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Ukraïnśka Latynka

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Re: Ukraïnśka Latynka

#21

Post by timeon »

atdrummond wrote: post #9

I understand why this is being done. I selfishly hope it doesn’t take off; I find Cyrillic much easier to read than any Latin transliterations, likely simply due to my brain expending extra resources to recall the Slavic languages’ much more consistent phonetic pronunciation rules instead of the various English alternative pronunciations for said string of Latin characters.

Some southern and all western Slavic languages use (extended) Latin characters. Even without Cyrillic, they do not need Engliš alternatives. I speak Czech and Slovak - Cyrillic is like Chinese for me.

Re: Ukraïnśka Latynka

#22

Post by timeon »

bcatanzaro wrote: post #7

This will never happen, but I wish we could go the other direction and write Polish and Czech/Slovak in Cyrillic. They would be so much easier to read! SZCZ is only one letter!

Maybe for Polish, which sounds bit like east Slavic, but I am not sure if Czech/Slovak even use combination šč that much.

Re: Ukraïnśka Latynka

#23

Post by atdrummond »

timeon wrote: post #21
atdrummond wrote: post #9

I understand why this is being done. I selfishly hope it doesn’t take off; I find Cyrillic much easier to read than any Latin transliterations, likely simply due to my brain expending extra resources to recall the Slavic languages’ much more consistent phonetic pronunciation rules instead of the various English alternative pronunciations for said string of Latin characters.

Some southern and all western Slavic languages use (extended) Latin characters. Even without Cyrillic, they do not need Engliš alternatives. I speak Czech and Slovak - Cyrillic is like Chinese for me.

I know - I also speak Czech/Slovak. They were harder for me to learn than Russian specifically due to the extra mental load of having to manage another set of pronunciations for Latin letters. This is solely due to English being my first language.

Re: Ukraïnśka Latynka

#24

Post by timeon »

dgudkov wrote: post #16

In Ukrainian language words spell exactly how they are pronounced (unlike Russian, btw). It's very convenient. Every Ukrainian letter always corresponds to the same respective sound. You know exactly how to correctly pronounce any word, even if you see it for the first time. I'm not sure if any of the proposed latinization variants would retain this feature.

> I'm not sure if any of the proposed latinization variants would retain this feature.

Maybe Slovene alphabet? (Slovak went with Russophilic y/i in 19. century).

Re: Ukraïnśka Latynka

#25

Post by bcatanzaro »

mistrial9 wrote: post #20
bcatanzaro wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's actually a political protest. Ukrainian more-or-less shares an alphabet with Russian. A number of former Soviet countries that in the past shared an alphabet with Russian have been abandoning Cyrillic and moving to the Latin alphabet. This software makes it possible for Ukrainians to transliterate text easily to Latin. I think people might want to do that because they are just so mad at Russia. Of course…

> A number of former Soviet countries switched .. with what total population, and what total publication history ? .. personally I support diverse languages to survive ..

Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, and most recently Kazakhstan have switched their namesake languages from Cyrillic to Latin alphabets. Some of these languages have been written in Latin, Arabic, and Cyrillic over the years, but there's definitely a movement away from Cyrillic after the Soviet Union.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kazakh_language#Writing_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkmen_language#Writing_syste... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uzbek_language#Writing_systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azerbaijani_language#Writing_s...

Re: Ukraïnśka Latynka

#26

Post by timeon »

atdrummond wrote: post #23
timeon wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some southern and all western Slavic languages use (extended) Latin characters. Even without Cyrillic, they do not need Engliš alternatives. I speak Czech and Slovak - Cyrillic is like Chinese for me.

I know - I also speak Czech/Slovak. They were harder for me to learn than Russian specifically due to the extra mental load of having to manage another set of pronunciations for Latin letters. This is solely due to English being my first language.

I see. Probably I have problem with English pronunciation for same reason (even if we ignore the vowel shift).

edit: but now when I'm thinking about it bit more how is it with non-Slavic letters like ø, ü, å? As I have mentioned the vowel shift maybe even 'g', 'r', 'j'?

And on the other hand Slovak have ľ and ô - which is ignored in my region and we just pronounce it as 'l' and 'o'.

