5 ms·

> Basically, their choices are keeping Cyrillic, and therefore implicitly culturally aligning themselves with Russia (or, to phrase it in a different way, expos

> Basically, their choices are keeping Cyrillic, and therefore implicitly culturally aligning themselves with Russia (or, to phrase it in a different way, exposing themselves to Russian cultural dominance); or switching to Latin, and implicitly culturally aligning themselves with Turkey. Or, they can, simply make both official and let the people decide like we did in Serbia centuries ago. Most nationalists or people aligned with Russian views use Cyrillic here and others use Latin. Having to learn both at young age (7 for Cyrillic, 8 for Latin) gives you more options in life. You can easily read anything on the Internet and learn western languages. On the other hand, you can go to Russia or Bulgaria and quickly find your way around. One can even argue that this opens up your views, so when you see Greek for the first time, it doesn't look like a bunch of weird characters but you start seeing similarities (esp. with capital letters) and it's makes you want to learn the ones that seem completely alien (like Sigma or Omega).

Kostic 10y ago
> Or, they can, simply make both official and let the people decide like we did in Serbia centuries ago. I disagree because current synchronic digraphia in Serbia is a mess. You have people using Cyrillic script in Latin documents, Latin script in Cyrillic documents. You have people religiously using Cyrillic and Latin. People who prefer Latin and make fun of people using Cyrillic. You also have a large percentage of uneducated people online who use Latin without diacritics (secer, solja, casa instead of šećer, šolja, čaša). Learning English (and it's alphabet) gives you mush more options in life than being a speaker of a language which uses a Latin based script (or Cyrillic, or any other script).
- babuskov 10y ago
  > You also have a large percentage of uneducated people online So do all the other countries and they make different kinds of "sins" regarding to proper writing. > who use Latin without diacritics (secer, solja, casa instead of šećer, šolja, čaša). This is mostly because we didn't have proper keyboard support in leading operating systems for a very long time and many people got used to typing like that. Also, a lot of hardware is still sold without proper keyboard layout (you can change it in software, but then you have to remember which of the curly brackets is used for what letter). On mobile devices, typing with diacritics is much slower. These are all problems of Serbia being a small market and software solutions by big western companies for our use cases are often sub-par. It isn't a product of having digraphia.
  - foepys 10y ago
    Shouldn't it be the opposite if there is a good dictionary for autocorrect? Or is there just no good dictionary?
    - Asooka 10y ago
      Autocorrect for Slavic languages is a somewhat hard problem due to all the different conjugations (wrong word?) you can impose on a word. In English for instance, a noun can be in singular form, or in plural form. In Slavic languages, it can be in many forms - (singular, plural, dual) * (all the cases) * ("a", "the" -- if the language has the distinction). Adjectives then get all these, but times the three genders they need to agree with. Verbs can be conjugated in many ways, too. So a good autocorrect system needs to be grammar-aware to know that the word you're correcting is e.g. an adjective that's agreeing with a feminine singular noun in the accusative case. None of them do that from what I've seen. It's not all bad, since you mostly know what you're trying to write and just picking the closest word by levenstein distance does the job, but it can definitely be done better. One downside is you need to have every variant of every word in the dictionary which kind of makes it needlessly large in size, and I've sometimes found variants missing and had to add them.
      - foepys 10y ago
        I see, thank you for the insight. It seems to be a similar but much harder problem to the German dictionaries which don't know how to deal with compound words. Android is also missing a lot of forms for verbs in second person singular.
        dahauns 10y ago
        Bah yes, this drives me nuts. I don't get it, compound words aren't rocket science, and even some level of grammar awareness shouldn't be so hard considering the rather low expectations towards autocorrect when it comes to correctness.
        10y ago
- dragandj 10y ago
