Sure, I wouldn't dare advocate the Cyrillic alphabet for English. But for Polish, which is a West Slavonic language and thus not a million miles away from Russian, it would be a great step in the right direction - indeed the right tool for the job! Actually, proposals were made to change to Cyrillic in the 1850s... the reason it never happened are myriad, but mainly Political. Which is also why it'll never happen! Poles are none to fond of their neighbours, for much the same reasons as Moldovans if I can hazard a guess. It's a real shame, because szsz is the classic case in point, it's really just one letter... and that's what you'd get with Cyrillic, namely a (and/. won't allow it, but the W with a tail, which no Russian would have a problem pronouncing)
Anyway, the adoption of the Latin alphabet in Poland is most likely due to the hegemony of the Roman Catholic church and the prevalence of Latin in the early church. Indeed, nothing much has changed in that respect. Every town in Poland worth it's salt has at least one street, school or square named Jan Pawel II... Polish is also a bit of an oddity, because whereas most Slavic languages using the Latin alphabet picked up the Czech orthographic system, Polish orthography developed independently.
By the way, if you speak Russian, Polish should be reasonably easy to pick up once you get past the orthography and learn to gadac[talk]. After all, spell piwo however you like, the best thing to do is still to drink it:)
any technology such as this is invaluable to us archaeologists. You see, these days archaeologists are loath to put their WHS trowels in the ground for a simple reason: archaeology is the unrepeatable experiment. Unlike most sciences, you cannot go back and recover from any mistakes. Once it's up, it's up and that's the end of that. Untold valuable sites have been irreparable screwed up by previous clumsy excavations and thousands of artefacts have horribly degraded due to us not really understanding the conversation process. It's really only a miracle of fate that Howard Carter found Tutankhamen's tomb when he did - a few years before and most what of he discovered would be remembered to us only by grainy sepia photographs. Still, even with the reasonably modern techniques and equipment at his disposable a lot of damage was done and like a forensic site, much of the evidence has been contaminated.
Archaeological investigations these days tend to be for emergency purposes. Or in layman's terms, someone's building a motorway through an iron age hill (as in Ireland), or someone found a Roman bathhouse while pile driving the foundations for an office block. To be fair the latter shouldn't happy as archaeologists are normally called in to do a preliminary investigation before construction, at least in archaeological sensitive places such as London, Paris etc. It's pretty hard to get money for pure archaeology now. Mostly because governments would rather fund other, more pragmatic research fields and secondly because modern archaeologists are a squeamish bunch - if something's sat in situ for two millennia without any problems it can afford to wait a decade or more until adequate funding and a conservation strategy are in place. Nowadays most of the glory is going to the geophys guys and not Indiana Jones.
For this reason any methods which can provide any insight, no matter how small, are gaining ground. Really, despite what most people think of archaeologists we're not treasure hunters. We're trying to piece together the past piece by piece. What we're looking for is not lost cities, but rather more mundane artefacts like field boundaries, foundations, lost turnpike roads between settlements etc. Google Earth maybe good at this sort of thing, maybe even for smaller structures too and maybe very handy when trying to piece together larger landscapes. You're probably not going to find Eldorado though.
I live in Poland, more specifically in Przemysl on the Ukrainian border so I'm exposed to both alphabets more or less daily. I must confess, I envy the Easterners! The Latin alphabet is really not suited to Slavic tongues and I think the Cyrillic one is a far superior way to render them. For example, in Cyrillic you get one nice little letter looking like w with a tail, whereas we get szcz... if you're an English speaker, it'd be something like the sh ch between freSH CHeese. Anyway, the inadequacies of the Latin alphabet is why Polish sometimes ends up looking like a cat walked across the keyboard and totally bewildering to anybody living west of the river Oder. Consider this little gem: w Szczebrzeszynie chrzaszcz brzmi w trzcinie i Szczebrzeszyn z tego slynie - and that's without actually using any of the eight accented letters. Basically, horrible things were done in the past to squeeze a square peg into a round hole and that's why Polish has ended up with rather random letter combinations like cz, ch, rz, sz, szcz etc. in order to get 36 sounds out of a measly 23 letters (Polish doesn't use v, x or q)... Cyrillic is far more efficient all things considered - with one letter for each distinct sound. Alas, we're stuck with what we have now... a pity.
