Ulyanovsk in Russia has a monument dedicated to the letter ั (yo) which is often replaced by ะต (ye) due to awkward placement on keyboard (I suspect?).
On translit keyboard layout which I'm using it's no bother, so I can write ัััั as much as I like ๐
Yes, someone also mentioned German umlauts in this context!
Fortunately, Polish spelling is so bloody complicated that nobody even approaches it without a proper Polish keyboard ๐ All diacritics are however available as Alt combinations so Alt-O makes ร so quite easy.
In Russian translit keyboard ั is placed at Shift-3 so replacing # which is not much of a loss.
@kravietz I once a long time ago worked on a web site project that had a Polish version of the whole interface, and we were all German developers, none spoke Polish. There I learned to respect Polish spelling. It was quite a challenge to make sure itโs all correct! ๐
A lot of Polish people are struggling with this on daily basis ๐
@kravietz ๐
You should have seen our faces when the translator came back with the Polish translations for the menu items. German runs pretty long, but we ran out of space for many of the Polish words in the buttons. ๐
@kravietz oh no, it's not due to anything related to a keyboard. The letter has a long, arduous history ever since its inception in the XVIII century. Educated people argued it encouraged "common" pronunciation of words, there were also problems with producing a printed type for it. It wasn't even considered a part of the alphabet until the XX century.
But basically, the letter has just become an unlucky subject of "holy wars" where it's too easy to have Opinions about how things should be.
I will therefore certainly continue to use ั ๐
@kravietz by the way, the officially allowed (and commonly used) replacement of "ั" with "ะต" is probably the reason why the word "rรถntgen" is pronounced in Russian with a clear [ษ] sound. As a borrowed word, people could only derive its pronunciation from print, which was "ัะตะฝัะณะตะฝ", without the two dots.
This is interesting. I was always wondering why some (but statistically significant) English teachers in Russia pronounce words like "first" as ััััั or even ััััั. Might be unrelated but this ะต-ั confusion might be a hint.
@kravietz I think it's unrelated. This one is probably because "ั" is the closest we have phonetically to the shwa sound in "first", "girl", etc.
@kravietz We should have more monuments for underappreciated letters. :)