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).
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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).
Polish cuisine is very similar to German cuisine.
(This comment will make a lot of Polish people very upset.)
Lots of common main ingredients like potatoes, beets, cabbage, and sausages. It could also have a different reason, like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Former_eastern_territories_of_...
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.
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.
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).
Being Catholic helps too
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.
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.
It's just like the new Copilot 365. Every time I try to type "Ć", Copilot pops up. I have to close the app constantly.
Best part is that it installs itself automatically, without prompting me for that.
Thank you Microsoft; nice to see your QA works well.
The linguistic, historical, and cultural information is so fascinating, and really well explained.
(2015)
This was a fun read. Here is the tl;dr version:
> Instead of blindly and greedily blocking Ctrl S, we could block Ctrl S only if Alt key was not pressed.
Ctrl alt s was the keyboard shortcut for the polish S. Ctrl s was blocked to improve saving. And this also blocked ctrl alt s too.
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.
“Polish uses the English/Latin alphabet” - was it developed back when the US and Italy were allies in ancient Roman times?
I stumbled over that too, but it makes sense when you finish the article. The ancient Romans didn’t build a lot of keyboards.
What’s hard to understand here?