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Inventing Cyrillic (2024)

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Re: Inventing Cyrillic (2024)

#111

Post by culebron21 »

TFNA wrote: post #94
culebron21 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funnily, you don't know or omit the details yourself. Russian Empire didn't give the conquered nations the alphabet, but USSR did, as part of supporting local nationalists (surprize!). And it first gave them the Latin script. Secondly, using different scripts for the same language isn't hard. Serbs use both Cyrillic and Latin interchangeably, and many people used Latin traslit in computers and phones when their codep…

> Russian Empire didn't give the conquered nations the alphabet, but USSR did, as part of supporting local nationalists. Many languages of Russia got their alphabets already in the late nineteenth century or around the 1906 rebellion. If you look at publications then in Mari, Chuvash, Ossetic, etc. the Cyrillic orthography already has most of the special characters that were used in the Soviet era. (Moreover, many of…

> Many languages of Russia got their alphabets already in the late nineteenth century or around the 1906 rebellion. If you look at publications then in Mari, Chuvash, Ossetic, etc. the Cyrillic orthography already has most of the special characters that were used in the Soviet era.

Good point. So, it's not evil Commies that forced Cyrillic upon them. :)

Regarding Uzbekistan -- well, let's assume Latin won. I wonder how did it make them go off the influence of Russia? Until 2024 attacks and more anti-immigration push, they were quite in orbit, despite the fact that they got rid of this "propaganda and influence weapon" of Cyrillic.

Re: Inventing Cyrillic (2024)

#112

Post by nikolay »

jltsiren wrote: post #104
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.

People always try to think about the past in today's terms. No, it was's anything like today's America and Roman citizenship wasn't anything like today's citizienship of a country either. Ethnicity did matter more back then than it does today. Tell me, what did "Greek" mean back then and did it mean anything and were they Greeks? If it's the citizenship that matters, why so many Roman citizens presented as "Greeks" today?

Re: Inventing Cyrillic (2024)

#113

Post by jltsiren »

nikolay wrote: post #112
jltsiren wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

People always try to think about the past in today's terms. No, it was's anything like today's America and Roman citizenship wasn't anything like today's citizienship of a country either. Ethnicity did matter more back then than it does today. Tell me, what did "Greek" mean back then and did it mean anything and were they Greeks? If it's the citizenship that matters, why so many Roman citizens presented as "Greeks" t…

Greek identity is a 19th century creation. People of the East Roman Empire, as well as their descendants in the Ottoman Empire, considered themselves Romans. To them, Greeks (or Hellenes) were the pagans who lived in the region in the distant past. Around the Greek War of Independence, Greek identity started slowly gaining ground. First among the educated elites, partly due to Western philhellenism, and later among the common people.

You can still probably find some older people in rural Greece who consider themselves both Greek and Roman.

As for ancient Rome, it's pretty famous for elevating citizenship over ethnicity. Much in the same way as the US, and unlike most other modern countries. Assimilating conquered peoples and turning them into Romans was a major factor in their success. Other empires that built themselves around a dominant ethnic group were more short-lived. They had to rely excessively on the favored ethnicity for their military needs. Eventually that ethnic group was depleted due to constant wars, and someone else took over.

Re: Inventing Cyrillic (2024)

#114

Post by BAHKA »

revengerwizard wrote: post #38
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 used as a political weapon under the Soviet Union. For example, in soviet Moldova it was mandatory to learn to read and write cyrillic at schools. They effectively wanted to eradicate the local language and culture in favor of russian.

Being a person grew up in Soviet Moldova I can't stop laughing at the nonsence you have just produced. In 1980s we had two types of schools - those with education in Russian and those with education in Moldavian language. "Russian" schools had obligatory 4 academic hours for Moldavian language classes, "Moldavian" schools had same amount of hours for Russian language classes. All banners, all documents, everything was written in two languages - it was OBLIGATORY. There was no single official document without two language versions of the same text. And btw, educate yourself - first alphabet of Medieval Moldova was... CYRILLIC!

When Moldova Adopted CyrillicMedieval Era: The Cyrillic script arrived between the 9th and 10th centuries. It was introduced alongside Christianity, primarily through the influence of the First Bulgarian Empire. This script became the official writing system for the Principality of Moldavia when it was founded in the 14th century.

