8 ms·

Alpha. Bravo. Cyrillic

53 points by sohkamyung 4y ago

throwaway22032 4y ago
There's something upsetting to me about the latinization of languages that I can't quite put my finger on. "It just looks wrong" is the best I can come up with, but I think it's that they tend to lose detail along the way. Chinese pinyin is a good example - not only is it only an approximation of the actual sounds, there are so many homophones that you end up compressing tens of characters into one.
- pigsty 4y ago
  Yeah, Latin characters are kind of limited in their sounds and few if any languages really experiment with them. Vietnamese is one of the few recent adopters I know of to add unique accent marks, although they still use the same character set. One interesting thing is that as Cyrillic has spread, new local characters have been added depending on the language. Eg, Ukrainian has letters than Bulgarian doesn’t use. It’s pretty neat.
  - School-Cotton 4y ago
    > One interesting thing is that as Cyrillic has spread, new local characters have been added depending on the language Isn’t this true of Latin characters, too? German has ß; French doesn’t. Inversely for ù.
    - LudwigNagasena 4y ago
      The general tradition for Latin alphabets is to add diacritics to existing letters, which makes the text abstruse and nudges people to omit them.
      - bombcar 4y ago
        Even English has a ton of digraphs which are technically two or more letters but are actually one "sound". We have a bunch in English but th, sh, ci are favorites. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digraph_(orthography)#English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digraph_(orthography)#English
  - zozbot234 4y ago
    Unicode has all kinds of weird exotic characters that are still considered part of the Latin script. Though diacritics are generally more common.
  - gilleain 4y ago
    > Vietnamese is one of the few recent adopters I know of to add unique accent marks, although they still use the same character set. This is an understatement of how complex the Vietnamese writing system is (I speak not a single word). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnamese_alphabet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnamese_alphabet They don't just have diacritics, they _stack_ them to form towers of diacritics. Ok, so only 2 high, but even so.
  - Asooka 4y ago
    If I'm not wrong, Ukrainian just has "ï" - lowercase i with diaeresis, which is just a Latin letter. Not sure I would call it an addition to the Cyrillic alphabet per se vs an adoption of a latin letter into the Ukrainian alphabet. Similar to North Macedonia uses "j" in place of й. It is an interesting philosophical question - is it a Cyrillic letter that looks like a Latin letter, or is it a Latin letter being used in a country's alphabet? Is "а" the same as "a" or different? But yeah, every regional variety has its small differences due to the different phonetics of the local language.
    - dragonwriter 4y ago
      > It is an interesting philosophical question Like many “interesting” philosophical questions, its grounded in a false premise; the description of alphabets derived from the Latin or Cyrillic with subsequent evolution and possibly admixture as “Latin” or “Cyrillic” is imprecise; its a letter of a particular Ukrainian alphabetic of mostly Cyrillic derivation but some Latin influence. (This can be simplified either of the ways siggested by the question for purposes like defining international character sets, but then it is more of a practical question than philosophical.)
- Ygg2 4y ago
  On hand it's loss of language diversity as they latinize and lose certain specific traits. On the other hand. No language rules forever. See lingua franca.
- School-Cotton 4y ago
  Pinyin (with tones) represents exactly as many distinct syllables as standard Mandarin has. Of course, Chinese isn’t a good example because indeed, many different characters sound the same. For languages written with an alphabet, like Russian, there are romanization systems that exactly preserve all the available information. And there is even Serbian, which can be (and is by native speakers) written in either Latin or Cyrillic, with a 1:1 correspondence between characters.
  - tsm 4y ago
    I was talking to a Serbian coworker about this, and he showed me a screenshot from a recent Slack conversation where he and another Serbian were intermingling Latin and Cyrillic in the same sentences. He said they really didn't care which one was used.
