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Inventing Cyrillic (2024)

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Re: Inventing Cyrillic (2024)

#101

Post by [deleted] »

troupo wrote: post #98
foobarian wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of this was a top-down overhaul of the writing system in the 19th century. Before that it was an awful mess and people just "vibe-wrote" the weird Slavic sounds using latin how they saw fit; try reading some old writings from that era. Or read some modern Polish or Czech text :-D

So the original claim of "is trivially provable that Cyrillic script is better adapted even to languages which do not use it today" boils down to "in the 19th Century they cleaned up the writing system" (similarly, there was a top-down cleanup of Russian, with Bolsheviks removing ѣ,ѳ, і, ѵ and ъ version of yer )

[deleted]

Re: Inventing Cyrillic (2024)

#102

Post by tkot »

necovek wrote: post #62
tkot wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 i…

> 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.

It's the same with Unicode encoding of Cyrillic letters - й (U+0439) can be written as й (и U+0438 + ◌̆ U+0306)

> 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.

Based on your description it seems that the root cause of the issues is using two letters to represent the digraph - for example N (U+004E) J (U+004A) instead of NJ (U+01CA) - and the sorting issues would be identical if people typed Н (U+041D) Ь (U+042C)instead of Њ (U+040A).

What's the reason for the digraph being substituted by 2 letters in the first case more often than in the second case?

Re: Inventing Cyrillic (2024)

#103

Post by nikolay »

The Greekification and Russification of history is disgusting! Cyril and Methodius were Bulgarian; there's plenty of evidence about it, and they created the Glagolic alphabet, while the Cyrillic alphabet is 100% Bulgarian-made without any doubt. Not to mention that Old Bulgarian was the official language in Russia for a while - all this confirmed by honest Russian scholars. But, hey, can the Soviets allow a small country like Bulgaria to be so important for its culture, right? But it's disgusting how "Orthodox" nations are being so nationalistic, love to erase, and rewrite history. That's not Orthodoxy!

Do you know that the first concentration camp in Europe was actually in Greece [0], and Bulgarian priests were put in it and died? So Orthodox, right?

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleo_Trikeri

Re: Inventing Cyrillic (2024)

#104

Post by jltsiren »

nikolay wrote: post #103

The Greekification and Russification of history is disgusting! Cyril and Methodius were Bulgarian; there's plenty of evidence about it, and they created the Glagolic alphabet, while the Cyrillic alphabet is 100% Bulgarian-made without any doubt. Not to mention that Old Bulgarian was the official language in Russia for a while - all this confirmed by honest Russian scholars. But, hey, can the Soviets allow a small cou…

Cyril and Methodius were Roman citizens, as was their father. Whatever ethnic roots they had was a secondary concern, much in the same way as it is in the US today.

Re: Inventing Cyrillic (2024)

#105

Post by Rendello »

d_silin wrote: post #75

Cyrillic letters can be used to spice up English. Imagine having just one letter for "ch", "sh" and "th"! "She relaxed in the chair under a tree's shade" "Шe relaxed in фe чair under a tree's шade"

You might enjoy Reddit's "constructed orthography" subreddit:

https://old.reddit.com/r/conorthography/top/

Or you can take the plunge and make your own complete script:

https://old.reddit.com/r/neography/top/

And if you're still not satisfied and want to spend the rest of your life making a language that no one else will care to learn:

https://old.reddit.com/r/conlangs/

Re: Inventing Cyrillic (2024)

#106

Post by gibber878 »

necovek wrote: post #61
gibber878 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It takes tremendous study to arrive at a conclusion and your inability to get _basic_ details correct, that your narrative depends on, betray that you have not done that study.

You are not my conversing partner. You are simply someone who emits nonsense onto the internet and people should be aware of you willingness to confabulate reality.

Re: Inventing Cyrillic (2024)

#107

Post by armenarmen »

adrian_b wrote: post #29
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 Russi…

The Communists standardized our (Armenian) spelling a bit but never forced us to get rid of our letters. Likewise with the Georgians.

Re: Inventing Cyrillic (2024)

#108

Post by armenarmen »

tliltocatl wrote: post #85
pavel_lishin wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But ф is absolutely not the sound that "th" makes. In fact, in Russian, at least, we don't have a "th" sound. But this is better than using Д in place of "A".

It absolutely doesn't as pronounced now, yet Thomas is Фома, Theodor is Феодор, etc. Just like Hertz is Герц, even through Г and H are as far from each other as one can get.

That h -> г always confused me when “Х” is right there

Re: Inventing Cyrillic (2024)

#109

Post by watwut »

secondary_op wrote: post #64

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

Oh yeah, abandoning nazi groupthing site for the one where you dont get that crap and choose your own feed is clear sign of something bad.

And yes, gender theory has uses in medieval world study. After all, medieval women existed.

Re: Inventing Cyrillic (2024)

#110

Post by tliltocatl »

armenarmen wrote: post #108
tliltocatl wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It absolutely doesn't as pronounced now, yet Thomas is Фома, Theodor is Феодор, etc. Just like Hertz is Герц, even through Г and H are as far from each other as one can get.

That h -> г always confused me when “Х” is right there

Х is ch in Bach rather than h, and apparently, anglophones can distinguish those. I can't.
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