A Cyrillic orthography for the Polish language
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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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
If such extreme rules of pronunciation as in English language will be accepted, then all Cyrillic languages can be merged into one written language.
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.