a practical side - even if you know Cyrillic, lowercase letters are kinda awkward to read at a glance - very blocky, way less a/descenders, many look alike and they are a lazy copy of upper case.
And Cyrillic cursive is a nightmare.
Not sure anyone implied that Poland should use the Cyrillic alphabet...
> On a practical side - even if you know Cyrillic, lowercase letters are kinda awkward to read at a glance - very blocky, way less a/descenders, many look alike and they are a lazy copy of upper case.
That's both pretty subjective, and partly incorrect, given the latest tendencies in type design: https://www.lettersoup.de/what-shall-be-done-for-bulgarian-c...
> And Cyrillic cursive is a nightmare.
Sorry but Cyrillic cursive is 90% the same as Latin cursive
What about Bulgaria? Or Ukraine?
Politically and religiously more connected to Rome, not the West as Rome stopped being the head of the West for centuries now. But Poland is also ethnically, linguistically and culturally closer to the slavic nations.
Vs.The the east slavic and south slavic ones.
Notice that similarly to other west slavs we are Roman Catholic.
As for political connection, Rome was almost non existent for centuries.
Rome has been nonexistent for centuries, but the foundations of cultures for most of Europe except the Slavic countries come from the interactions between Rome and the Germanic tribes.
Roman tradition (Western Europe): Legal behavior is ethical behavior.
Slavic/Polish: Laws and ethics are two different things.
Roman: Behaving politely is paramount and one needs to maintain decorum. Positivity.
Slavic: People express themselves plainly and openly; complaining, criticizing, negativity, and rudeness are okay if that's how people feel.
Roman: Imperialism and cultural imperialism. One should help others by spreading their superior culture.
Slavic: Acceptance, tolerance, and fitting in. Polish people adapt to cultures they go to, and for most of history, oppressed groups (like Jews) flocked to Poland for their (relative) tolerance.
Etc.
My point wasn't about which slavic groups poland is more closer to. The point is that poland is a slavic nation and hence far more closer to other slavic nations than to italy/rome/etc.
> If we talking about cultural inspirations, we are much more influenced by ancient Rome and Greece, classical literature and arts than to other Slavic nations.
All slavic nations are more influenced by ancient rome and greece than each other because the slavic nations didn't contribute much to literature/arts until fairly recently. Russian leaders didn't call themselves tsars ( russianized caesar ) for no reason. And it's not an accident that cryllic alphabet looks awfully like the greek alphabet.
Your point is true of all northern europe really as northern europe didn't produce any meaningful culture until the past few hundred years. Prior to that, northern europe had to rely on roman/greek arts because northern europe was lacking in culture/art.
Sure poland is more influenced by rome/greece than by russia or ukraine. But that's the same for russia/ukraine. They are more "inspired" by rome/greece than poland. Doesn't change the fact that they are all slavic nations though.
"Ever since the 1620 Battle of White Mountain, the Czech people have been historically characterised as "tolerant and even indifferent towards religion"."
"Pew Research Center found in 2015 that 72% of the population of Czech Republic declared to be irreligious"
Also (2):
"With the fall of the Habsburgs in 1918, more than a million Czechs (including 300 priests) left the Roman Catholic Church. Most chose not to affiliate with another church."
Why such a reaction? In (1) we read how the Catholic Church and the rulers behaved before, under the Habsburgs control:
"the whole population was forcibly converted to Roman Catholicism—even the Utraquist Hussites. All kinds of Protestant communities including the various branches of Hussites, Lutherans and Reformed were either expelled, killed, or converted to Roman Catholicism."
Also (3)
"Royal decrees pertaining to religion granted Protestant lords, knights, and burghers the right to choose either conversion or emigration. Only about one-quarter of the noble families living in Bohemia and Moravia prior to 1620 remained"
"The emigrations devastated Bohemia and Moravia, which may have lost as much as one-half of their population."
Then in 1781 Joseph II "abolished restrictions on the personal freedom (serfdom) of the peasants, and he granted religious toleration."
1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_the_Czech_Republic
2) https://fee.org/articles/how-state-religion-made-the-czechs-...
3) https://www.britannica.com/topic/Czechoslovak-history/The-Co...
In short, communism simultaneously increased Czech tradition religious apatheticism and Polish Catholicism.