I couldn't agree more... on an unrelated, but comparable note: Joseph Heller had "Catch 22" turned down dozens of times before it was published. Most editors (who are invariably failed writers IMHO) sat down, read a few pages and stuffed his manuscript in the shredder. Stephen King used to keep his rejection letters on a 6" nail until he ran out of space....
The moral of the story is that everything's subjective in life and all creators, be they writers, artists or programmers are extremely self-critical of their own work, but more than that:- peers are even more cynical and critical than others. I bet even Tolkien had a few "thanks, but no thanks" letters in his time, and I bet he felt his work was sub par after a or dozen two. A middle finger after success still remains the best cure and just because everyone says your creation sucks it doesn't mean it's true.
Except that... I am a British citizen, and alas I pay the BBC tax like everyone else. However I, like many thousands (if not millions) of Brits spend much of my time in other EU countries, mainly in Poland but sometimes in Hungary. How many retired people have a second summer home in Spain? How many youngsters work in sunny Greece over the summer? I am outside of the UK for most of the year, but as I maintain an address in the UK - and yes, there's a telly - I pay the license fee. This means that I cannot access content for which I have paid, whereas my Polish friends doing a tour of duty in London can, even though haven't paid a penny.
The BBC - and not just them - seem to be stuck in some Cold War timewarp that ignores the rapidly changing demographics of Europe. There are many thousands of Brits in Poland, all paying for a service they can't use. Maybe an account verification system or something would be better idea? God knows.
Oh, just to rub salt in the wound I have to pay the Polish TV tax too. It makes the BBC one look like a great deal. Polish State TV has 15 minutes of commercials every hour, normally during badly dubbed repeats of some piss poor Brazilian Soap Opera or a locally made show with production values that would make the producers of Neighbours grimace.
The more I think about, the more I'm tempted to Keith Moon the telly from the balcony and be done it.
I'm from Europe, so I don't really get it... but please, help me. Why is it that the majority of Americans (and many Europeans to be fair) seem to think that only "Big Name" chain stores can provide these essential services to them? As far as I can see this model seems to cater only for corporate greed mongers, and the crappy service you recieve seems directly related to this. What's was flaunted as capitalism has emerged as an oligopoly of one or two market leaders at best. I read here that people have only 2 stores to choose from in their town, or not even that many. Wow, there's choice in action. Might as well sell only two brands of cola and be done with it. You say "but hey, it's cheaper this way..." and sure, the chain stores might save you a few cents due to their vast economy of scale, but what about everything you loose to tighten the purse strings?
You complain about the service, but greedy corporate chains don't pay much, so who works there? As the old adage goes, pay peanuts and you get monkeys. Moreover, as they're the only store in town you can like it lump it as far as they're concerned. No wonder they treat the public with contempt, we let them. Perhaps its time we returned to the old days of smaller, private stores??? After all, if my business relies on a good reputation and repeat trade I'm likely to offer a good service in return. Yes, things might cost a little more, but then you have to also ask the question about whether you're paying the true cost of anything these days. For example, I live in the Sub-Carpathian region, but amazingly bananas are cheaper than apples in the supermarket! Eh? Same for most products now, be it computers, food, clothes... all the same, someone gets screwed somewhere because the end user is tight fisted. Maybe, just maybe, we have to stop thinking about everything in simple $$$$ terms. People say they saved x number of cents on a product, but wasted x number of hours (and stress) when it didn't work, went wrong etc.
I for one will continue to support my local, privately run computer store. I pay a little more, but I get to talk to a guy who knows what he's on about, can find what I want and competently fix my machine when it's wrong. I save a lot this way, time and blood pressure namely, and as an added bonus I know a decent chap's getting paid fairly for his work. Chain stores will never compete with that level of service, not in a million years.