  - grujicd 4y ago
    Just a small correction, there are two letters 'љ' and 'њ' which are single char in Serbian Cyrillic (like everything else) but 2-char sequence in Latin: 'lj' and 'nj' ('pollution' and 'new'). So there are some complications when automatic switching between alphabets because it's not a simple 1:1 for all chars. Fun fact, since both alphabets are tought early in school and used all the time, most adults can read both of them and even switch mid-sentence without noticing a difference. This also means that we're a bit "blind" about traffic signs or directions/instructions which are in Cyrillic only - we don't notice anything strange but it's a big difference for foreigners! This is not limited to Serbia. For instance when travelling to Greece it's much better if you know how to read Greek alphabet since not everything is presented in Latin.
    - monodeldiablo 4y ago
      A small correction to your correction: The letter 'ǌ' is actually a single character in the Croatian/Slovenian and Latinized Serbian/Montenegrin/Bosnian alphabets (go ahead and select it with your cursor!), as are the letters 'ǉ' and 'ǆ'. While they are certainly digraphs, they are regarded as a single letter and not a 2-character sequence. They have their own sound, sort order, Unicode designation, and written orthography. For example, on advertising where a word is written vertically, 'ǉ' will not be separated vertically, and a hyphen never separates the 'l' from the 'j'. However, since the letters 'n' and 'j' already exist on a keyboard, it's easier in this electronic era for people to type the letters separately instead of hunting for the 'ǌ' key, so the presence that you see of two character sequences to represent those letters is a consequence of the compromise of modern electronics and expediency, not innate to the alphabet itself. TL;DR: Each letter in Serbian Cyrillic maps 1:1 to a single letter in Gaj's Latin alphabet, as each alphabet was specifically designed such that each character represents exactly one phoneme.
- vetinari 4y ago
  They will lose part of their history and cultural heritage. The younger generations won't be able to read the older works, so they will be forgotten. ~100 years ago, Turkey switched from Arabic to Latin; you can study the impact.
  - zozbot234 4y ago
    OTOH by transcribing those older works to the more widespread Latin script, you'd also make them a bit more available internationally.
    - eimrine 4y ago
      There are 15 competing standards...
  - mda 4y ago
    Benefit of the switch is much higher. Important old works can be translated. Even though latin Turkish alphabet is a bit problematic for software (I -> ı capitalization issues) I think Uzbec and Kazakh alphabets avoided this issue.
- powera 4y ago
  "Chinese pinyin is a good example - not only is it only an approximation of the actual sounds" I think you have misunderstood something. Reading the pinyin without the tone markers (or worse, as-if it was English) would be an approxmiation (and tone sandhi isn't written), but otherwise it is what the characters sound like. How do you think kids in China learn Chinese today?
  - dontlaugh 4y ago
    It’s probably confusing because pinyin’s use of Latin characters doesn’t match any Latin language, or English, or even German. However, it is fairly internally consistent once you get over the surprises.
- gsich 4y ago
  >"It just looks wrong" is the best I can come up with, but I think it's that they tend to lose detail along the way. Depends on the source script. For Cyrillic->Latin the changes are minute. Most characters have a 1:1 mapping.
  - jjtheblunt 4y ago
    Cyrillic has custom characters for character pairs in western European languages. For instance, {a,e,i,o,u} are in both Cyrillic and English (for example), but Cyrillic has custom single characters for what English would spell as {ya,ye,yi,yo,yu}, and then similarly for what English writes as {sh,zh,ch,shch}. Cyrillic also has a couple soft vs hard annotation single characters, which I'm not able to explain well in terms of their cousin western European but still Indo-European languages. So you get horrendous spellings if using Latin characters for the Slavic sounds, like you see in Polish. (Disclaimer: i'm a native English speaker who had years of western european linguistics, also took Russian and had a Polish grandfather).
    - Joker_vD 4y ago
      Transliterated-to-Cyrillic Polish actually looks quite a lot like a Belorussian with somewhat Russianized, so to speak (more "o"s instead of "a"s), spelling. Which makes sense, I guess, given the history of the languages/dialects situated geographically between the Polish and the Russian.
