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> "One of the things that we've noted is that you'll have a person in Poland applying with a very complicated name," he recounted, "and then when you get them on Zoom calls it's a military age male Asian who can't pronounce it."

Why not simply pretend they are from South Korea?

Tinfoil: Maybe these ones are supposed to fail so everyone feels like they are so clever in stopping them.



Friend's comment:

> Konichiwa, Brzęczyszczykiewicz-san.


> Brzęczyszczykiewicz

For anyone not familiar, this is a Polish joke. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AfKZclMWS1U


That is hilarious and would be hilarious even without any context.

If I don't bookmark it now then I'll never be able to find it again. :-)


Born?


Chrząszczyżewoszyce powiat Łękołody


Sometimes I wonder why Polish didn’t replace the z digrams with accented letters (č, ž etc.) like many other Slavic languages.


Ah but we have those too :)

The 'rz' phoneme has the same sound as the letter 'ż' which is a different sound from the letter 'ź' (the latter being a softer sound - one that foreigners usually find easier to reproduce).

Whether you write a word with the 'rz' or the 'ż' is governed by a set of orthographic rules that are of course peppered with numerous exceptions.


Why would we? It "just works". We've only changed how we write the letter "ż" some 30-20 years ago. It was previously "ƶ". Also, "ż" and "ź" are not accents but separate alphabet letters.


There was no typeface change for “ż” - the other typeface is sometimes used now as it was 30 years ago. See the foto at Wikipedia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%BB


Early primary schooling in the early 90s and some preschool teaching in the late 80s taught me to write "ż" as a "ƶ"[0].

> It represents the same sound in the Polish alphabet, remaining in active usage by some as an alternative for the letter Ż (called "Z with overdot").

> In Polish, the character Ƶ is used as an allographic variant of the letter ⟨Ż⟩ (called "Z with overdot") although once used in Old Polish.

Funnily, there's a counter-argument to "Straż Miejska" from article you linked, with "Straƶ Miejska" in another Wikipedia entry[1] :)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z_with_stroke

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Straz_plakietka.svg


I started school in 1980 and I don’t remember this. Also books don’t use this typeface no matter how old.


And yet, you can see the "Straƶ Miejska" logotype linked in my comment above, with a crown on the eagle, so post-December 31, 1989[0].

It may depend on the region (I was raised in the eastern Poland) but I also remember that in the primary school we used a different symbol for the letter "s". But only in hand-writing while any printed "s" looked like it does currently. I'm unable to find the UTF-8 character resembling the hand-written version.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coat_of_arms_of_Poland#


You’ll soon find that languages evolved over centuries do not care about consistency and simplicity in grammar rules.


Cyrillic would fit so much better.


Additionally, Polish also has more different consonants that e.g. Czech, where the haček accents were first introduced.

sz contrast with ś/si, as does cz and ć/ci, or ż/rz and ź/zi, or dż and dź/dzi

(might have swapped one or two)

Add in some good etymological reasons why the consonant+i combinations are not respelled and the whole thing makes a lot of sense.


You could also look at Croatian, which has a similar contrast with e.g. "C", so they use "č" and "ć". This could be easily extended to "s" and "z". Or you could take "ż" and apply the same diacritic to "c" and "s".

"rz" is a bit of a special case since it's pretty much etymological - what used to be "r", and corresponds to "r" in the same roots in other Slavic languages, but became to be pronounced like "ź" in Polish. What to do about it depends on whether you want your orthography to be purely phonemic (a better choice IMO, just look at South Slavic languages - it works great for them!) or retain the etymological distinction. But even then it would be better off as a diacritic.

What would be really neat tho is having a single Latin-based notation that works consistently across all Slavic languages, similar to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Turkic_alphabet. For example, we could use cedilla to represent post-alveolars: ç and ş - and then use acute accent to indicate palatalization ("softness"). So e.g in Czech you'd only need s/ş, in Polish you'd use s/ş/ş́, and in Russian you'd have all four possible combinations s/ś/ş/ş́.


> "rz" is a bit of a special case (...) pronounced like "ź" in Polish

Tiny correction: "rz" is spelled exactly like "ż", while "ź" sounds differently.


At this point it’s a unique aspect of the language, so much so that changing sz to š for example would feel like a betrayal. There are also a few letters without similar sounds in other Slavic languages (ą and ę) so you’d end up retaining those anyway.


Those make sense since they aren't digraphs. But c'mon, comparing Czech to Polish, it's pretty clear which orthography was designed first, and which learned from the mistakes of the other :)


Ok, is it a declaration of war?!


Naaah, let's exchange knedlíky and pierogi recipes, make silly jokes about the other language over a few beers and we're good.


Why not have both?


When you are dealing with intelligence services and others who work through deceit that sort of thinking is not tinfoil.


I have come to a conclusion about this "tinfoil" thing.

Expectation: intelligence services, spies, secrets

Reality: bunch of ponzi schemers, arrogant sub revolutionaries, greedy people, envious people. All together in a pseudo network of trust, always at each other's throats. Unrepentable and thus, impossible to forgive. Sad but not much.


