Why when spelling Polish names abroad, Polish letters are ignored?

I do indeed, Antek. As the expression in English goes; you have to draw a line in the sand somewhere.

Yet, the "Chopin"/"Szopen", "Kopernik"/"Kopernikus" debate rages on with no sign of abating:-)))

But other languages do it too. I think it's the case no.2 of my post (there must be a historical reason why those names have it's own Polish name and not an orginal spelling).

senat.gov.pl/k5/kom/kksp/2002/014ksp.htm

Here you have a nice example of a new Polonization. The house of Schaffgotsch, a German noble family from Silesia, becomes "Szawgocz". In a official document of the Polish senat. I don't think there is a long record of a Plonized spelling, since these nobles were unimportant to Poland... until 1945.

By the way, while we're on the topic of phonetics, the next Rand-McNally World Atlas might read:

Varshahvah

Woodzh

Krahkoof ...... ad ridiculum.....

LOL

This whole issue of 'pc' (political correctness) began mushrooming around twenty years ago. Before then, I can't remember alternate spellings of foreign names in US-school books: Chopin, Mao Tse Dong, Che Guevara, Moscow, Paris etc... It never occurred to us pupils that there could be a different way, that is, a correct, original way of spelling the Russiand or Polish capitals etc.. We took OUR spellings for granted and that was that. Only years later, in college, did I finally become attuned to the nature of foreign names in context, remembering too, English is "foreign" to a lot more people than it is "familiar" to us native speakers!

One of the most ridiculous alterations of a city's name from one language to another has to be that of the Southern Italian city "Lucca" which, for some unfathomable reason, is rendered as "Leghorn" in English.

Kiriwina Islands formerly known as Trobriands Islands - the place dear to the hearts of Polish schoolboys. (A hint: "The Sexual Life of Savages in North-Western Melanesia", "Życie seksualne dzikich")

Beats me as well, Des Essientes! Anglo-Saxon arrogance, that's all.

Why is it dear to their hearts Boletus? Just because Malinowski described sexual practices in that book or is it because it had illustrations or photographs?

You could probably visit an optometrist:


Shall I translate this for you? The shorthand writer wrote the name as heard. It is an unauthorized shorthand.

Both. And also on aesthetic grounds since the photographs are beautiful. Check the Google books, there are many pages available for free viewing.


And "Monachium" and "Mniszkowo" in Polish. The place where many Polish painters studied and made their careers.

Because our language doesn't contain those letters and neither do our keyboards.
Same reason we never see Chinese letters that no one here would understand.

For the same reason Polish people don't use the letter Q as in Quadrant, Qatar, Quark.

Actually they do.
Since there are only eight funny characters in Polish, instead of using a Polish virtual keyboard, you can just type alt+basic character - if you have chosen a so-called Professional-Polish keyboard layout. For example:

ą = alt-a
Ć = alt-shift-c

This covers:ą, ę, ś, ć, ń, ó, and ż.
The remaining character ź is generated by alt-x. But check it out, you operating system may have reversed ż with ź.

Huh. Never knew that.
Do Polish keyboards have those funny letters right on the keys or do they have to use this procedure too?

Good point.

as far as I know such keyboards are available (with the diacrytics on the keys) but are not popular - if I wanted to learn to type on that national keyboard I would have to bascially learn to type all those national characters anew (as I use the key combinations to write them)

there was a thread on Polish keyboard layouts some time back here in the forum

I do not think so - since Polish letters are mostly Latin this would defeat a purpose of Unicode.

For example, my operating system offers a sticky bar at the very top of the monitor - with some little gadgets allowing me to quickly change certain characteristics of my computer: a music volume, a current cell position in a grid of a virtual screen, date representation, quick access to "Time machine" (backup), etc. One of them is a national flag. Currently it shows as "red-and-white", which allows me to type regular English plus those special Polish characters.

And if for whatever reason, I want to temporarily switch to German specific characters, I replace the Polish flag by "black-red-orange" and continue typing in German for a while. But since I do not know the German rule, that corresponds to the Polish alt+basic, I have to additionally invoke the German virtual keyboard and type those few umlauts from there. If I were using German daily, I would certainly memorize their rule for generation of special characters.