    - gsich 4y ago
      >Cyrillic has custom characters for character pairs in western European languages. For instance, {a,e,i,o,u} are in both Cyrillic and English (for example), but Cyrillic has custom single characters for what English would spell as {ya,ye,yi,yo,yu}, and then similarly for what English writes as {sh,zh,ch,shch}. I would consider that as 1:1 mapping while technically being 2 characters in most latin languages.
      - jjtheblunt 4y ago
        good point, but there is no soft-sign and hard-sign of Cyrillic in (for example) English characters, so it's not quite isomorphic.
- bloak 4y ago
  I would guess it's not just latinisation, in particular, but any major change of orthography even while keeping the same alphabet. Think about alternative orthographies for English, for example: maybe you could invent a better (simpler, more logical, more concise) way of writing English with Latin letters, but general adoption would be a huge disruption and a kind of barrier to understanding between the past and the future.
- PeterisP 4y ago
  The issue is that, unlike slavic languages, those particular turkic languages lose as much or even more detail by being transcripted in cyrillic.
  - LudwigNagasena 4y ago
    The Kazakh Cyrillic alphabet has 42 letter and barely a couple of them have diacritics. One of the main problems of the Latin alphabet is its poor vowel and sibilant inventories.
  - mFixman 4y ago
    Do they? Both alphabets are almost identical, but Cyrillic has many "standardised" sounds that don't appear in the Latin alphabet (Ж "zh", Ц "tz", Ч "ch", Ш "sh") while I don't think there isn't anything the other way around. The biggest difference is that Latin scripts tend to create new sounds by adding diacritics or digraphs while Cyrillic scripts tend to create new letters — IMO the second way is better for non-Slavic languages.
    - jjtheblunt 4y ago
      RISC vs CISC, really.
      - zozbot234 4y ago
        The Hangul script is the most compositional of them all. It marks individual features, that get combined together to form consonants and vowels.
        nine_k 4y ago
        +100 for Hangul. Its a script that was actually designed, and it shows. The learning curve is actually not steep at all. But it was invented too late, and lacked an expansionist empire, or a widespread religion, to bring it to enough neighboring peoples.
    - gsich 4y ago
- tgv 4y ago
  But even though English, Spanish, Dutch, German and French are written with the same 26 characters and a handful of diacritics, the sounds (phonemes) are quite different. Transcription doesn't have to be 1:1, although it would be nice if it weren't as messy as English. And the Latin alphabet is certainly no worse than Cyrillic or Arabic. Look how Czech manages its various phonemes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czech_language#Orthography https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czech_language#Orthography.
  - gumby 4y ago
    It's a matter of attitude. The German umlaut and ß are basically contractions (ß ambiguously less so); accents in French change pronunciation and/or semantics (French circumflex shows where a no longer pronounced letter used to be) while in Spanish they only denote atypical stress (which can disambiguate an otherwise homonym), similar to the Vietnamese use where they are pretty explicitly phonic in nature. While in, say, Swedish, letters like Å, Ä and Ö (and, to this non-swede, arguably W) are diacritically-marked letters that became fully-fledged ones, like mitochondria becoming "part of a cell". Actually the swedish alphabet is remarkable to me in that it preserves many otherwise useless letters like Q and Swedish orthography is quite tolerant of the use of non-letters like á ("non-letter" meaning "not part of the official alphabet"). The only diacritic used in English, the diaresis, is clearly completely optional and I suspect many people go through their entire lives without encountering it!
    - 082349872349872 4y ago
      The diaeresis is no longer preëminent, but if we coöperate in reïgniting usage maybe we can reënter it in quotidian use?