And the serious distancing from the same church by Czechs goes back even to centuries before that, as I've quoted before. Also note how Joseph II helped there only 9 years after that 1772 you mention.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albania#Religion
This gave Poland a position where it had strong economic progress, both due to an excellent school system and membership in the EU, but where it was discriminated against by Western powers which pushed Greco-Roman-Germanic culture, which is quite distinct and different from Slavic culture. Many Poles have an unwarranted inferiority complex, and many Western Europeans have a superiority complex.
The Polish Plumber ads played on some of that, in uniquely Polish ways: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_plumber
Most of the Ukrainians and Belorussians I've met were either Catholic or had Catholic grannies (and were atheist/agnostic themselves).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_Ukraine#Demograp...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rusyns
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Catholic_Churches
Wouldn't it be "better off not using Cyrillic for political reasons" for Bulgaria? Hardly. But why is it for Poland then?
Wouldn't it be "better off not using Cyrillic for political reasons" for Ukraine? I'm sure many people believe so (I personally met Ukrainians who started using DIY Latin-based script after 2014). Yet no officials seem to consider this seriously.
Pan-slavism isn't a bad idea. The bad idea is dominance of pan-slavism by Putin or the latest incarnation of the USSR / Russian Empire.
Most of the Slavic cultures are culturally closer to each other than to Western Europe, although Poland has really (and rather unfortunately) westernizing since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the rise of the EU, etc. Polish culture is being replaced by Germanic culture, which is quite sad to see.
A modern pan-slavic incarnation would likely look like the USA, the EU, or some of the partnerships of African countries, where there is free trade and some degree of free travel. I think prerequisite to that would be to fix some of the governance issues in Slavic countries, though. Right now, the concern would be that any such partnership would be bullied around by Putin.
On the practical side, do you know any language that uses Cyrillic alphabet? If no, then you are not used to it and this is why it looks awkward, blocky, etc. and cursive is not a nightmare and is very readable, much so like cursive text written in English.
If you do know any language that uses Cyrillic, can you provide examples to support your characterizations?
You might like the movie about Grzegorz Brzęczyszczykiewicz: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AfKZclMWS1U
Personally, I can't see why we keep using cz instead of č or sz instead of š. But I know that historically speaking we did. It came from Czech. There are few remains, for instance ł (which does not sound like l, it sounds more like wh in which, what, why ;) ). The funny thing Czech people dropped it :) But this is another story; it probably has something to do with national pride. To some extent Cyrillic might have something to do with pride and independence, but the fact is Polish is very far from Russian (it's Western Slavonic language after all) and there are many sounds that there is no way to properly describe in it. Problem is, these sound might be hard to distinguish for people that does not use Polish as their mother tongue... Tough luck :)
I would prefer the Ukrainian or Belarussian versions of Cyrillic were used as a model, as they are closer to Polish (with the exception of the palatalisation of е, the norm in both Polish and Russian and almost rare in Ukrainian).
I'm disappointed if it's not phonological, if it were, I believe that would be the biggest advantage of the whole approach.
Were the authors aware of these issues? Was it really to "build the bridges" or did they simply miss some nuances while making the examples?
Edit: Now I'm trying to check and I find on the page "р̌еки" with the mark, that actually keeps the phonological information, if I understand. So it seems it's not "реки."
Edit2: I'm discovering that the default rendering of the page as I saw it didn't show much of the text (!) -- I had to turn on the "reader's mode" -- so the р̌ is from the older attempt, not from the new one presented on the page. So now I see: "I wouldn't propose transcribing it to ж, for the same etymological reasons: rz comes from softened r, while ż comes from softened g. The fact that it sounds very different does not change that fact. Therefore, we simply use рь (and not this weird creation from the 19th century, р̌)."
I really like щ instead of szcz etc. Now I understand how "user unfriendly" the Latin representation of Polish is (for somebody not knowing the expected pronunciations).
To transcribe using another alphabet is done often when teaching and it is I guess not that interesting to the author. But trying to answer the question of what an honest effort to adopt Cyrilic sometime in the past would look like is pretty fun.
But ... I'm interested in how the Polish Ł "fits in" to Л. The sounds are not similar from my English-speaking perspective though I don't know how that sound developed or is thought of from a native Pole.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%81#Polish
The phonetic relationship might be easier to see if you think about an English example. Children learning to speak, for instance, confuse and conflate these phonemes - we say things like 'wittle' for 'little' to imitate infant speech.
The reason is that Russian is less phonetic. O is pronounced as A if it is accented, for example, while Bulgarian Cyrillic is as phonetic as Spanish.
Also; political reasons. It is better to have something not resembling the Soviet block imposition.