[freshbob]

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.

[rathel]

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.

And Cyrillic cursive is a nightmare.

[phoronixrly]

> 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.

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

[qwerty456127]

> Poland is better off not using Cyrillic for political reasons

What about Bulgaria? Or Ukraine?

[pvg]

You mean what about Russia, a country that uses a script it borrowed from Bulgaria :)

[keiferski]

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.

[disown]

> 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.

[pawel_dyda]

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.

[disown]

> Ethnically (genetically) we're more closer...

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.

[krzyk]

Yes, Poland is closer to slavic countries. More specifically to west slavic ones - Czech, Slovakia.

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.

[woofie11]

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.

Etc.

[woofie11]

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.

The Polish Plumber ads played on some of that, in uniquely Polish ways: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_plumber

[jhbadger]

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.

[acqq]

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."

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...

[emmelaich]

Good links! Yet I would think that Catholicism was still the main determinant of language.

[keiferski]

Those are all correct links, but the current atheism in the Czech Republic is mostly due to communism. You can observe a similar effect in Albania.

[qwerty456127]

> Both are Orthodox Christian countries, whereas Poland is strongly Roman Catholic.

Most of the Ukrainians and Belorussians I've met were either Catholic or had Catholic grannies (and were atheist/agnostic themselves).

[keiferski]

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.

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

[Nginx487]

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"

[qwerty456127]

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.

[CGamesPlay]

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.

[aschatten]

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?

[woofie11]

> One less reason for Russia to exert its influence by preaching pan-slavism and "russkiy mir".

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.

[Nginx487]

But we did not experience any other incarnation of it...

[woofie11]

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.

[pawel_dyda]

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 :)

[emmelaich]

> I always felt that Polish words were just too long

You might like the movie about Grzegorz Brzęczyszczykiewicz: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AfKZclMWS1U