- Timpy 4y ago
  Chinese pinyin isn't meant to be read as an alphabet though, it's just a different set of information that isn't explicitly available in the ideogram. At least as a foreign language learner, it's not possible to reliably identify initial, final, and tone from the Hanzi alone (although certain patterns do emerge). Transliterating Kazakhstani Cyrillic to a Latin alphabet won't change the underlying information available in the characters, it will only change the way the characters are being presented. No detail lost. That being said, I am wistful of the change.
- mFixman 4y ago
  The "it just looks wrong" makes me appreciate the effort of medieval scholars that added random silent consonants to English words to make their spelling closer to their Latin and Greek originals, like the 'b' in "doubt". It makes learning English a bit harder, but it also makes the language a big nicer. Sometimes they got it wrong: "island" comes from Old English and never had an 's', but it sounds close enough to the Latin "isla" that they just tacked the letter in there.
  - gumby 4y ago
    To me it makes English easier because it makes spelling more semantic rather than phonetic, so that if you see an unfamiliar word you're more likely to figure out its meaning than if you simply had the sound.
- numpad0 4y ago
  I think what you are upset with is the fact that it is Latin script that is used in Pinyin where it should be a hypothetical “Chinese alphabet”, rather than that the Latin-based-Pinyin being not perfect. That might be felt like the Western hegemony is bulldozing Amazon rainforests worldwide, and it might be true to extents that it needs some actions and remediations. But rest assured, modern Chinese language having tons of homophones, itself, has nothing to do with the Latin script. They always had them.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - Timwi 4y ago
    There's always Bopomofo (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bopomofo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bopomofo).
- iavael 4y ago
  Uzbek language is not represented well with Russian alphabet as neither Latin. In both cases for cyrillic and latin-based Uzbek alphabets there are some adapted symbols to represent sounds specific for this language. They are not dumb transliteration for Uzbek language.
Aspos 4y ago
Russians are funding content with pretty much the same narrative which was summarized in the last phase of this article: > the recent, nationalism-inspired wave of alphabet reform is a risky gambit with dubious benefits. Completely unfounded, unsubstantiated closing statement with a threat it in. "Don't change your alphabet, you nationalists, or we will invade." Go chase your warship, russia. Such articles with content nearly identical to this one pop up regularly, but it is the first time I am seeing it in English.
- reisse 4y ago
  Do you have any proofs of the funding? JSTOR is funded by Andrew Mellow Foundation [1]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSTOR https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSTOR
  - Aspos 4y ago
    I don't have any proofs. I just see a coordinated effort and this particular article miraculously matches the narrative. Pure coincidence, of course. Not sure who Andrew Mellow is and not sure how they vet their content creators.
    - isbjorn16 4y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Mellon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Mellon He's been dead for almost a century, so I don't think he's vetting much of anything at the moment
- actionfromafar 4y ago
  It was such an abrupt ending too, just when the article was getting started!
reisse 4y ago
> In the past few years, the governments of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan have both made a rather bold commitment: They will soon use the Latin alphabet to write their respective Turkic languages. Oh... They didn't do even basic fact-checking, like, spending five minutes to check Wikipedia page for Uzbekistan. Uzbekistan made a decision switch from Cyrillic to Latin back in 1992, and it already went through three different iterations of Latin alphabet on the way. The 30-years transition period officially ends 1 Jan. 2023, but de-facto a lot of things from education to official documents are in Latin (or have both Latin and Cyrillic versions) for at least 20 years.
- petargyurov 4y ago
  In the next paragraph they kind of allude to it: > The question of alphabet reform is hardly new for these countries—over the last 150 years or so, Kazakh has been written in Arabic, Latin, and Cyrillic, each prevailing at different points in the language’s history.
- bombcar 4y ago
  I wonder if the decision to switch in 1992 made much more sense given the computers of the era versus now when most everything "roughly" supports Unicode.
  - reisse 4y ago
    It didn't really, at least not in the beginning, because the Latin alphabet used in 1992 was similiar to a Turkish one, with many special symbols for Turkic sounds. However, few years later (I don't exactly remember when) it was simplified to include only a subset of "English" Latin glyphs, and special symbols were replaced by glyph pairs - so "sh" or "o`" both were a single letters in Uzbek alphabet. And now they are moving back to the special symbols.
