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I "think" these should be pretty close to Cyrillic ш/щ, ч and ж.

Half of them are, the other half are the 'matching' pairs that don't exist in Russian (for example). Soft ш and ж, hard ч and щ.

It's a trap! Roughly speaking, the ones on the right are those. The ones on the left are different and they correspond historically to something like сь, чь, зь (though the pronunciation is rather different from standard Russian pronunciation).

well, sure, it's not uncommon even for ppl who speak the same language and use the same letters to pronounce things differently.

the point is I don't think Latin vs Cyrillic in Poland's case was driven by Polish language phonetics per se. I would venture to guess this had more to do with political/religious affiliations etc.

Absolutely. Mieszko I chose to convert himself and his realm to the Roman faith for both political and religious reasons. Had he chosen to accept Christianity from the East (remember, this was pre-schism), it would have entailed the adoption of Cyrillic.

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