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It's not only that Cyrillic is designed specifically for Slavic languages, but also that the general tradition around Cyrillic is to make up new letters when ad
by taejo 9y ago
It's not only that Cyrillic is designed specifically for Slavic languages, but also that the general tradition around Cyrillic is to make up new letters when adapting it to a new language, as oppposed to the Latin alphabet where the two traditions are to use digraphs and to add diacritics. This choice between two possibilities is already causing the problem of "cz" vs. "č", but within those there are still the choices of "cz", "ch", "tsh", "tch", ... and "č", "ç", "ĉ", ...
- int_19h 9y agoI think the line between "making up new letters" and "adding diacritics" is rather blurry, and really hinges on your definition of "new letter", which is largely defined by convention. Most (all? I can't think of any that don't) Cyrillic alphabets have some letters with diacritics - ё and й in Russian; й, i and ї in Ukrainian; j in Serbian etc. But speakers of those languages don't consider the diacritics to be a modifier in this case - we treat them as completely separate letters, that just have a disjoint element in their overall shape. I don't see why e.g. c vs č can't be treated in the same exact way as и vs й (and indeed, I wonder if Czech don't already do that?).