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Sure, I wouldn't dare advocate the Cyrillic alphabet for English. But for Polish, which is a West Slavonic language and thus not a million miles away from Russian, it would be a great step in the right direction - indeed the right tool for the job! Actually, proposals were made to change to Cyrillic in the 1850s... the reason it never happened are myriad, but mainly Political. Which is also why it'll never happen! Poles are none to fond of their neighbours, for much the same reasons as Moldovans if I can hazard a guess. It's a real shame, because szsz is the classic case in point, it's really just one letter... and that's what you'd get with Cyrillic, namely a (and /. won't allow it, but the W with a tail, which no Russian would have a problem pronouncing)
:)
Anyway, the adoption of the Latin alphabet in Poland is most likely due to the hegemony of the Roman Catholic church and the prevalence of Latin in the early church. Indeed, nothing much has changed in that respect. Every town in Poland worth it's salt has at least one street, school or square named Jan Pawel II... Polish is also a bit of an oddity, because whereas most Slavic languages using the Latin alphabet picked up the Czech orthographic system, Polish orthography developed independently.
By the way, if you speak Russian, Polish should be reasonably easy to pick up once you get past the orthography and learn to gadac[talk]. After all, spell piwo however you like, the best thing to do is still to drink it
any technology such as this is invaluable to us archaeologists. You see, these days archaeologists are loath to put their WHS trowels in the ground for a simple reason: archaeology is the unrepeatable experiment. Unlike most sciences, you cannot go back and recover from any mistakes. Once it's up, it's up and that's the end of that. Untold valuable sites have been irreparable screwed up by previous clumsy excavations and thousands of artefacts have horribly degraded due to us not really understanding the conversation process. It's really only a miracle of fate that Howard Carter found Tutankhamen's tomb when he did - a few years before and most what of he discovered would be remembered to us only by grainy sepia photographs. Still, even with the reasonably modern techniques and equipment at his disposable a lot of damage was done and like a forensic site, much of the evidence has been contaminated.
Archaeological investigations these days tend to be for emergency purposes. Or in layman's terms, someone's building a motorway through an iron age hill (as in Ireland), or someone found a Roman bathhouse while pile driving the foundations for an office block. To be fair the latter shouldn't happy as archaeologists are normally called in to do a preliminary investigation before construction, at least in archaeological sensitive places such as London, Paris etc. It's pretty hard to get money for pure archaeology now. Mostly because governments would rather fund other, more pragmatic research fields and secondly because modern archaeologists are a squeamish bunch - if something's sat in situ for two millennia without any problems it can afford to wait a decade or more until adequate funding and a conservation strategy are in place. Nowadays most of the glory is going to the geophys guys and not Indiana Jones.
For this reason any methods which can provide any insight, no matter how small, are gaining ground. Really, despite what most people think of archaeologists we're not treasure hunters. We're trying to piece together the past piece by piece. What we're looking for is not lost cities, but rather more mundane artefacts like field boundaries, foundations, lost turnpike roads between settlements etc. Google Earth maybe good at this sort of thing, maybe even for smaller structures too and maybe very handy when trying to piece together larger landscapes. You're probably not going to find Eldorado though.
I live in Poland, more specifically in Przemysl on the Ukrainian border so I'm exposed to both alphabets more or less daily. I must confess, I envy the Easterners! The Latin alphabet is really not suited to Slavic tongues and I think the Cyrillic one is a far superior way to render them. For example, in Cyrillic you get one nice little letter looking like w with a tail, whereas we get szcz... if you're an English speaker, it'd be something like the sh ch between freSH CHeese. Anyway, the inadequacies of the Latin alphabet is why Polish sometimes ends up looking like a cat walked across the keyboard and totally bewildering to anybody living west of the river Oder. Consider this little gem: w Szczebrzeszynie chrzaszcz brzmi w trzcinie i Szczebrzeszyn z tego slynie - and that's without actually using any of the eight accented letters. Basically, horrible things were done in the past to squeeze a square peg into a round hole and that's why Polish has ended up with rather random letter combinations like cz, ch, rz, sz, szcz etc. in order to get 36 sounds out of a measly 23 letters (Polish doesn't use v, x or q)... Cyrillic is far more efficient all things considered - with one letter for each distinct sound. Alas, we're stuck with what we have now... a pity.
