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"The latter would have been a much better fit for the sounds in the language." The Cyrillic alphabet as originally developed for Old Church Slavonic lacks seve
by Mediterraneo10 9y ago
"The latter would have been a much better fit for the sounds in the language."
The Cyrillic alphabet as originally developed for Old Church Slavonic lacks several sounds of Polish, namely the velarized /l/ (which has now become a semivowel /w/ except in peripheral dialects), and the palatalized affricates /ź/ and /ć/.
If you are a Russian speaker, you might think that Cyrillic could represent palatalized sounds by use of the soft sign, but that it not what the soft sign was actually used for originally. It was meant to represent the front reduced vowel /ĭ/ before the fall of the yers. So, Russian choose to represent its phonology by extending the Cyrillic alphabet in a way that was originally unintended, while Polish chose to represent its phonology by extending the Latin alphabet. How is either of these choices better than the other?
- int_19h 9y agoWorth noting that Serbian did its own thing, and added new Cyrillic letters for palatized L and N as separate letters Љ and Њ, (which are obviously digraphs of Л and Н with Ь). Although that's a late 19th century invention.
- Mediterraneo10 9y agoYes, modern Serbian orthography only did so in the end because Vuk Karadžić was intentionally following the example of Russian.
- int_19h 9y agoAh, but it's not really an example of Russian in that sense, since he made them separate distinct letters rather than reusing Ь as a modifier, as Russian did. So semantically a rather different approach that just looks similar because it appropriated the shape.