There are so many women throughout history who are remembered for being the wife of their husband and are often referred to in these terms. How did she escape this? I never hear people say "Pierre Curie and his wife Marie". Is she just that cool?
I knew about Marie far before I learned about Pierre as well.
After seeing that last-name, I'm starting to wonder if Polish should go back to being written in Cyrillic (also, you can have the little squid letter back if you do, and it looks adorable)
Yes, everything helping to disconnect us from western cultural onslaught would be good, but we never had cyrillic, Poland used latin script from the start. It's possible that some glagolitic was earlier used in southern Poland because of contacts with Great Moravia, but there is no proof for it. It's also right we need to reform the ortography a bit, there's some redundancies and nonsenses gathered over the ages.
Also this name isn't even that bad for English speaker, it's just something like "Scwodovsca", would be worse in cyrillic.
I genuinely don't know how to pronounce three consonants like S C W without a vowel inbetween, but thats a me-problem rather than a polish problem. Regarding the use of cyrillic, according to a brief wikipedia-scim, cyrillic was used in poland for a very brief period during the russian empire, but it seems like it was only as a temporary measure until the ruling class got russified enough.
How do you pronounce e.g. "squid"? It's pretty close to skwid imo
Yeah but it wasn't even really a serious attempt. It was more because the printing in Polish was forbidden for some time. Fun fact: this meant Okhrana had to print propaganda aimed at Poles in Austrian owned Kraków.
I doubt this too was a serious attempt considering how great it went with Balkan Germans, who more of a germanised Russian ruling class than in other way. Another fun fact: a would be tsar Konstantin Romanov got somewhat polonised while he was governor of Russian partition.
I mean both of those could maybe came to be if they did had centuries to work with and it wasn't the age of growing nationalim and if Romanov's Russia wasn't already in decay when they tried to do it, but even Poles didn't really treated it seriously as Polish political factions show - there was Austian faction and Russian faction arguing that Poles could get more rights under either liberalising AH empire or bigger chance to secede the decaing Russian one (but there was no serious German faction, germanisation was done seriously and treated seriously by Poles).
Name more iconic duo than reactionaries and shooting themselves in the foot.