Inventing Cyrillic (2024) • Hacker News Board

Re: Inventing Cyrillic (2024)

#71

Post by troupo » Fri, May 08, 2026, 4:55 PM UTC

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…

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."

Re: Inventing Cyrillic (2024)

#72

Post by cynicalsecurity » Fri, May 08, 2026, 5:14 PM UTC

Poles and Czechs are happy they dodged that bullet.

Re: Inventing Cyrillic (2024)

#73

Post by anonymars » Fri, May 08, 2026, 5:53 PM UTC

troupo wrote: post #65

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.

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?

None of those are digraphs or have diacritics, each is a single letter/character

Compare with:

Š/S (Š = S + diacritic)

Nj (this "letter" is made up of two other letters)

Re: Inventing Cyrillic (2024)

#74

Post by gostsamo » Fri, May 08, 2026, 5:55 PM UTC

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 comes from slovo == слово which means word or speech, a.k.a slavs are people who can talk to each other which is a pattern in many other ethnic groups about differentiating between themselves and outsiders. Немци or mutes are those who cannot speak the language.

Re: Inventing Cyrillic (2024)

#75

Post by d_silin » Fri, May 08, 2026, 6:06 PM UTC

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"

Re: Inventing Cyrillic (2024)

#76

Post by mistrial9 » Fri, May 08, 2026, 6:12 PM UTC

adrian_b wrote: post #46

lovegrenoble wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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…

While the Russian army was the main force in the war against the Turkish empire, in the beginning it was close to losing the war, so it had to request help from the Romanian Principates. Only the combined Russian-Romanian forces have succeeded to defeat the Turkish army, so Russia does not have alone the merit for making Bulgaria independent. Moreover, Bulgaria was very lucky that Romania was interposed between it an…

this topic today, here, is on literacy, writing and the history of writing

Re: Inventing Cyrillic (2024)

#77

Post by pavel_lishin » Fri, May 08, 2026, 6:13 PM UTC

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"

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".

Re: Inventing Cyrillic (2024)

#78

Post by pavel_lishin » Fri, May 08, 2026, 6:24 PM UTC

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…

I always thought it was probable that it came from the same root as the word for "glory" - слава - as in, we're the glorious people.

Re: Inventing Cyrillic (2024)

#79

Post by not_only » Fri, May 08, 2026, 6:24 PM UTC

konart wrote: post #52

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.

>Nem/нем literally means "mute" in Serbian, Same in Russian нем\немой - mute немота - muteness But yes, we do use Germany for country's name :)

Neamț (pl. nemți), pronounced something like neamtz/nemtzi is a German person in Romanian too.

Re: Inventing Cyrillic (2024)

#80

Post by d_silin » Fri, May 08, 2026, 6:25 PM UTC

pavel_lishin wrote: post #77

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"

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".

Yeah, it is just фe most aesфetically pleasing letter for фis case.