- q1w2 4y ago
  I think you're focusing too much on the technicalities. It's most accurate to say that after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s, many former soviet states tried to "un-russify" themselves for the benefit of gaining access to global markets. That process slowed and as Russia reconstituted, many reconnected with the Russian economy in the 2000s when oil prices were persistently high. Then when Russia began invading neighbors to "secure" Russian speaking territories, many of the CIS states re-invigorated their efforts to eliminate Russian/Cyrillic from their countries to prevent Russia from doing the same to them. They've been doing such things as curbing Russian-language education, shutting down Russian TV/radio stations, fining people for conducting commerce in Russian, etc...
zoomablemind 4y ago
"...A little more than a decade after the First Turcological Congress [presenting the Latinised alphabets], many of its participants—including Baitursynov, who remains a national hero in Kazakhstan—were executed over accusations of nationalism." It seems that the whole Soviet "indigenisation" project was a mere, however protracted and disguised, effort to identify the local cultural and indigenous leaders and to subsequently terminate them. It rather seems consistent with an imperial safeguarding action. For all empires, the indigenous identity is a direct threat. Especially so this is in the case of russian empire in whatever reincarnation. This only underscores the absurdity of this conglomerate of forcefully "united" people - not allowing them to develop on their own, yet having not much in common in order to being able to effectively lead them. Let alone, lead where?? I wonder who is considered a ruling class in the present day russia?
desireco42 4y ago
Serbian here. We use both latin and cyrillic and like others pointed out, it doesn't really make huge difference. Computers can handle any kind of script, instead of figuring out how to make them more versatile, we are trying to cram every language in 26 characters. I am in general not happy where computing is going, I feel like we can use them more to automate, augment our knowledge and enhance creativity. Instead they are used for pretty much enslaving people. I always felt that knowing both alphabets is something that enriches me, not the opposite.
sologoub 4y ago
> Instead of all-out alphabet reform for Russian, the early Soviet Union mandated spelling reform, wiping the language clean of archaic or redundant Cyrillic characters. Overall poor quality article with a bunch of issues already pointed out. I’ll throw in one more - the reform was originally proposed during early 20th century and was viewed as idiotic and a hack job on the language. Soviets realized that they could make old text almost unreadable to the newly educated people and ceased on that as a way to break with the past. Soviets instituted a near monopoly on print after and eventually enforced the monopoly with oppression. See for more info https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reforms_of_Russian_orthography https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reforms_of_Russian_orthograp... While I find Cyrillic letters to better represent sounds found in Slavic languages (latin scripts require more combinations of letters and special symbols, where Cyrillic has a dedicated letter), switching between say Polish and English reading is a bit easier/faster mentally.
- Koshkin 4y ago
  > a bit easier I don't know about that... W Szczebrzeszynie chrząszcz brzmi w trzcinie / I Szczebrzeszyn z tego słynie. / Wół go pyta: „Panie chrząszczu, / Po cóż pan tak brzęczy w gąszczu?” (In Szczebrzeszyn a beetle sounds in the reeds / And Szczebrzeszyn is famous for this. / An ox asks him: "Mister beetle, / What are you buzzing in the bushes for?")
- inkyoto 4y ago
  > […] switching between say Polish and English reading is a bit easier/faster mentally. How so? Specifically with Polish «szcz», «cz» and «ź» – for which English has no approximants; with the devilish «y» and with «ą» and «ę» causing the consonant mutation. It is akin to saying that Welsh «ymddwyn» or Icelandic «hvort» are easy to mentally switch to by virtue of both making use of the same alphabet that English does. Good luck getting a unsuspecting English speaker to mentally grasp the Polish «szlachta».
