I understand the Polish language uses Latin characters and many Polish immigrants would have written their names with “-wicz” and similar uses. Where I live in the Midwest, many of our families have Polish heritage and Polish last names that have lost their pronunciation over the years — “-wicz” pronounced “witz” instead of “vich”. This evolution is organic and I don’t have an issue with it. However, early spellings of Polish places in English both changed the original characters AND got the pronunciation wrong. Kraków comes to mind, with some English spellings writing it as “Krakow,” others “Cracow,” but neither directs English speakers to pronounce the “v” at the end correctly.
My question is essentially why did English choose to neither preserve the original Polish spellings nor accurately reflect the Polish phonetics, instead choosing a middle road that did neither well?
