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Inventing Cyrillic (2024)

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Re: Inventing Cyrillic (2024)

#61

Post by necovek »

gibber878 wrote: post #28
necovek wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It seems that I was wrong only partially, and this was totally not the core of my point (they do call the country Germaniya).

If making one mistake discredits the entire take, I'd hate to be your conversing partner ever.

Re: Inventing Cyrillic (2024)

#62

Post by necovek »

tkot wrote: post #42
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…

> 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 digraphs or glyphs with diacritics — some are thus not using it to distance from a particular influence instead I've heard this claim many times but never the reasoning behind it - by what metric is "ш" su…

It's less pronounced with diacritics, but enter Unicode normal forms: you can represent š either as š, or s followed by a diacritic. When you want to compare two strings, you have to normalize them to ensure you are comparing apples to apples. I can guarantee most software is broken in that regard. For Cyrillic, it just works.

With digraphs (lj, nj, dž + sometimes dj for đ too), it's even worse. Even capitalization is ambiguous: sometimes it's Lj and other times it's LJ. Then you have words like konjugacija where nj is not a digraph.

Interestingly — and not many know this — Unicode includes separate codepoints for all of the digraphs too. While well-intentioned, it only makes the problem worse.

Digraphs are especially sucky when you try sorting strings in a phonebook order as LJ comes after L, so you've got ...LI, LK..., LZ, LJA... With exceptions, it is even worse.

Re: Inventing Cyrillic (2024)

#63

Post by necovek »

ymolodtsov wrote: post #27
necovek wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I invite you for a walk through Belgrade streets, maybe even with Google Street View. There will be Cyrillic in official signage, but ads and shop names will be predominately in Latin script. If there are some in Cyrillic, they are likely to be part of a newer "hipster" move to differentiate more for the tourists.

Re: Inventing Cyrillic (2024)

#64

Post by secondary_op »

Wouldn't trust anything about medieval or cultural from someone in general and in this case _mirelaivanova_ who is touched by oxford group think, who is abandon twitter in favor of bluesky, who talks about "the uses and possibilities of the gender theory in the study of medieval world" https://youtu.be/dK9qpHIWXRs?t=118

Re: Inventing Cyrillic (2024)

#65

Post by troupo »

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.

Since we're talking about Serbian below, here are some characters from Cyrillic Serbian Alphabet:

Ђ/ђ

Ћ/ћ

Љ/љ

Њ/њ

Џ/џ

Ј/ј

Various diacritical marks, digraph, a jod... What makes this Cyrillic more unambiguous than the Latin equivalents?

Re: Inventing Cyrillic (2024)

#66

Post by troupo »

ceedaxp wrote: post #25
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…

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'…

Even within Slavic languages there is plenty of weirdness: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48064121

Re: Inventing Cyrillic (2024)

#67

Post by lovegrenoble »

_hao wrote: post #60
lovegrenoble wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Bulgarians were “insulted” a second time after World War II, when - having forgotten about the Soviet submarines sunk and aircraft shot down by the Bulgarians, and having forgotten about the Bulgarian medical trains on the Eastern Front that had diligently cared for the soldiers of the Third Reich - and having forgotten about the towns and villages of the Non-Chernozem region that had been ravaged with the help o…

I don't know if you're willfully ignorant or actively spreading misinformation, but the USSR seized Bulgaria's gold reserves after the war and the following coup. They also seized the national archives, which are still not returned to this day. Everything you tout as being "given" by USSR was paid with Bulgaria's own funds! I really don't understand (French) communists (if you are in fact French, assuming from your b…

>> I don't know if you're willfully ignorant or actively spreading misinformation

In 1960, the banks of Great Britain, France, Germany, and Italy demanded early repayment of loans, a whopping $135 million. Thus, they provoked an economic crisis in Bulgaria. Over time, it had ballooned to an astronomical sum. If nothing else, Bulgaria had to pay off the enormous interest that had accumulated on those loans. The Soviet Union came to the aid - they bought (and at the London Stock Exchange rate) Bulgaria's gold reserves.

