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As can be expected in an English-language blog about the history of mostly Polish cuisine, you may come across a fair number of Polish words and names here. The Polish language is notoriously tricky for native English speakers to pronounce, which is why I provide pronunciation respelling for some of the Polish words.
The scheme I use is a kind of compromise: it's as close to actual Polish pronunciation as you can get while using only those sounds that exist in English. In some cases, two sounds that are distinct to Polish speakers, are approximated by the same English sound. The goal here isn't to make you sound like a native Polish speaker; it's just to help you not butcher Polish words beyond recognition. It's meant to be as intuitive to English speakers as possible, but here's an explanation of the symbols anyway.
=== Vowels ===
All Polish vowels, stressed or not, are of uniform length, with no long vowels or schwas(technically, Polish does have a handful of nasal diphthongs, but we'll ignore those for simplicity). Some of them sound similar to long vowels in English, but are pronounced shorter.
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