I couldn't agree more... on an unrelated, but comparable note: Joseph Heller had "Catch 22" turned down dozens of times before it was published. Most editors (who are invariably failed writers IMHO) sat down, read a few pages and stuffed his manuscript in the shredder. Stephen King used to keep his rejection letters on a 6" nail until he ran out of space....
The moral of the story is that everything's subjective in life and all creators, be they writers, artists or programmers are extremely self-critical of their own work, but more than that:- peers are even more cynical and critical than others. I bet even Tolkien had a few "thanks, but no thanks" letters in his time, and I bet he felt his work was sub par after a or dozen two. A middle finger after success still remains the best cure and just because everyone says your creation sucks it doesn't mean it's true.
Except that... I am a British citizen, and alas I pay the BBC tax like everyone else. However I, like many thousands (if not millions) of Brits spend much of my time in other EU countries, mainly in Poland but sometimes in Hungary. How many retired people have a second summer home in Spain? How many youngsters work in sunny Greece over the summer? I am outside of the UK for most of the year, but as I maintain an address in the UK - and yes, there's a telly - I pay the license fee. This means that I cannot access content for which I have paid, whereas my Polish friends doing a tour of duty in London can, even though haven't paid a penny.
The BBC - and not just them - seem to be stuck in some Cold War timewarp that ignores the rapidly changing demographics of Europe. There are many thousands of Brits in Poland, all paying for a service they can't use. Maybe an account verification system or something would be better idea? God knows.
Oh, just to rub salt in the wound I have to pay the Polish TV tax too. It makes the BBC one look like a great deal. Polish State TV has 15 minutes of commercials every hour, normally during badly dubbed repeats of some piss poor Brazilian Soap Opera or a locally made show with production values that would make the producers of Neighbours grimace.
The more I think about, the more I'm tempted to Keith Moon the telly from the balcony and be done it.
I'm from Europe, so I don't really get it... but please, help me. Why is it that the majority of Americans (and many Europeans to be fair) seem to think that only "Big Name" chain stores can provide these essential services to them? As far as I can see this model seems to cater only for corporate greed mongers, and the crappy service you recieve seems directly related to this. What's was flaunted as capitalism has emerged as an oligopoly of one or two market leaders at best. I read here that people have only 2 stores to choose from in their town, or not even that many. Wow, there's choice in action. Might as well sell only two brands of cola and be done with it. You say "but hey, it's cheaper this way..." and sure, the chain stores might save you a few cents due to their vast economy of scale, but what about everything you loose to tighten the purse strings?
You complain about the service, but greedy corporate chains don't pay much, so who works there? As the old adage goes, pay peanuts and you get monkeys. Moreover, as they're the only store in town you can like it lump it as far as they're concerned. No wonder they treat the public with contempt, we let them. Perhaps its time we returned to the old days of smaller, private stores??? After all, if my business relies on a good reputation and repeat trade I'm likely to offer a good service in return. Yes, things might cost a little more, but then you have to also ask the question about whether you're paying the true cost of anything these days. For example, I live in the Sub-Carpathian region, but amazingly bananas are cheaper than apples in the supermarket! Eh? Same for most products now, be it computers, food, clothes... all the same, someone gets screwed somewhere because the end user is tight fisted. Maybe, just maybe, we have to stop thinking about everything in simple $$$$ terms. People say they saved x number of cents on a product, but wasted x number of hours (and stress) when it didn't work, went wrong etc.
I for one will continue to support my local, privately run computer store. I pay a little more, but I get to talk to a guy who knows what he's on about, can find what I want and competently fix my machine when it's wrong. I save a lot this way, time and blood pressure namely, and as an added bonus I know a decent chap's getting paid fairly for his work. Chain stores will never compete with that level of service, not in a million years.