But such rules are not applicable to languages that differ dramatically from Latin, such as Russian or Greek. You would be stuck with virtual keyboard, unless you have a language specific national keyboard.

They use, for example in Latin phrases: qui pro quo, status quo


yes.

They are racists and haters.

borowik, I don't think they have a thing like Polish alt+basic feature in German - they have their national characters on their specific national keyboards - you need to use shift to use some of these characters IIRC

Ok. You can stop now. I already know why. It's on the first page. It's about lacking of decent fonts.

You were right gumishu, the German keyboard layout is not compatible with the English one. So when I use the virtual German keyboard (on my standard keyboard) the "qwertyu" becomes "qwertzu", etc.

But I forgot to add last time that you can also generate foreign characters, plus bunch of mathematical symbols, etc., not from the virtual keyboard, but from a character palette (viewer). In such a case you do not need to play with national flags or virtual keyboards, but you enter the characters directly from a huge - but well organized - viewer. I often collect most commonly used symbols at one place to keep them handy for easy access.

But then there is a third method:
Check out a page "Special character chart for German",
german.about.com/library/blcharcodes.htm

It deals with both Windows and Mac.

I will concentrate on the Mac version because I can test it right now on one of my machines and provide the proof that it works. It is easier than the Windows version, where you have to memorize the numeric codes.

Here is how you generate special German characters on Mac, using the standard English keyboard, not the German one. Make sure that your "national" flag is set to the standard keyboard (British, American, Canadian). Then type one of those:

Alt u + a = ä
Alt u + A = Ä

Alt u + o = ö
Alt u + O = Ö

Alt u + u =ü
Alt u + U= Ü

Alt s = ß
Alt e + e = é

P.S. ALT is actually called OPTION in Mac, but that does not matter much, so I used a familiar term ALT instead.

I know you can enter many signs with Alt + plus a numeric code - you need to switch the NumLock on - but it's pretty cumbersome - there is a small utility for windows that opens a small window with various symbols you can enter almost anywhere

When I saw this statement the first time, I ignored it. Now you caused me to waste my time to prove how wrong this statement is. I just scanned all available font collections on my Mac, with support for character "ę". Here you go:

UNICODE Name: LATIN SMALL LETTER E WITH OGONEK
Collection: Modern
Futura: Condensed Medium, Medium, Condensed Bold, Medium Italic
Gill Sans: Light, Regular, Bold, Italic, Light Italic, Bold Italic
Helvetica Neue: Condensed Black, Condensed Bold, Light, Medium, Regular, Ultralight, Bold, Italic, Ultralight Italic, Bold Italic
Collection: PDF
Courier: Regular, Bold, Bold Oblique
Helvetica: Regular, Bold, Oblique, Bold Oblique
Times: Regular, Bold, Italic, Bold Italic
Collection: Traditional
Cochin: Regular
Didot: Regular
Collection: Web
Andale: Mono
Arial: Bold, Bold Italic, Regular, Black regular
Comic Sans MS: Regular , Bold
Georgia: Bold, Bold Italic, Italic, Regular
Impact: Regular
Times New Roman: Bold, Italic, Bold Italic, Regular
Trebuchet MS: Bold, Bold Italic, Italic, Regular
Verdana: Bold, Bold Italic, Italic, Regular
Collection: Fun
American Typewriter Condensed: Regular, Light, Bold
American Typewriter: Light, Regular, Bold
Herculanum: Regular
Marker Felt: Thin, Wide
Zapfino: Regular
Collection: Fixed Width - for us, programmers
Andale Mono
Courier: Regular, Bold, Oblique, Bold Oblique
Courier New: Bold, Bold Italic, Italic, Regular
Menio: Bold Bold Italic, Italic, Regular
Monaco: Regular

Would you call it decent enough?

Yes, it's clearly a conspiracy by those Western Europeans to make Polish people look bad.

PolskiMoc should do something about it, perhaps write a few e-mails. Oh, but wait - he can't actually spell in Polish either.

I forgot to addin the past... ;)
Sorry I didn't mean to make you waste your time :)

Ok, you are welcome, I exaggerated . :-)

you mean "Copernicus"

Urszulu, 'Kopernikus' pisze się po niemiecku-:) I'd forgotten the "Polish" spelling-:)

Actually the phonetic spelling would be Vawensa.

Mousie Dung