Yep. For example, the name of the third-largest city in Poland is "Łódź", which might look like it's pronounced "lods", but is actually pronounced more like "wootch".

Sometimes you end up with parcel addressed to city "??d?". Shipping systems cannot cope with non-ASCII chars more often than I would expect...

I've seen shipping labels with HTML encoded characters, like é and è. I'm not sure if that's better or worse:

Łódź

This is a pretty frequent thing to encounter actually. Just some years ago many websites actually preferred to use ISO/Windows codepages to save space on multibyte Unicode symbols adding HTML entities to represent everything which is not in it the basic ASCII and their primary language alphabet.

Fun fact: I was looking for an e-mail solution for a small company about a decade ago and found Zarafa. It seemed nice and I deployed it happily. Just to find out it only supports the Western European ISO codepage which was hardcoded. I hope they have switched to UTF-8 since then.

Always omit diacritics when giving your address/name to foreign parties which are going to have to ship you anything or issue any documents for you.

The fact most of the speakers of the language have switched to a different accent (by the way, I feel curious why) doesn't mean a fundamental difference. Same letters and whole same words are vocalized differently in the US and the UK (and even different regional accents within both countries) and nobody thinks about them as different letters/words. Ł still is the same letter, a direct counterpart to L in English, German, almost all latin-based Slavic alphabets and pretty much everywhere. I bet almost every Mikołaj drops the slash happily (some probably even change the whole name to Nicholas which is the English counterpart) if they get a passport of an anglophone country.

Nevertheless I find it absurd it's 2021 and they still have to. It's almost 30 years since the introduction of Unicode in Windows NT and NTFS, probably also close to that in Java. Pretty much every serious programming language or database supports Unicode by default today.

I believe it's a bug in some app in the toolchain as Windows file system API is perfectly capable of handling non-ASCII symbols. I always cared to avoid using non-ASCII symbols and spaces in my paths (incl. always installing almost everything to a custom directory outside "Program Files") but c'mon, how many decades do we need to develop handling these reliably?

I would also consider Windows' inability to optionally change the actual home directory name and distinguish between the user's full (display) name and their "username" (which are 2 distinct properties in Linux) "feature-bugs".

> The fact most of the speakers of the language have switched to a different accent (by the way, I feel curious why)

It was a long process of L-vocalization [0] that started around XVI century. The first segment of the population to be affected by it were peasants (it is also one of the reasons why the original sound quality of «ł» survived relatively long among Polish artists in early XX century as a sign of professionalism, similarly to English’s Mid-Atlantic accent [1]).

I suspect that L-vocalization’s proliferation was aided by multiple wars, partitions and occupations that followed, which caused many waves of both natural and forced internal migration and disappearance of most dialectal differences.

According to [2](PL) the pronunciation of «ł» as /w/ was codified as the standard around XIX/XX in both informal and formal settings. There are still remaining populations using the old sound quality, but they are mostly confined to the areas in proximity to other Slavic languages.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L-vocalization [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid-Atlantic_accent [2]: http://www.dialektologia.uw.edu.pl/index.php?l1=leksykon&lid...

I actually take a hint of offense that you say "Ł still is the same letter, a direct counterpart to L". By what measure? It was always a separate phoneme. Just because it shifted to w doesn't mean it wasn't distinct to poles to begin with - just now clearly distinct to everyone as the sound has only become more distinct! Pointing to ways we poles live with the situation doesn't mean it's ideal

It was not "always a separate phoneme". English-L-like hard pronunciation of Ł still is valid Polish, although rare to encounter in real life outside certain regions in the east. In fact it is even considered sort of more literate (conservative/standard) in theory.

Would you also say Greek lambda has nothing to do with the English L? Or, slightly more relevant and complex example, actual Polish L with Slovak Ľ and Serbian Љ?

Can you provide argument that a letter was created for Polish for something that was not a phoneme? It has always co-existed with normal L, while it has sometimes sounded close to L I don't think one could say standard Polish ever merged these.

Conservative Ł would still be distinct.

You probably misunderstood me, I never meant to say Polish Ł and Polish L are the same and have no reason to be distinguished. I meant Polish Ł is a direct counterpart to English L and only differs significantly by the sake of regional/historical shift in accents.

The problem is some software just has problems with non-English alphabets because, roughly saying, all the software was meant to only process English text historically and much of it still has not been fixed. Users of non-latin-based alphabets have been accustomed to this and have no problem writing "Иван" as "Ivan" (despite it normally reads even more different in English, more correct phonetic transliteration would be "Eevan"). Heck they even spell "Семён" (~"Semyon", the Russian counterpart to English "Simon") as "Semen" X-). But the users of diacriticized Latin somehow get surprised with this.

If I could travel back in time to when ASCII was designed and give the engineers a hint I would ask them to add first-class diacritics to their design so anybody would be able to add the slash for Ł, the umlaut for Ü, Ö or whatever using an extra byte. Sadly, even today we mostly encode Ü as a letter absolutely distinct to U rather than a combination of the latter with the umlaut even though Unicode allows doing this the latter way AFAIK.