Isn't that what intelligence services and spies are like too? Adam Curtis wrote a great article on it once:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/webarchive/https%3A%2F%2Fwww.bbc.co.uk...


so even though reality isn't exactly as the expected, they are still detecting them because they are more sensitive to situation than normies. situational awareness is not a bad thing even if the reason your heightened awareness is up for a different reason.


What are you even talking about?

Sounds like complete bullshit. Your response is exactly the sort of thing I see as a social scam. Situation awareness? That makes no fucking sense.


you've never heard the term situational awareness? that's funny.

if someone thinks there's a conspiracy behind everything so they trust nothing and then it turns out that the thing could not be trusted but because of a different reason than the suspected conspiracy doesn't make the conspiracy theorist wrong about the lack of trust. just the reason for the lack of trust.

compare that to someone that trusts everything. they get screwed because they were not paying attention to trust should be suspect. yet the kooky conspiracy person was better off even if for the not so right reason


A conspiracist shouldn’t be confused with a skeptic that attempts to practice and employ critical thinking and structured analysis to issues. Conspiracists get taken in by scams all the time because they put their trust in perceived “outsiders”. Alex Jones sold snake oil for decades to conspiracy rubes. Conspiracism is just a different dogmatic worldview.


Can you elaborate on the difference?


Conspiracism is a world view and way of thinking. I think Michael Barkun sums it up well. His three principles of conspiracism are nothing happens by accident, nothing is as it seems, and everything is connected.

In the conspiracist world view, things aren’t caused by negligence or incompetence. There aren’t systemic causes that lead to events. Opportunists don’t jump on opportunities that a chaotic event opens up. Things are caused by plans thought up and executed by cabals of powerful people (illuminati, CIA, “the elites”, banking elite, the deep state).

However things appear isn’t the “real” story. Everything is deception and whatever the true causes are hidden behind the “official narrative”. Large amounts of evidence, scientific studies, and other information are ignored and dismissed. Wild conjecture, random anomalies (“isn’t it weird” style rhetorical questions to show the “official narrative” is false), and other “alternative” evidence are embraced instead.

Things are connected and you need to find the patterns. This is often accompanied by finding “hidden messages” and symbols that show that seemingly unconnected events share a common cause and were conducted by a common group as part of some larger plan.

Skeptical thinking, by contrast, is about questioning claims and doubting things without sufficient evidence. Embracing the scientific method and accepting scientific conclusions, while still remaining open to new information. Examining biases and accepting your own limited knowledge.


That sounds like a very superficial take on it. Like you're describing Fox Mulder and Scully. Those are very crude simplifications.


A skeptic is just someone looking for real reasons besides those used in whatever propaganda suggests. That reason could be benign or not, but it doesn't mean that some secret organization/cabal is pulling the strings to make the situation what it is.

When some SaaS become unavailable due to some DNS issue, is it a conspiracy that their status page is also not updated when their status page is also affected by the outage or is it the deep state's fault trying to keep the average worker down with a cunning plan? A skeptic sees the outage and the status discrepancy as a company that just got things wrong. The conspiracy nut things the Illuminati it out to get them specifically.

Maybe it helps to have been in/around cults for more time in their youth than one would like to admit, but a skeptic and a conspiracy nut are nothing alike to me.


How so? If you want to have a discussion, you actually need to say something more substantial that two sentences saying "I disagree". What about what I said was superficial and crude? What about any of the modern things that would be called “conspiracies” doesn’t fit what I said? PizzaGate, the government did 9/11, Qanon, the government did Sandy Hook, etc.


Sounds like bullshit.

You are talking about personas, like they're action figures or something.

"the conspiracy theorist"

"the spy"

"the trusty shieldbarer"

Then you did a mini plot to tell a small storyline that attaches itself to the conversation. I can do that too if I want.

If you do it to help people, then it's good. If you are doing it to confuse someone or get advantage, then it's a dick move.

Raising those issues about "suspecting everything" is something that I've been exposed to my whole life. Specially in the last years, it has been more intense.

Instead, I believe the stronger position is to believe in human kindness. A healthy mixture of skepticism and trust that cannot be put in a box. Being good without being a fool. Which entails the act of sometimes entertaining the dumb conspiracy agitator or other disruptive personalities.

The more you do it, the harder it is for toxic people. They quickly get into a very previsible box and even pretend they like it.


You seriously never noticed John Krasinski is Asian? Hats off to you for not seeing race!


Poorly-presented staging for a scam is part of the process - it allows you to select for only the least credulous of marks. If they fall for something that obvious, then you know you can take for everything they’ve got. That’s the entire principle behind the Nigerian prince email scam.


>That’s the entire principle behind the Nigerian prince email scam.

I always hear people repeating this, but in my experience this is not true. People doing mass scams are just not very competent.


Might work, but they'd have to learn to mask their NK accent.




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