  - sologoub 4y ago
    Not quite what I meant. I don’t expect a non-Polish speaker to either be able to understand or pronounce words you used or some of the other classic examples like “Grzegorz Brzęczyszczykiewicz”. In fact, while letters look the same, the rules for pronouncing are different. All I was saying, mentally for me after reading English for a day, “szlachta” clicks faster than шляхта. It’s just personal experience, may not generalize for all I know.
krunck 4y ago
It's odd that the article does not mention that Cyrillic is not a Russian invention but from 9th century Bulgaria.
- Asooka 4y ago
  It's complicated :) . While it was indeed made in the 9th century for writing Old Bulgarian (aka Old Church Slavonic), Russia, or rather Russia importing the printing press, imposed letterform changes to make the letters closer to Latin ones - so you wouldn't need to manufacture too many Cyrillic-specific slugs. There is also the orthographic (spelling) reform that happened under socialist rule. Of course, they ought to have mentioned the origin of the alphabet, considering how often countries' contributions to world history are forgotten or ascribed to their larger, more powerful neighbours, especially given how important Cyrillic was for Bulgaria and the region as a whole.
nikolay 4y ago
But how is using the Cyrillic alphabet Russification as it's not even a Russian alphabet!
lancelot-ru 4y ago
Of course by now your hatred for Russians is of the same species as nazi hatred for the jews, but you will never admit it to yourselves. You are hating people who were dispossessed, humiliated, and dehumanized by you, superrace.
- lancelot-ru 4y ago
  So, HN decided to stop removing my posts.. To put things in the right context, I have posted the comment on this thread out of frustration with my inability to have my voice be heard in your land of the free. So, though the comment does not really belong here, it definitely reflects what I think about you and your exceptional nation.

53 points by sohkamyung 4y ago

throwaway22032 4y ago

There's something upsetting to me about the latinization of languages that I can't quite put my finger on. "It just looks wrong" is the best I can come up with, but I think it's that they tend to lose detail along the way. Chinese pinyin is a good example - not only is it only an approximation of the actual sounds, there are so many homophones that you end up compressing tens of characters into one.

pigsty 4y ago
Yeah, Latin characters are kind of limited in their sounds and few if any languages really experiment with them. Vietnamese is one of the few recent adopters I know of to add unique accent marks, although they still use the same character set. One interesting thing is that as Cyrillic has spread, new local characters have been added depending on the language. Eg, Ukrainian has letters than Bulgarian doesn’t use. It’s pretty neat.
- School-Cotton 4y ago
  > One interesting thing is that as Cyrillic has spread, new local characters have been added depending on the language Isn’t this true of Latin characters, too? German has ß; French doesn’t. Inversely for ù.
  - LudwigNagasena 4y ago
    The general tradition for Latin alphabets is to add diacritics to existing letters, which makes the text abstruse and nudges people to omit them.
    - bombcar 4y ago
      Even English has a ton of digraphs which are technically two or more letters but are actually one "sound". We have a bunch in English but th, sh, ci are favorites. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digraph_(orthography)#English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digraph_(orthography)#English
- zozbot234 4y ago
  Unicode has all kinds of weird exotic characters that are still considered part of the Latin script. Though diacritics are generally more common.
- gilleain 4y ago
  > Vietnamese is one of the few recent adopters I know of to add unique accent marks, although they still use the same character set. This is an understatement of how complex the Vietnamese writing system is (I speak not a single word). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnamese_alphabet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnamese_alphabet They don't just have diacritics, they _stack_ them to form towers of diacritics. Ok, so only 2 high, but even so.
- Asooka 4y ago
  If I'm not wrong, Ukrainian just has "ï" - lowercase i with diaeresis, which is just a Latin letter. Not sure I would call it an addition to the Cyrillic alphabet per se vs an adoption of a latin letter into the Ukrainian alphabet. Similar to North Macedonia uses "j" in place of й. It is an interesting philosophical question - is it a Cyrillic letter that looks like a Latin letter, or is it a Latin letter being used in a country's alphabet? Is "а" the same as "a" or different? But yeah, every regional variety has its small differences due to the different phonetics of the local language.
