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Inventing Cyrillic (2024)

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Re: Inventing Cyrillic (2024)

#21

Post by necovek »

Antibabelic wrote: post #14
troupo wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> is trivially provable that Cyrillic script is better adapted even to languages which do not use it today, but have to resort to digraphs or glyphs with diacritics Take a look at the Cyrillic section of Unicode to see your trivially provable claim being trivially disproven. You'll see all the same digraphs, glyphs, accents, graves etc. as used in Latin scripts. It's also easy to see it easily disproven if you look a…

To be fair, the parent post was clearly talking about Slavic languages, not "all the languages USSR forced cyrillic alphabet on", which were not Slavic and which required significant modifications to the alphabet.

Indeed: most notably, Croatian, Slovenian, Bosnian, Serbian and Montenegrin are all unambiguous with Cyrillic, but Latin script dominates, even in officially Cyrillic-first Serbia.

Again, it is seen as a political tool (pro-West or pro-Russia), when Cyrillic is technically better suited (there is certainly history as well, but that's very mixed up in the region).

Again, I am saying this as someone who has worked to implement things like full-text search, collation (lexical ordering/sorting) algorithms and tables, fonts and ligatures, functions like uppercase/titlecase/lowercase...

Eg. an already complex Unicode Collation Algorithm tables can never support exceptions with digraphs like "konjukcija" (nj is usually a digraph, but not here), etc.

Re: Inventing Cyrillic (2024)

#22

Post by mootothemax »

orbital-decay wrote: post #15
mootothemax wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Germans are Nemci in Russian as well I wanted to check; are you implying that Russian is not a Slavic language?

No, GP is saying that Russian uses the Latin root for Germans, I'm saying it doesn't. (it does for Germany though: "Germaniya").

I think I may have fallen victim to a GP midflight edit - I agree with you fwiw, it’s a stone cold fact.

Re: Inventing Cyrillic (2024)

#23

Post by Antibabelic »

lovegrenoble wrote: post #19
_hao wrote: post #13

Glagolitic was created by Cyril and Methodius which was the precursor for Cyrillic. Whether they were Greek or Bulgarian is still in contention, but that doesn't matter. What matters is that Cyrillic itself was created later by students of theirs in Bulgaria at the Preslav Literary School. On the political aspect Russia has always hated the fact that small Bulgaria gave them their alphabet/culture and has used it's i…

>> Russia has always hated the fact that small Bulgaria gave them their alphabet The wording is entirely accurate, since even during the Roman Empire, the region where Sts. Cyril and Methodius were later born and worked was known as Macedonia. And, of course, no one in Russia is trying to deny the contribution of the First Bulgarian Empire to the creation of the Slavic alphabet, since that would contradict historical…

> And, of course, no one in Russia is trying to deny the contribution of the First Bulgarian Empire to the creation of the Slavic alphabet, since that would contradict historical facts.

This doesn't follow. People deny historical fact all the time.

Re: Inventing Cyrillic (2024)

#24

Post by mootothemax »

Antibabelic wrote: post #9
necovek wrote: post #5

This is an article with a long introduction and then jumps straight to the point in one, final paragraph: Russia is abusing it for political messaging again. While yes, any tool will be abused like this, it really is also a tool to best codify spoken language of the Slavs (in a sense, it is trivially provable that Cyrillic script is better adapted even to languages which do not use it today, but have to resort to dig…

"Slav" deriving from the Slavic term for "word" is something of a false etymology that was invented in the 19th century. It is implausible on philological grounds: you'd expect a different vowel in this word if this were the case, and the suffix *-ninъ is only otherwise used in terms derived from place names. It is more likely[0] that the term derives from some toponym. This is in line with how tribal names tend to w…

The irony for me being that when I was first learning Polish and looking for any and all mnemonics - “ah, that word is the number nine, and that one is ten because it has an s in the middle and that’s next to t for ten in the alphabet”-levels of desperate - the false etymology helped me set word, słowo, in my head, and the rather delightful dosłownie, literally / to the word, has remained ever since.

(tho while on the subject, it’s hard to beat wieloryb as a wonder that I don’t want to know the true etymology of ever because if there’s even a chance that the word for whale derived from the words great as-in-size + fish, I want to hang on to it forever)

Re: Inventing Cyrillic (2024)

#25

Post by ceedaxp »

troupo wrote: post #11
necovek wrote: post #5

This is an article with a long introduction and then jumps straight to the point in one, final paragraph: Russia is abusing it for political messaging again. While yes, any tool will be abused like this, it really is also a tool to best codify spoken language of the Slavs (in a sense, it is trivially provable that Cyrillic script is better adapted even to languages which do not use it today, but have to resort to dig…

> is trivially provable that Cyrillic script is better adapted even to languages which do not use it today, but have to resort to digraphs or glyphs with diacritics Take a look at the Cyrillic section of Unicode to see your trivially provable claim being trivially disproven. You'll see all the same digraphs, glyphs, accents, graves etc. as used in Latin scripts. It's also easy to see it easily disproven if you look a…

