Polish Spelling

From Yahoo:

"Poland campaigns to preserve its complex spelling"

Polish language experts launched a campaign Thursday to preserve the challenging system of its diacritical marks, saying the tails, dots and strokes are becoming obsolete under the pressure of IT and speed. The drive, initiated by the state-run Council of the Polish Language, is part of the UNESCO International Mother Language Day. The campaign's Polish name is complicated for a non-Polish keyboard: "Je,zyk polski jest a,-e,." That's a pun meaning that Polish language needs its tails and is top class. Part of the meaning is lost and the pronunciation sounds wrong if the marks aren't there. Computer and phone keyboards require users to punch additional keys for Polish alphabet. To save time, Poles skip the nuances, and sometimes need to guess the meaning of the message that they have received. This is also true for IT equipment users of other languages with diacritical marks, like Russian or Romanian. As part of the new campaign, some radio and TV stations are playing songs with words stripped of diacritical pronunciation, making them sound odd to the Polish ear. A rap song concludes: "Press the right Alt sometimes" to obtain Polish letters, referring one of the keyboard buttons that Poles need to press to write characters with diacritical marks.  The tails make "a'' and "e'' nasal, strokes over "s," "c'' and "n'' soften them and sometimes make them whistling sound, a stroke across "l'' makes it sound like the English "w," and a dot over "z'' makes it hard like a metal drill. And each change matters. "Los" means "fate," but when you put a slash across the "l'' and add a stroke over the "s'' it becomes "elk." "Paczki" are "parcels," but "pa,czki" are doughnuts. Foreigners who know Polish say the diacritical marks are a visual sign that it's a tough language and that they add to the complexity of the grammar and vocabulary, which does not derive from Latin or from Germanic languages. Russia has its own campaign to protect twin dots over the letter "e'' — pronounced "yo" — and which, experts say, often fall victim to a writer being lazy. Education Minister Dmitry Livanov last year pledged to look into the problem.

^ A language is meant to be used and should change with the times. I know Russian and how difficult it is when people write it in e-mails, texts, etc and use the Latin transliteration rather than the Cyrillic. I'm sure for a native Russian it isn't an issue, but it is for me. I have been to Warsaw a couple of times and know that while it is easier to get the jest when a Pole speaks Polish (since it is related to Russian) it is much harder to understand when it is written. When I worked at the Holocaust Museum people would ask me about Lodz. In English we pronounce the "L" like an "L", but in Polish it has a slash through the "L" so it should be pronounced like a "W" which sounds odd to the English-speaking ear. Although technically people should have asked for Litzmannstadt since that is the name the Nazis gave the city. I know there are many countries, organizations, people, etc that are afraid of loosing the integrity of their language (by either removing the accents or adding foreign words to it) but as I stated a language is only good if people use it and the more people use it the more in flourishes. While I don't like when people don't use correct grammar in English I think it would be fine to encourage foreigners to learn "Simple English" rather than regular English which is very complex. That way it would easier for them to learn and for native speakers to understand them since English has become the sole international language and is used in transportation, finance, business, trade, diplomacy, etc. I wonder if other languages like Polish could use the same "Simple" solution. ^

http://news.yahoo.com/poland-campaigns-preserve-complex-spelling-133334255.html