  - dragonwriter 4y ago
    > It is an interesting philosophical question Like many “interesting” philosophical questions, its grounded in a false premise; the description of alphabets derived from the Latin or Cyrillic with subsequent evolution and possibly admixture as “Latin” or “Cyrillic” is imprecise; its a letter of a particular Ukrainian alphabetic of mostly Cyrillic derivation but some Latin influence. (This can be simplified either of the ways siggested by the question for purposes like defining international character sets, but then it is more of a practical question than philosophical.)
Ygg2 4y ago
On hand it's loss of language diversity as they latinize and lose certain specific traits. On the other hand. No language rules forever. See lingua franca.
School-Cotton 4y ago
Pinyin (with tones) represents exactly as many distinct syllables as standard Mandarin has. Of course, Chinese isn’t a good example because indeed, many different characters sound the same. For languages written with an alphabet, like Russian, there are romanization systems that exactly preserve all the available information. And there is even Serbian, which can be (and is by native speakers) written in either Latin or Cyrillic, with a 1:1 correspondence between characters.
- tsm 4y ago
  I was talking to a Serbian coworker about this, and he showed me a screenshot from a recent Slack conversation where he and another Serbian were intermingling Latin and Cyrillic in the same sentences. He said they really didn't care which one was used.
- grujicd 4y ago
  Just a small correction, there are two letters 'љ' and 'њ' which are single char in Serbian Cyrillic (like everything else) but 2-char sequence in Latin: 'lj' and 'nj' ('pollution' and 'new'). So there are some complications when automatic switching between alphabets because it's not a simple 1:1 for all chars. Fun fact, since both alphabets are tought early in school and used all the time, most adults can read both of them and even switch mid-sentence without noticing a difference. This also means that we're a bit "blind" about traffic signs or directions/instructions which are in Cyrillic only - we don't notice anything strange but it's a big difference for foreigners! This is not limited to Serbia. For instance when travelling to Greece it's much better if you know how to read Greek alphabet since not everything is presented in Latin.
  - monodeldiablo 4y ago
    A small correction to your correction: The letter 'ǌ' is actually a single character in the Croatian/Slovenian and Latinized Serbian/Montenegrin/Bosnian alphabets (go ahead and select it with your cursor!), as are the letters 'ǉ' and 'ǆ'. While they are certainly digraphs, they are regarded as a single letter and not a 2-character sequence. They have their own sound, sort order, Unicode designation, and written orthography. For example, on advertising where a word is written vertically, 'ǉ' will not be separated vertically, and a hyphen never separates the 'l' from the 'j'. However, since the letters 'n' and 'j' already exist on a keyboard, it's easier in this electronic era for people to type the letters separately instead of hunting for the 'ǌ' key, so the presence that you see of two character sequences to represent those letters is a consequence of the compromise of modern electronics and expediency, not innate to the alphabet itself. TL;DR: Each letter in Serbian Cyrillic maps 1:1 to a single letter in Gaj's Latin alphabet, as each alphabet was specifically designed such that each character represents exactly one phoneme.
vetinari 4y ago
They will lose part of their history and cultural heritage. The younger generations won't be able to read the older works, so they will be forgotten. ~100 years ago, Turkey switched from Arabic to Latin; you can study the impact.
- zozbot234 4y ago
  OTOH by transcribing those older works to the more widespread Latin script, you'd also make them a bit more available internationally.
  - eimrine 4y ago
    There are 15 competing standards...
- mda 4y ago
  Benefit of the switch is much higher. Important old works can be translated. Even though latin Turkish alphabet is a bit problematic for software (I -> ı capitalization issues) I think Uzbec and Kazakh alphabets avoided this issue.
powera 4y ago
"Chinese pinyin is a good example - not only is it only an approximation of the actual sounds" I think you have misunderstood something. Reading the pinyin without the tone markers (or worse, as-if it was English) would be an approxmiation (and tone sandhi isn't written), but otherwise it is what the characters sound like. How do you think kids in China learn Chinese today?