Oldest Romanian document was written in Cyrillic - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neac%C8%99u%27s_letter

Re: Inventing Cyrillic (2024)

#115

Post by revengerwizard »

BAHKA wrote: post #114
revengerwizard wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cyrillic has been used as a political weapon under the Soviet Union. For example, in soviet Moldova it was mandatory to learn to read and write cyrillic at schools. They effectively wanted to eradicate the local language and culture in favor of russian.

Being a person grew up in Soviet Moldova I can't stop laughing at the nonsence you have just produced. In 1980s we had two types of schools - those with education in Russian and those with education in Moldavian language. "Russian" schools had obligatory 4 academic hours for Moldavian language classes, "Moldavian" schools had same amount of hours for Russian language classes. All banners, all documents, everything wa…

My parents also grew up in Soviet Moldova, I don't know what you want to educate me about.

The Soviet Union specifically pushed the idea that "Moldovan" was separate from Romanian and imposed the Moldovan Cyrillic alphabet in the MSSR while Romania itself used the Latin script. This was of course only one part of a broader [0] russification effort, alongside deportations and population transfers.

I'm also not sure how Cyrillic having been adopted in medieval times is relevant to this topic, unless you're trying to justify or connect older usages.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russification#Bessarabia/Moldo...

Re: Inventing Cyrillic (2024)

#116

Post by necovek »

troupo wrote: post #71
necovek wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

So, it's not "trivially provable that Cyrillic is better suited to Slavic languages". But that "the symbols representtion we settled on in software has some difficulties disambiguatuong some, but not all cases of symbol use in a language, a problem that is not unique to Slavic languages, see Dutch IJ, Turkish ı/i, German ß etc."

Decoupling choice of script from "symbols representation" is a weird approach — this is how people type them out.

Yes, problems are not unique to Slavic languages, but at least for _some_ Slavic languages, Cyrillic has been taken to the most simplified form that is _accidentally_ easy to process on a computer too.

But yes, I was a bit too absolutist, I agree — as ever, everything is more nuanced, so perhaps not "trivially provable", but in "closer to full differentiation in graphical representation while being simple and unambiguous to process on a computer"?

Re: Inventing Cyrillic (2024)

#117

Post by necovek »

tkot wrote: post #102
necovek wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You are absolutely right that there are examples where Cyrillic as used by Slavic languages is not perfectly "clean" either, and it's certainly a lot more nuanced than my simplistic and absolutist claim.

Perhaps people misunderstood me: it is not a _technical_ property of Cyrillic (vs Latin) script per se, but a combination of historical setting and ability to adapt the script to the (smaller) group's language. This has led to Cyrillic scripts being _developed_ to be technically more suitable for Slavic languages, because where Latin script was used, there was not as much liberty (perceived or real).

I mean, either is just a set of pictograms representing parts of spoken words, and obviously, if developed similarly, there is no difference between them. But for Slavic languages they were _not_ developed similarly, which is my point.

Re: Inventing Cyrillic (2024)

#118

Post by vldx »

lovegrenoble wrote: post #70
_hao wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I assume you’re targeting western audiences with all this BS, because you sound really out of depth to anyone from the Balkans/EE.

Re: Inventing Cyrillic (2024)

#119

Post by troupo »

necovek wrote: post #116
troupo wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, it's not "trivially provable that Cyrillic is better suited to Slavic languages". But that "the symbols representtion we settled on in software has some difficulties disambiguatuong some, but not all cases of symbol use in a language, a problem that is not unique to Slavic languages, see Dutch IJ, Turkish ı/i, German ß etc."

Decoupling choice of script from "symbols representation" is a weird approach — this is how people type them out. Yes, problems are not unique to Slavic languages, but at least for _some_ Slavic languages, Cyrillic has been taken to the most simplified form that is _accidentally_ easy to process on a computer too. But yes, I was a bit too absolutist, I agree — as ever, everything is more nuanced, so perhaps not "triv…

Most Latin-based scripts are just as unambiguous ;)

Re: Inventing Cyrillic (2024)

#120

Post by necovek »

troupo wrote: post #119
necovek wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Decoupling choice of script from "symbols representation" is a weird approach — this is how people type them out. Yes, problems are not unique to Slavic languages, but at least for _some_ Slavic languages, Cyrillic has been taken to the most simplified form that is _accidentally_ easy to process on a computer too. But yes, I was a bit too absolutist, I agree — as ever, everything is more nuanced, so perhaps not "triv…

Most Latin-based scripts are just as unambiguous ;)

But the point was if this holds true for Slavic languages: my claim was it does not, as supported by the discussion.
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