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Inventing Cyrillic (2024)

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Re: Inventing Cyrillic (2024)

#91

Post by foobarian »

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…

The unique quirk with South Slavic languages is the linguistic work e.g. associated with Vuk Karadžić [1] which resulted in a cleaned up purely phonetic alphabet. This was done across the region and ended up getting plumbed through both alphabets, so e.g. the Croatians/Slovenes write in latin but with a handful of special characters for the unique sounds like "š" or the double-letter characters "dž" "lj", which also map 1-1 to stuff on the Serbian Cyrillic side.

It's the kind of legacy cleanup you love to see :-)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vuk_Karad%C5%BEi%C4%87

Re: Inventing Cyrillic (2024)

#92

Post by foobarian »

troupo wrote: post #89
anonymars wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

> None of those are digraphs or have diacritics, each is a single letter/character Okay, you got me, these don't have diacritics, but other Slavic languages do. Unicode committee decided that some of these are separate letters (Ѓ, Й, Ё etc.) and some are not (Ў), but still doesn't make these "trivially provable to suit Slavic languages better". > Nj (this "letter" is made up of two other letters) Indeed it is. Invent…

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

Re: Inventing Cyrillic (2024)

#93

Post by cloudie78 »

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 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.

Missing context:

What you’re talking about is Likbez - Soviet program to eliminate illiteracy started as soon after the revolution in 1917 that overthrew the tsar as the majority of the population was in fact illiterate, at around 23% or so literacy.

So you’re saying that they re-educated an illiterate population to stop writing in their native alphabet and instead in Cyrillic? In forced re-education camps?

Or am I missing something here?

Re: Inventing Cyrillic (2024)

#94

Post by TFNA »

culebron21 wrote: post #37
adrian_b wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 these languages never had a Latin-alphabet phase.)

But in the USSR, official doctrine required crediting the Bolsheviks with the development of minority-language writing, and it became taboo to mention all the pre-1917 developments. Only around the time of glasnost and perestroika was this era revisited in Soviet scholarship, but many ordinary Russians remained unaware they had been taught a myth.

Your claims elsewhere here about Uzbek are out of date. I have traveled extensively in UZ and, as an OSM mapper, I am constantly looking at signage. There is exceedingly little Cyrillic left in most of the country. So little that when one spots it, it seems a bit of a novelty.

Re: Inventing Cyrillic (2024)

#97

Post by LfLxfxxLxfxx »

AndriyKunitsyn wrote: post #96
cynicalsecurity wrote: post #72

Poles and Czechs are happy they dodged that bullet.

And I'm happy that they are happy, but Czech keyboards have so many letters they have to use the number row, and Polish words, as beautiful as they are, have a lot of digraphs.

and even a tetragraph: szcz=щ

Re: Inventing Cyrillic (2024)

#98

Post by troupo »

foobarian wrote: post #92
troupo wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> None of those are digraphs or have diacritics, each is a single letter/character Okay, you got me, these don't have diacritics, but other Slavic languages do. Unicode committee decided that some of these are separate letters (Ѓ, Й, Ё etc.) and some are not (Ў), but still doesn't make these "trivially provable to suit Slavic languages better". > Nj (this "letter" is made up of two other letters) Indeed it is. Invent…

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)

Re: Inventing Cyrillic (2024)

#99

Post by AndriyKunitsyn »

necovek wrote: post #63
ymolodtsov wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There are so many Russian émigrés in Belgrade that you hear Russian more than Serbian in the city center.

Re: Inventing Cyrillic (2024)

#100

Post by foobarian »

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 )

Now that you mention it, there were also several iterations of the original Glagolitic, the angular being my favorite :-)
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