In accordance with a written request from the chairman of the People's Bank of the BNR, the USSR State Bank paid off Western loans by purchasing 22 tons of Bulgarian gold and 50 tons of silver. The payment of these assets was made in a convertible currency at the market rate. Moreover, Moscow undertook to support the Bulgarian economy by subsidizing it with the supply of petroleum products at prices significantly below market prices.

https://web.archive.org/web/20100408235132/http://www.blitz....

Re: Inventing Cyrillic (2024)

#68

Post by lovegrenoble »

lovegrenoble wrote: post #67
_hao wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if you're willfully ignorant or actively spreading misinformation, but the USSR seized Bulgaria's gold reserves after the war and the following coup. They also seized the national archives, which are still not returned to this day. Everything you tout as being "given" by USSR was paid with Bulgaria's own funds! I really don't understand (French) communists (if you are in fact French, assuming from your b…

>> I don't know if you're willfully ignorant or actively spreading misinformation In 1960, the banks of Great Britain, France, Germany, and Italy demanded early repayment of loans, a whopping $135 million. Thus, they provoked an economic crisis in Bulgaria. Over time, it had ballooned to an astronomical sum. If nothing else, Bulgaria had to pay off the enormous interest that had accumulated on those loans. The Soviet…

There are a few more points to add to what has been said above:

After the end of World War II, in accordance with the agreements signed at the 1947 Paris Peace Conference, Bulgaria - as an ally of Nazi Germany - was required to pay reparations totaling $70 million over an eight-year period. However, this is mere pocket change compared to the billion dollars that Greece, actively egged on by the British, wanted to squeeze out of Sofia! And it would have succeeded - had the USSR not intervened to stand up for its “brothers.”

Re: Inventing Cyrillic (2024)

#69

Post by _hao »

lovegrenoble wrote: post #67
_hao wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if you're willfully ignorant or actively spreading misinformation, but the USSR seized Bulgaria's gold reserves after the war and the following coup. They also seized the national archives, which are still not returned to this day. Everything you tout as being "given" by USSR was paid with Bulgaria's own funds! I really don't understand (French) communists (if you are in fact French, assuming from your b…

>> I don't know if you're willfully ignorant or actively spreading misinformation In 1960, the banks of Great Britain, France, Germany, and Italy demanded early repayment of loans, a whopping $135 million. Thus, they provoked an economic crisis in Bulgaria. Over time, it had ballooned to an astronomical sum. If nothing else, Bulgaria had to pay off the enormous interest that had accumulated on those loans. The Soviet…

Citing blitz.bg... That's like citing a soiled piece of toilet paper found in a public bathroom.

We can all cherry pick "facts", but history requires context. Your replies are all in bad faith. I'm done with this "discussion". To future readers - beware! This is how actual misinformation and disinformation works.

Re: Inventing Cyrillic (2024)

#70

Post by lovegrenoble »

_hao wrote: post #69
lovegrenoble wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> I don't know if you're willfully ignorant or actively spreading misinformation In 1960, the banks of Great Britain, France, Germany, and Italy demanded early repayment of loans, a whopping $135 million. Thus, they provoked an economic crisis in Bulgaria. Over time, it had ballooned to an astronomical sum. If nothing else, Bulgaria had to pay off the enormous interest that had accumulated on those loans. The Soviet…

Citing blitz.bg... That's like citing a soiled piece of toilet paper found in a public bathroom. We can all cherry pick "facts", but history requires context. Your replies are all in bad faith. I'm done with this "discussion". To future readers - beware! This is how actual misinformation and disinformation works.

Mate, I can provide you with sources, but it would require you to dig deeper, to question what you’ve been taught, as it will reveal that our entire civilization is built on lies.

But it would truly require you to actually dig, look for real facts, ask critical questions, and realize that humanity - especially our Western civilization - has always sought to rewrite history.

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