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Comment by lII1lIlI11ll | Hacker News Reader

Yes, a cursory glance at written Polish should be enough for anyone to understand why Latin alphabet is a poor match for Slavic languages.

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Polish is a rather extreme case, however. Czech orthography is a bit more straightforward. In spite of that, Polish orthography still does a rather good job.

Generally speaking, if you've a language with heavy use of palatalisation in its phonology and grammar, the Latin alphabet is going to struggle without hacks. Irish and Scottish Gaelic similarly struggle with the inherent limitations of the Latin alphabet, but chose a different set of hacks (necessarily, given the Irish has the second oldest written vernacular language in Europe after Greek).

Similarly, the Latin alphabet is poorly suited to the Germanic languages, Danish and English in particular, because of their large vowel inventory.

I found Croatian significantly easier than Czech, perhaps because of centuries (millenia?) of trans-Adriatic Italian influence?

It doesn't have a hard/soft contrast though, unlike the West and East Slavic languages. Palatalisation isn't a feature of the western South Slavic languages anymore.

Oh yes, Polish, the difficulty is shown in this 1:19 slice from a movie: "Grzegorz Brzęczyszczykiewicz " -- https://youtu.be/AfKZclMWS1U

Also compare the Polish 'chrząszcz' with its Cyrillic equivalent 'хрущ' (but take into account a difference in pronunciation).

Because Polish has avoided to use diacritics in many cases, many Polish words are much longer not only than their Cyrillic equivalent, but also than their Czech equivalent, where the Polish double letters are replaced by letters with diacritics.

The Latin alphabet is also a poor match for English. We make do.

Your are getting downvoted, but polish writing system really is not great. There are both non-english characters (ą, ę, ś, ć, ź, ż) and digraphs (rz, sz, cz, dz, dż, dź, ch). Also there is done overlap here and some sounds can be written in more than one way (h ~= ch, ż ~= rz, ć == ci, ś == si, etc).

At least you can pretty much always tell how to read a word looking only at its spelling.

At least some of that is the inevitable consequence of pronunciation changing over time ("rz" being the standout, which used to sound like the Czech soft-r, but lost its r-colouring) and others attempt to show an etymological relationship, which makes spelling a bit more difficult in some ways and easier in others.

Remember that English also suffers from digraphs.

e.g. ch, th, sh, wr, oo; etc

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digraph_(orthography)#English

That page lists 15 such over and above the doubled letters.

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