Why do I sometimes see q's in Polish names on this site?

by James J. Czuchra

When I first began working with computers and wanted to type Polish characters, there were no good options either in terms of comfort (ease of typing) or in terms of the codes used to represent the Polish characters. So, I invented the q data entry system. Polish does not use the letter q so I could safely insert it in Polish names and words to signal that the next character was a special Polish character. The q is a regular letter on keyboards so it is easy to type and does not get ignored or changed to something else if the data is transmitted to a different computer. Using a macro, custom programming, or even an application's search and replace feature, the q combinations can be replaced by their correct Polish characters.

You may find a stray q because it was typed after a character instead of in front ( but only rarely). More often than not, the stray q means that that field was not processed to remove the q and make the proper replacement. Oops!

How does the q system handle the fact that there are two special z's? The "dotted" z is entered as qz while the "accented" z would be entered as qqz (double q). In doing the search and replace, you have to replace qqz before doing the qz replacement or else you will get q "dotted" z. The capital letters are entered by putting the q in front of the capital version, so qS is Ś

qa = ą, qc = ć, qe = ę, ql = ł, qn = ń, qo = ó, qs = ś, qz = ż, qqz = ź

Some people use the ~ (tilde) data entry system to do much the same thing as the q data entry system because they claim it looks cleaner. I never much liked it because it requires a shift key and long stretch to enter the tilde, making it uncomfortable. It can also be confusing for newbies to use because the tilde comes after the Polish character instead of in front. Other data entry systems use the ALT key. This is again an awkward shift type of keystroke on the bottom row of the keyboard.