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


tygrys 3 | 290
8 Aug 2013 #61
Why do they ignore English letters in Poland, without using the proper letters like Q,X or V?
polforeigner
8 Aug 2013 #63
What "English" letters? The English language uses the latin alphabet and has no special signs contrary to a lot of European languages...
Ziemowit 14 | 4,278
8 Aug 2013 #64
Why do they ignore English letters in Poland, without using the proper letters like Q,X or V?

examples?

Technically, the letters Q, X, V do not belong to the Polish alphabet. But they are allowed in foreign names and used in foreign, particularly proper and trade names, also in names which do not have the Polish equivalent spelling yet. Many words do have it, however, so "fax" should be written "faks" and "xero" should be written "ksero". Yet people would often write "fax", but gramatically speaking it is the same mistake as writing "telephon" rather than "telefon" in Polish.
kpc21 1 | 763
10 Aug 2013 #65
What about Monachium, Norymberga, Kolonia, Rzym, Padwa, Praga, Paryż? Do you get my point? Muenchen is Mnichov in Czech, by the way.

What about Naples in Italy? For Italians it's Napoli, for Poles - Neapol. Rome? For Italians - Roma, for Poles - Rzym, e.g. for Russians - Rim (Рим). Cities, especially big ones, have different names in different languages - like countries. Usually the differences are small, but for example Polish name of Italy is Włochy, on the other hand Hungarian name of Poland is Lengyelország. Interesting is Montenegro with its Polish name - Czarnogóra. Taking cities again into consideration - popular Polish transcription of Pyongyang is Phenian (but Pyongyang is also in use), often pronounced in English style.

In Poland we say Monachium for Muenchen, Germans say Stettin for Szczecin or Danzig for Gdańsk. Ukrainians have Lviv (Львів), we say Lwów. Szczecin and Lwów can be explained by that before World War II Szczecin was a German city, Lwów was Polish.

I can understand ignoring Polish letters abroad (especially in texts typed on computers - though Polish is quite comfortable here, we don't have different keyboard like Germans, the only thing to do is to change keyboard layout in settings and to know how to use Alt key to type Polish letters), but what I sometimes meet and can't understand is ignoring them in pronunciation.
texas 1 | 21
10 Aug 2013 #66
THIS JUST IN! Different languages are.....wait for it....different!
ssoass 1 | 6
12 Aug 2013 #67
US papers generally will not use any non US characters, be it an "ą" or an "ö" (which is usually translated to "oe"). I think in part it is because of typesets, but mostly because they are not part of the English language and the audience for these papers are English speaking readers.

Papers do use the Polish names for cities .. Gdansk is Gdansk, not Danzig.
Wlodzimierz 4 | 543
13 Aug 2013 #68
Yet nonethless "Gdansk" rather than "GdaŃsk", a waste of money requiring new typefaces to be set for a language not as numerous as, for example, Hindi, Chinese, Russian, Arabic or Urdu:-)


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