Re: Ukraïnśka Latynka

#27

Post by cerebellum »

valeg wrote: post #12

This issue was non existent before Feb 24 but now becomes really relevant. The Cyrillic script has weird origins (the first known chronicler in it was some Novgorod priest Upir Оfeigr; his first name sounds like "vampire"). The official story about Cyril and Methodius is an example of empire propaganda. Their Glagolitic alphabet has no relation to Cyrillic. So, no real value to keep the Cyrillic script other than imp…

"The Cyrillic script has weird origins" Not really. The Early Cyrillic alphabet was developed during the 9th century AD at the Preslav Literary School in the First Bulgarian Empire during the reign of tsar Simeon I the Great, probably by DISCIPLES of the two Byzantine brothers[6] Saint Cyril and Saint Methodius ( byzantine scholars from Thessaliniki), who had previously created the Glagolitic script. The Cyrillic script is named IN HONOR of Saint Cyril (by the disciples who created it and translated the first important works) in the 890s (9th century) as a more suitable script for books in Old Bulgarian (later called for political correctness "Old Church Slavonic"). This was primarily done in the Preslav Literary School (in northeastern Bulgaria). The credit goes to the seven most prominent disciples of the two saints, but primarily to st Clement of Ohrid & st Naum of Preslav (aka Kliment Ohridski & Naum Preslavski).

(Christian emissaries later brought it from Bulgaria to Kiyv not long after as I recall. And as we all know, at that time Moscow did not exist... Sometime later Bulgaria fell under the Ottoman Empire for five centuries and did not stand a chance... Yet what had reached the Kievian Rus lived on... as you know... Yes, a Russian tsar threw out a bunch of letters at some point…)

(So much of Eastern Europe’s history has been… “edited” after WWII… I know.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrillic_script

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_Cyrillic_alphabet

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preslav_Literary_School

Re: Ukraïnśka Latynka

#28

Post by timeon »

bcatanzaro wrote: post #15
gerdesj wrote: post #8

I'd be grateful if someone would explain what this really means to us Roman alphabet users. An npm trove on Github isn't ringing any bells. A sad Google translate doesn't work either. Please explain.

I think it's actually a political protest. Ukrainian more-or-less shares an alphabet with Russian. A number of former Soviet countries that in the past shared an alphabet with Russian have been abandoning Cyrillic and moving to the Latin alphabet. This software makes it possible for Ukrainians to transliterate text easily to Latin. I think people might want to do that because they are just so mad at Russia. Of course…

> The reason Czech/Slovak/Polish use the Latin alphabet is because they are Catholic countries

Codified Slovak was created by Lutheran priests. But yes other Latin scripts like Czech/Polish/Hungarian/German were already used there.

Re: Ukraïnśka Latynka

#29

Post by pndy »

timeon wrote: post #21
atdrummond wrote: post #9

I understand why this is being done. I selfishly hope it doesn’t take off; I find Cyrillic much easier to read than any Latin transliterations, likely simply due to my brain expending extra resources to recall the Slavic languages’ much more consistent phonetic pronunciation rules instead of the various English alternative pronunciations for said string of Latin characters.

Some southern and all western Slavic languages use (extended) Latin characters. Even without Cyrillic, they do not need Engliš alternatives. I speak Czech and Slovak - Cyrillic is like Chinese for me.

Same for me - it takes a time to decipher Cyrillic script for someone who uses Latin alphabet, while I'm able to read and understand Czech, Slovak and to some degree read south Slavic group languages.

I've witness a scene last March where social services clerk tried to help Ukrainian mother get some social benefit - they were able to understand each other in speech but not in the written words. At the end of conversation she suggested that it would be better if woman would translate her documents into Polish by a sworn translator. The clerk was in 50s and she probably still could remember something from spoken Russian - which was at some point a language taught in Polish schools during PPR times.

As for the Latynka - it's of course up to Ukrainians but personally I believe that would be a good political move to separate themselves from Russia even more. Kazakhstan did change writing system few years ago [1] and I'm pretty sure that one of the former SSR of Soviet Union also reverted to Latin script while being previously forced to use Cyrillic script

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kazakh_language#Writing_system

Re: Ukraïnśka Latynka

#30

Post by [deleted] »

cerebellum wrote: post #27
valeg wrote: post #12

This issue was non existent before Feb 24 but now becomes really relevant. The Cyrillic script has weird origins (the first known chronicler in it was some Novgorod priest Upir Оfeigr; his first name sounds like "vampire"). The official story about Cyril and Methodius is an example of empire propaganda. Their Glagolitic alphabet has no relation to Cyrillic. So, no real value to keep the Cyrillic script other than imp…

"The Cyrillic script has weird origins" Not really. The Early Cyrillic alphabet was developed during the 9th century AD at the Preslav Literary School in the First Bulgarian Empire during the reign of tsar Simeon I the Great, probably by DISCIPLES of the two Byzantine brothers[6] Saint Cyril and Saint Methodius ( byzantine scholars from Thessaliniki), who had previously created the Glagolitic script. The Cyrillic scr…

[deleted]
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