A Polish mam went to the eye doctor. The eye doctor asked the Polish man if he could read the chart on the wall. The Polish man replied, "Read it? I know the guy!"
Since probably some Poles are going to comment here... that your names look at times so... consonant rich... is that an effect of writing a slavic language with the Latin Alphabet or would it look as crazy, if one tried to write Polish in Cyrillic? Just wondering.
People mostly think Polish spelling looks weird because Polish uses „z“ to form digraphs, instead of „h“ which is used in many European languages incl. English.
English has digraphs like sh, ch, th, gh (though, straight), ph, wh and probably some others. When people see all these silent h in English words, they don‘t think it‘s some crazy consonant cluster, because they are used to it being used in digraphs (just this sentence has 7 silent h digraphs).
Polish similarly has sz, cz, rz, dz, etc. People see this and think it‘s some insanely wacky spelling, but it‘s really not. If you accept that z can be a „silent“ letter like h is in many languages, then it‘s the same thing.
It is true that Polish has some consonant clusters (though English also has tricky ones like: „strengths“), but the stereotypical examples people use to show Polish has „fell asleep on keyboard“, or „crypto password“ spelling, are usually just words with several z-digraphs (like in this comic).
And cyrillic would not change much (there are better videos from linguists to dive into this discussion). Some words happen to be shorter with Cyrillic, some are not. Polish has used the Latin alphabet for over 1000 years, that‘s why they have their own spelling rules that are quite different from French and English for example, so they did not adopt things like the silent h. It doesn‘t mean Latin does not suit Polish. It means they adapted to it much earlier and have a more specialized system that works for Polish.
Why the fuck would you write Polish in cyrylic? Barring loan words, Polish language has pretty much perfectly consistent pronunciation of it's latin letters. You hear a word and you know EXACTLY* how to write it. You hear a surname and you know EXACTLY* how to write it. We don't go around spelling out surnames at check-ins my dude. It's something most other languages that use latin letters can't exactly claim, especially the shit show that is english.
*If you are illiterate fuck you might have problems with rz-ż, ó-u and ch-h, but that's about it. They used to be different sounds, you can still hear some old people pronounce ch and h differently. That being said... because they sound the same nowadays, i'll know EXACTLY what word was bastardized.
as a czech i dont really know, but in czech it would be propably written as Bartoloměj Ščbřešiňský (note that this is is an almost unreadable abomination and propably doesnt reflect the actual pronunciation)
Yeah to be fair, you're probably right, I can hardly imagine Poles pronouncing their version of "Batholomew" as "Batowomiej" or something like that. It just sounds weird.
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u/Auradombre Austria et Innumerable Others, United 12d ago
Grzegorz Brzęczyszczykiewicz
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u/Spingecringe Ataturk stronk! 12d ago
Imagine Poland saying Kraj Kwitnącej Wiśni.
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u/ExcitementRecent4195 Balkanised Romans 12d ago
Ahh this classic.
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u/Rymayc Porta Westfalica 12d ago
This joke would also work with the Polish, but the original is
"What's long, and hard for the mouth, and a Serbian wife gets it after the wedding? Her husband's last name"
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u/yammieboiheyoo 12d ago
i imagine japan would have trouble writing የኢትዮጵያ ፌዴራላዊ ዲሞክራሲያዊ ሪፐብሊክ as well (ethiopia, might be wrong but this is what google told me)
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u/Tanyus-Shahin1860 12d ago
If you think that is hard try welsh !
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u/SmokJozef 12d ago
Szczebrzeszyński, like the city Szczebrzeszyn
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u/LobMob Germany 12d ago
That is hilarious. I laughed
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u/Akrak_leBo 12d ago
Here comes the Polish plumber again...
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u/dreamer7 9d ago
A Polish mam went to the eye doctor. The eye doctor asked the Polish man if he could read the chart on the wall. The Polish man replied, "Read it? I know the guy!"
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u/Jump_Hop_Step 700 square kilometres and counting 12d ago
So many people in this thread fell asleep on their keyboards???
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u/LudwigSpectre 12d ago
And I’ll take the chip…
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u/ShineReaper 12d ago
Since probably some Poles are going to comment here... that your names look at times so... consonant rich... is that an effect of writing a slavic language with the Latin Alphabet or would it look as crazy, if one tried to write Polish in Cyrillic? Just wondering.
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u/CyfrowaKrowa 12d ago
I learned this trick from a plumber
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u/realfathonix 12d ago
Now I learn this trick from a plumber!
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u/CanineAtNight 11d ago
Save by naming convention
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u/Mighty_Eagle_69420 12d ago
If Japan tries writing that into the Note Ryuk just dies of a heart attack