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).
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.
I sometimes hear the same in my circles about Persian ditching the perso-arabic script. I don't get it, why can't you align a country however you like without creating a huge rift between a big population and years of literature, material etc etc? One can learn multiple scripts and almost all literate people know the latin script globally nowadays. Besides, sad to see the whole world just use the latin script in the end but that's not the point
Sure, a common use of bread, potatoes, cabbage/other vegetables, hearty meat dishes etc but the Polish kitchen is closer to Ukrainian/Russian in technique/ingredients.
Barszcz, pierogi, fermented everything, pickles, sour rye, and many dishes built around wheat/rye, mushrooms, dairy, and Eastern-style fillings are much more like Ukrainian/Belarusian/Russian food.
The biggest German influences are probably the sausages and the beer culture.
It's also true for Belarus, Baltics, and some parts of Ukraine. Generally, we can speak about North-Eastern European cuisine with potatoes, secale flour breads, and various pickled things. And that name will make a lot of everybody upset, cause everybody in those lands pretend they are "Central". Americans would not believe how many "geographical centers of Europe" are claimed there.
I'm not sure how surprised Americans would be to learn that there are so many "centers of Europe". After all, we all know that Colorado is in "the west", Texas in the "southwest", and, clearly, "the South" is located in the geographical southeast :D
These American peculiarities are funny too, but they are mostly historical, and from that perspective have reasonable explanation. In turn "we are not Eastern, but Central" is relatively recent PR-born madness. Somebody decided that EE often associates with questionable things like alcohol consumption somehow, so the solution is to separate yourself from other drinkers by claiming being completely different "Central" kind. Nobody stops drinking meanwhile, because why would you? I simplify the story, of course, but the logic is exactly like that.
I don't see why. A lot of Western Poland used to be German, and it's not like there's one German cuisine either. You don't get many Bavarians eating pickled herring with beets, but's it's classic cuisine in Berlin.
Western Poland used to be German, but all the Germans left/got expelled. After WW2 it was resettled with Poles from Eastern Poland, nowadays Ukraine and Belarus. Which makes traveling from Berlin to Poznan or Wroclaw an interesting experience. Directly at the German-Polish border, you'll enter Eastern Europe, then when you arrive in the mentioned cities, you're suddenly back in Central Europe.
Also, you'd be surprised at how widespread pickled herring is in Bavaria. Herring has been a trading good for millennia in Europe, was and is still consumed in the winter months in Bavaria. You can easily get a "Fischsemmel" at the Oktoberfest in Munich. Bavarians also used to pickle everything for the winter: cucumbers, beets, cabbage, beans.
How reasonably can German cuisine be described as a single unified thing? My mother was from East Prussia and my father from Swabia and their "home" cuisines were pretty dissimilar -- if for no other reason than climate.
Cuisine in Europe is shaped by climate, soil and former political entities. You'll find similar cuisine in and around the alps, along the north sea coast and around the baltic sea. While the people eating the same food speak a dozen different languages.
Due to Partitions of Poland a lot of of territory was under Prussian influence for over a century - that had to have some culinary effect (other than forced germanization).
To be fair, you have to have a very high average IQ at a company to produce an OS nobody understands anymore. Or you know, things like the legendary five-state boolean.[1]
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
That's 11.2 million Western Ukrainians, who are overwhelmingly Ukrophone. Even if you completely ignore the rest of the country (which definitely wasn't completely Russophone and is even less now), that's still more than the number of Czech speakers.
>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.
Problem is that language debate in Ukraine is extremely heated and thus self-censoring kicks in. Let's just say I personally believe that there are very few native Ukrainian speakers and let me say in advance that of course I am obviously very wrong here.
"Native speaker" is not a very useful term: it combines a lot of criteria (first acquired language, language you know best, language you identify with, language of your parents, language of your ethnic group etc.), and each of these criteria is further very fuzzy (e.g. I know plant names better in Ukrainian, but programming terms better in Russian, which language I know better? Competency is not a single value, ethnic identification is malleable and people can have several of these, etc.)
These criteria usually coincide in speakers of big languages (usually languages of [former] empires), so it's relatively easy to say who is a native speaker of Russian or English. There are a lot of people who fulfill all the criteria at once.
But they rarely coincide for speakers of smaller languages (usually colonised people). When most people are bilingual, it's often harder to say who is a native speaker of Ukrainian or Belarusian. Most people fulfill some criteria but not all of them.
So, the term "native speaker" is not neutral and not very useful.
>>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.
The language debate about whether Ukraine is third behind Russian and Polish does not get heated till somebody here proposes a Slavic language that would have more speakers than Ukrainian does.
Here you go, stats, you see that Ukraine has a 7m larger population than Poland, but it's already conceded that not everybody there speaks Ukrainian, putting Ukrainian into 3rd place. Are you claiming that 36 million Ukrainians speak Russian and not Ukrainian which would put Czechia in 3rd place with 10 million speakers?
Put up or shut up.
Russia 143,500,000
Ukraine 45,490,000
Poland 38,530,000
Czechia 10,200,000
Belarus 9,498,700
Bulgaria 7,265,000
Serbia 7,164,000
Slovakia 5,414,000
Croatia 4,253,000
Bosnia and 3,829,000
Herzegovina
Slovenia 2,060,000
Montenegro 621,383
The people here ranting about how heated the topic is seem to be the people who want the topic to be heated, I'm thinking Putin knob polishers.
What Slavic languages are spoken by more people than Ukrainian?
32 million Ukrainian as 1st language
6.9 million Ukrainian as 2nd language
you see? nobody is heated up. And soon, the remaining Russian speakers will be able to learn Ukrainian in school making the problem go away completely.
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.
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.
reply