  Or, you know, people do a lot of typing in English or on English keyboard (when programming), and don't care or even want to switch keyboards to type something with diacritics.
- rubber_duck 10y ago
  Is your name Kostic or Kostić ? There's one reason. The other is that typing out diacritics is a chore and people get what you mean without them anyway. Especially for programmers - we do most typing in English which doesn't use them, it's not in my "muscle memory". I am talking about casual messaging - for formal writing you probably do come off as illiterate if you don't bother to use them.
  - pawelmi 10y ago
    For Polish (on computers) we have a keyboard layout called "polish programmer" widely adopted many years ago affectively making the original "polish typewriter" layout (that mapped diacritics to separate keys) almost extinct. For typing diacritics AltGr is used (eg. ą = AltGr+a). Typing without diacritics is considered clumsy at least within the groups of people I interact with. On mobile it is a bit more relaxed, but the dictionary autocorrection is sort of OK. Conjugation, declension etc. complicates things, but you have the stem + most common suffix autocorrected, so usually it is a matter of erasing last 1-2 letters and changing them if needed. Also the Markov chain alike logic of autosuggestion quite often is right with the inflection.
  - Kostic 10y ago
    Kostić but I use Kostic when I write English. If I use Serbian Latin (when I communicate with Croatians, for example) I would write down Kostić. The problem with not writing out diacritics is that Serbian is a language with a fully phonetic alphabets. You don't need to ever guess how words are written or read. You lose greatest feature of the Serbian language if you don't use diacritics, when using the Latin keyboard. I shouldn't, ever, guess how a Serbian word is read when I see it.
    - kwhitefoot 10y ago
      > a language with a fully phonetic alphabet So there are no dialects or regional accents? My Norwegian teacher tried to tell me the same thing thirty years ago. For Norwegian it is manifestly untrue because pronunciation varies from valley to valley.
- vsl 10y ago
  This is not "uneducated" people, this is people getting used to type in like that in the 90s and not loosing the habit - or possibly simply perfecting the speed. It's not about keyboards only, but about software simply not having support for non-ASCII characters. Even in 2017, there's too many American companies that won't accept non-ASCII names (even like mine, which fits into Latin1). It's the same with Czechs: 15-20 years ago, typing without diacritics was perfectly normal. Some people still do. So ,no. Not uneducated.
aorth 10y ago
> On the other hand, you can go to Russia or Bulgaria and quickly find your way around. One can even argue that this opens up your views, so when you see Greek for the first time, it doesn't look like a bunch of weird characters Yes, as an American who has learned Cyrillic via Bulgarian, I find that traveling in Macedonia, Serbia, Ukraine, etc is much easier because I can read this script (not to mention the similarity of many Slavic words). I'm definitely a fan of learning languages with different scripts—hell, it even helps you as a programmer when testing your input fields, layout, etc! I understand the social and political motivations behind wanting to change the script, but I'd be sad if I didn't get to see Kazakhstan with the beautiful кирилица (Cyrillic).
- mgbmtl 10y ago
  Still though, Cyrillic was imposed on Kazakhstan and was adopted fairly recently, it's not the same in Bulgaria. Fully agree on the rest though. And nice blog! И аз съм живял в България за няколко години. :)
dotemacs 10y ago
> Or, they can, simply make both official and let the people decide like we did in Serbia centuries ago. Not true. It wasn't decided centuries ago. But it was done in 1954. in order to distance Yugoslav communists from Stalin's USSR. In fact it was done to placate the US. In fact this move by Kazakhstan, where they are courting the favour of the West, was done by Serbia 63 years ago. > Most nationalists or people aligned with Russian views use Cyrillic here and others use Latin. This sentence alone makes it painfully obvious of how things are in Serbia: little countries aren't allowed to have history and its citizens self respect. Ivo Andric put it well: "Prolonged slavery and bad rule, can confuse and distort the understanding of a people so that the common sense and their judgement weaken and become twisted. Such disturbed people can no longer distinguish good from evil, but their own benefit from the obvious harm."

