4 ms·

Some southern and all western Slavic languages use (extended) Latin characters. Even without Cyrillic, they do not need Engliš alternatives. I speak Czech and S

by timeon 4y ago

Some southern and all western Slavic languages use (extended) Latin characters. Even without Cyrillic, they do not need Engliš alternatives. I speak Czech and Slovak - Cyrillic is like Chinese for me.

atdrummond 4y ago
I know - I also speak Czech/Slovak. They were harder for me to learn than Russian specifically due to the extra mental load of having to manage another set of pronunciations for Latin letters. This is solely due to English being my first language.
- timeon 4y ago
  I see. Probably I have problem with English pronunciation for same reason (even if we ignore the vowel shift). edit: but now when I'm thinking about it bit more how is it with non-Slavic letters like ø, ü, å? As I have mentioned the vowel shift maybe even 'g', 'r', 'j'? And on the other hand Slovak have ľ and ô - which is ignored in my region and we just pronounce it as 'l' and 'o'.
pndy 4y ago
Same for me - it takes a time to decipher Cyrillic script for someone who uses Latin alphabet, while I'm able to read and understand Czech, Slovak and to some degree read south Slavic group languages. I've witness a scene last March where social services clerk tried to help Ukrainian mother get some social benefit - they were able to understand each other in speech but not in the written words. At the end of conversation she suggested that it would be better if woman would translate her documents into Polish by a sworn translator. The clerk was in 50s and she probably still could remember something from spoken Russian - which was at some point a language taught in Polish schools during PPR times. As for the Latynka - it's of course up to Ukrainians but personally I believe that would be a good political move to separate themselves from Russia even more. Kazakhstan did change writing system few years ago [1] and I'm pretty sure that one of the former SSR of Soviet Union also reverted to Latin script while being previously forced to use Cyrillic script [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kazakh_language#Writing_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kazakh_language#Writing_system

by timeon 4y ago

atdrummond 4y ago

I know - I also speak Czech/Slovak. They were harder for me to learn than Russian specifically due to the extra mental load of having to manage another set of pronunciations for Latin letters. This is solely due to English being my first language.

timeon 4y ago
I see. Probably I have problem with English pronunciation for same reason (even if we ignore the vowel shift). edit: but now when I'm thinking about it bit more how is it with non-Slavic letters like ø, ü, å? As I have mentioned the vowel shift maybe even 'g', 'r', 'j'? And on the other hand Slovak have ľ and ô - which is ignored in my region and we just pronounce it as 'l' and 'o'.

pndy 4y ago

Same for me - it takes a time to decipher Cyrillic script for someone who uses Latin alphabet, while I'm able to read and understand Czech, Slovak and to some degree read south Slavic group languages. I've witness a scene last March where social services clerk tried to help Ukrainian mother get some social benefit - they were able to understand each other in speech but not in the written words. At the end of conversation she suggested that it would be better if woman would translate her documents into Polish by a sworn translator. The clerk was in 50s and she probably still could remember something from spoken Russian - which was at some point a language taught in Polish schools during PPR times. As for the Latynka - it's of course up to Ukrainians but personally I believe that would be a good political move to separate themselves from Russia even more. Kazakhstan did change writing system few years ago [1] and I'm pretty sure that one of the former SSR of Soviet Union also reverted to Latin script while being previously forced to use Cyrillic script [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kazakh_language#Writing_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kazakh_language#Writing_system