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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...
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)
ши се варсэ
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.
Kazakhstan decided to do so, but Poland always had Latin alphabet.
Ukraine always had Cyrillic alphabet. There is no way, they will reject their culture just to punish foe. Also Cyrillics is tied to orthodox Christianity which has very big role in Ukraine.
In that context is more interesting that way more pro-russian Belarus, has some use of Latin (mostly in geographical standards) based on Latin variant, heavily inspired by Polish language.
By the way, parent of Belarusian and Ukrainian, the Ruthenian language (not related to Russian, Ruthenian was the second language of PLC), has a lot of alphabets including Latin and Arabics. First was caused by spread of Polish language, and second by large number of Tatar Muslims settled there.
Ukraine absolutely must ditch Cyrillic alphabet, after the war. There will be plenty of things to change.
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.
Polish cuisine is very similar to German cuisine.
(This comment will make a lot of Polish people very upset.)
Being Catholic helps too
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 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/...
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.
of course the absolute idiots at MSFT don't know their own APIs https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20040329-00/?p=40...
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!
Best part is that it installs itself automatically, without prompting me for that.
Thank you Microsoft; nice to see your QA works well.
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.
Remember how alt+c used to launch ATI Catalyst Control Center instead of "ć"?
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”?
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)
>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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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 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..
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.
Oh, that explains why I accidentally triggered Claude with alt+space, despite it being configured as alt+ctrl+space.
“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?
> 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.