Most of the extra glyphs are for non-Slavic (Turk languages of Central Asia and Siberia). You see the same (and worse) in Latin Unicode pages — just look at how many variations of vowels 'a', 'i', or 'e' you have, consonants like 'c', 'z', 's'…

Re: Inventing Cyrillic (2024)

#26

Post by matusp »

Antibabelic wrote: post #2

Oddly, the article doesn't mention the most interesting part. Most scholars believe that Cyril and Methodius did not design Cyrillic, but instead something called Glagolitic.[0] Glagolitic very quickly got pushed out by what were essentially Greek letters. If you look at Bulgarian and Byzantine manuscripts from the time, they are almost impossible to tell apart, unless you know the languages. The reason for that is p…

Cyrillic is probably a successor to Glagolitic. Glagolitic was the first Slavic alphabet, but when they tried to use it in Bulgaria, it had all the UX problems you mentioned. What they did is replace most of the characters with their Greek counterparts, while keeping the Glagolitic writing system and some of the characters with no counterparts. Bulgaria was close to Byzantium, and people were more likely to know and use Greek letters already. Nevertheless, Cyril and Methodius should still get some recognition, as the shape of the letters is not as important as having the system to write down the Slavic language into letters.

Re: Inventing Cyrillic (2024)

#27

Post by ymolodtsov »

necovek wrote: post #21
Antibabelic wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, the parent post was clearly talking about Slavic languages, not "all the languages USSR forced cyrillic alphabet on", which were not Slavic and which required significant modifications to the alphabet.

Indeed: most notably, Croatian, Slovenian, Bosnian, Serbian and Montenegrin are all unambiguous with Cyrillic, but Latin script dominates, even in officially Cyrillic-first Serbia. Again, it is seen as a political tool (pro-West or pro-Russia), when Cyrillic is technically better suited (there is certainly history as well, but that's very mixed up in the region). Again, I am saying this as someone who has worked to i…

Serbia is still mostly Cyrillic though. It's a very interesting experiment since Croatia isn't and the languages are basically the same.

Re: Inventing Cyrillic (2024)

#28

Post by gibber878 »

necovek wrote: post #17
orbital-decay wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No idea where you're getting it from, Germans are Nemci in Russian as well. It's rather "unable to speak the language ", meant for all foreigners but later stuck to Germans, presumably because German traders were the most common foreigners.

Apologies, it was mostly from running across different Russian maps with Германия that I took it as such (in Serbian it is Немачка). I stand corrected! Nem/нем literally means "mute" in Serbian, perhaps it's a latter evolution per region either way.

It seems to me that you have entirely discredited yourself. You confidently make claims about the Russian language but don't even know the most basic thing about the point you were making.

Re: Inventing Cyrillic (2024)

#29

Post by adrian_b »

culebron21 wrote: post #3

This author is suggesting that Cyrillic is a sort of tool or weapon in the arms of the authority, and is imposed upon the people for purely political reasons. This is just false projection of modern politics onto old times. It's shameless propaganda. In reality, at the time, it was the Eastern Christian church that was more liberal than Rome. Rome insisted every local church make services in Latin, and didn't transla…

Cyrillic has been indeed frequently used as a weapon, even if usually not by the Church, but by Tsars or by the Soviet state. Even the Eastern Christian Church, while it allowed various local alphabets, most of which were derived from the Greek alphabet, it was much less tolerant with the Latin alphabet or anything else that could be influenced by the Catholic Church, which was seen as a hostile competitor.

The Russians have forced most of the people they have subjugated (except for the 3 Baltic countries) to switch their writing system to Cyrillic, regardless whether they had previously used Latin, Arabic or other alphabets. This happened both during the time of the Russian Empire and of the Soviet Union.

This was very intentional, to make difficult for the younger people to read any books from before the Russian occupation, if they succeeded to find such books.

This was coupled to a system of education were people were taught in schools a falsified history, were the Russian invaders were presented as liberators and where it was claimed that everything good in science and technology had been discovered or invented by some unknown Russians instead of those about whom the Western "imperialists" say that they were the discoverers/inventors.

Re: Inventing Cyrillic (2024)

#30

Post by acadapter »

Antibabelic wrote: post #9
necovek wrote: post #5

This is an article with a long introduction and then jumps straight to the point in one, final paragraph: Russia is abusing it for political messaging again. While yes, any tool will be abused like this, it really is also a tool to best codify spoken language of the Slavs (in a sense, it is trivially provable that Cyrillic script is better adapted even to languages which do not use it today, but have to resort to dig…

"Slav" deriving from the Slavic term for "word" is something of a false etymology that was invented in the 19th century. It is implausible on philological grounds: you'd expect a different vowel in this word if this were the case, and the suffix *-ninъ is only otherwise used in terms derived from place names. It is more likely[0] that the term derives from some toponym. This is in line with how tribal names tend to w…

False etymology? You can roll back sound changes further to *ḱlew- in Proto-Indo-European

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-Eur...

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