Kostic 10y ago

> Or, they can, simply make both official and let the people decide like we did in Serbia centuries ago. I disagree because current synchronic digraphia in Serbia is a mess. You have people using Cyrillic script in Latin documents, Latin script in Cyrillic documents. You have people religiously using Cyrillic and Latin. People who prefer Latin and make fun of people using Cyrillic. You also have a large percentage of uneducated people online who use Latin without diacritics (secer, solja, casa instead of šećer, šolja, čaša). Learning English (and it's alphabet) gives you mush more options in life than being a speaker of a language which uses a Latin based script (or Cyrillic, or any other script).

babuskov 10y ago
> You also have a large percentage of uneducated people online So do all the other countries and they make different kinds of "sins" regarding to proper writing. > who use Latin without diacritics (secer, solja, casa instead of šećer, šolja, čaša). This is mostly because we didn't have proper keyboard support in leading operating systems for a very long time and many people got used to typing like that. Also, a lot of hardware is still sold without proper keyboard layout (you can change it in software, but then you have to remember which of the curly brackets is used for what letter). On mobile devices, typing with diacritics is much slower. These are all problems of Serbia being a small market and software solutions by big western companies for our use cases are often sub-par. It isn't a product of having digraphia.
- foepys 10y ago
  Shouldn't it be the opposite if there is a good dictionary for autocorrect? Or is there just no good dictionary?
  - Asooka 10y ago
    Autocorrect for Slavic languages is a somewhat hard problem due to all the different conjugations (wrong word?) you can impose on a word. In English for instance, a noun can be in singular form, or in plural form. In Slavic languages, it can be in many forms - (singular, plural, dual) * (all the cases) * ("a", "the" -- if the language has the distinction). Adjectives then get all these, but times the three genders they need to agree with. Verbs can be conjugated in many ways, too. So a good autocorrect system needs to be grammar-aware to know that the word you're correcting is e.g. an adjective that's agreeing with a feminine singular noun in the accusative case. None of them do that from what I've seen. It's not all bad, since you mostly know what you're trying to write and just picking the closest word by levenstein distance does the job, but it can definitely be done better. One downside is you need to have every variant of every word in the dictionary which kind of makes it needlessly large in size, and I've sometimes found variants missing and had to add them.
    - foepys 10y ago
      I see, thank you for the insight. It seems to be a similar but much harder problem to the German dictionaries which don't know how to deal with compound words. Android is also missing a lot of forms for verbs in second person singular.
      - dahauns 10y ago
        Bah yes, this drives me nuts. I don't get it, compound words aren't rocket science, and even some level of grammar awareness shouldn't be so hard considering the rather low expectations towards autocorrect when it comes to correctness.
        10y ago
dragandj 10y ago
Or, you know, people do a lot of typing in English or on English keyboard (when programming), and don't care or even want to switch keyboards to type something with diacritics.
rubber_duck 10y ago
Is your name Kostic or Kostić ? There's one reason. The other is that typing out diacritics is a chore and people get what you mean without them anyway. Especially for programmers - we do most typing in English which doesn't use them, it's not in my "muscle memory". I am talking about casual messaging - for formal writing you probably do come off as illiterate if you don't bother to use them.
- pawelmi 10y ago
  For Polish (on computers) we have a keyboard layout called "polish programmer" widely adopted many years ago affectively making the original "polish typewriter" layout (that mapped diacritics to separate keys) almost extinct. For typing diacritics AltGr is used (eg. ą = AltGr+a). Typing without diacritics is considered clumsy at least within the groups of people I interact with. On mobile it is a bit more relaxed, but the dictionary autocorrection is sort of OK. Conjugation, declension etc. complicates things, but you have the stem + most common suffix autocorrected, so usually it is a matter of erasing last 1-2 letters and changing them if needed. Also the Markov chain alike logic of autosuggestion quite often is right with the inflection.
- Kostic 10y ago
  Kostić but I use Kostic when I write English. If I use Serbian Latin (when I communicate with Croatians, for example) I would write down Kostić. The problem with not writing out diacritics is that Serbian is a language with a fully phonetic alphabets. You don't need to ever guess how words are written or read. You lose greatest feature of the Serbian language if you don't use diacritics, when using the Latin keyboard. I shouldn't, ever, guess how a Serbian word is read when I see it.
  - kwhitefoot 10y ago
    > a language with a fully phonetic alphabet So there are no dialects or regional accents? My Norwegian teacher tried to tell me the same thing thirty years ago. For Norwegian it is manifestly untrue because pronunciation varies from valley to valley.
vsl 10y ago
This is not "uneducated" people, this is people getting used to type in like that in the 90s and not loosing the habit - or possibly simply perfecting the speed. It's not about keyboards only, but about software simply not having support for non-ASCII characters. Even in 2017, there's too many American companies that won't accept non-ASCII names (even like mine, which fits into Latin1). It's the same with Czechs: 15-20 years ago, typing without diacritics was perfectly normal. Some people still do. So ,no. Not uneducated.

aorth 10y ago

> On the other hand, you can go to Russia or Bulgaria and quickly find your way around. One can even argue that this opens up your views, so when you see Greek for the first time, it doesn't look like a bunch of weird characters Yes, as an American who has learned Cyrillic via Bulgarian, I find that traveling in Macedonia, Serbia, Ukraine, etc is much easier because I can read this script (not to mention the similarity of many Slavic words). I'm definitely a fan of learning languages with different scripts—hell, it even helps you as a programmer when testing your input fields, layout, etc! I understand the social and political motivations behind wanting to change the script, but I'd be sad if I didn't get to see Kazakhstan with the beautiful кирилица (Cyrillic).

mgbmtl 10y ago
Still though, Cyrillic was imposed on Kazakhstan and was adopted fairly recently, it's not the same in Bulgaria. Fully agree on the rest though. And nice blog! И аз съм живял в България за няколко години. :)

dotemacs 10y ago

> Or, they can, simply make both official and let the people decide like we did in Serbia centuries ago. Not true. It wasn't decided centuries ago. But it was done in 1954. in order to distance Yugoslav communists from Stalin's USSR. In fact it was done to placate the US. In fact this move by Kazakhstan, where they are courting the favour of the West, was done by Serbia 63 years ago. > Most nationalists or people aligned with Russian views use Cyrillic here and others use Latin. This sentence alone makes it painfully obvious of how things are in Serbia: little countries aren't allowed to have history and its citizens self respect. Ivo Andric put it well: "Prolonged slavery and bad rule, can confuse and distort the understanding of a people so that the common sense and their judgement weaken and become twisted. Such disturbed people can no longer distinguish good from evil, but their own benefit from the obvious harm."