- dontlaugh 4y ago
  It’s probably confusing because pinyin’s use of Latin characters doesn’t match any Latin language, or English, or even German. However, it is fairly internally consistent once you get over the surprises.
gsich 4y ago
>"It just looks wrong" is the best I can come up with, but I think it's that they tend to lose detail along the way. Depends on the source script. For Cyrillic->Latin the changes are minute. Most characters have a 1:1 mapping.
- jjtheblunt 4y ago
  Cyrillic has custom characters for character pairs in western European languages. For instance, {a,e,i,o,u} are in both Cyrillic and English (for example), but Cyrillic has custom single characters for what English would spell as {ya,ye,yi,yo,yu}, and then similarly for what English writes as {sh,zh,ch,shch}. Cyrillic also has a couple soft vs hard annotation single characters, which I'm not able to explain well in terms of their cousin western European but still Indo-European languages. So you get horrendous spellings if using Latin characters for the Slavic sounds, like you see in Polish. (Disclaimer: i'm a native English speaker who had years of western european linguistics, also took Russian and had a Polish grandfather).
  - Joker_vD 4y ago
    Transliterated-to-Cyrillic Polish actually looks quite a lot like a Belorussian with somewhat Russianized, so to speak (more "o"s instead of "a"s), spelling. Which makes sense, I guess, given the history of the languages/dialects situated geographically between the Polish and the Russian.
  - gsich 4y ago
    >Cyrillic has custom characters for character pairs in western European languages. For instance, {a,e,i,o,u} are in both Cyrillic and English (for example), but Cyrillic has custom single characters for what English would spell as {ya,ye,yi,yo,yu}, and then similarly for what English writes as {sh,zh,ch,shch}. I would consider that as 1:1 mapping while technically being 2 characters in most latin languages.
    - jjtheblunt 4y ago
      good point, but there is no soft-sign and hard-sign of Cyrillic in (for example) English characters, so it's not quite isomorphic.
bloak 4y ago
I would guess it's not just latinisation, in particular, but any major change of orthography even while keeping the same alphabet. Think about alternative orthographies for English, for example: maybe you could invent a better (simpler, more logical, more concise) way of writing English with Latin letters, but general adoption would be a huge disruption and a kind of barrier to understanding between the past and the future.
PeterisP 4y ago
The issue is that, unlike slavic languages, those particular turkic languages lose as much or even more detail by being transcripted in cyrillic.
- LudwigNagasena 4y ago
  The Kazakh Cyrillic alphabet has 42 letter and barely a couple of them have diacritics. One of the main problems of the Latin alphabet is its poor vowel and sibilant inventories.
- mFixman 4y ago
  Do they? Both alphabets are almost identical, but Cyrillic has many "standardised" sounds that don't appear in the Latin alphabet (Ж "zh", Ц "tz", Ч "ch", Ш "sh") while I don't think there isn't anything the other way around. The biggest difference is that Latin scripts tend to create new sounds by adding diacritics or digraphs while Cyrillic scripts tend to create new letters — IMO the second way is better for non-Slavic languages.
  - jjtheblunt 4y ago
    RISC vs CISC, really.
    - zozbot234 4y ago
      The Hangul script is the most compositional of them all. It marks individual features, that get combined together to form consonants and vowels.
      - nine_k 4y ago
        +100 for Hangul. Its a script that was actually designed, and it shows. The learning curve is actually not steep at all. But it was invented too late, and lacked an expansionist empire, or a widespread religion, to bring it to enough neighboring peoples.
  - gsich 4y ago
tgv 4y ago
But even though English, Spanish, Dutch, German and French are written with the same 26 characters and a handful of diacritics, the sounds (phonemes) are quite different. Transcription doesn't have to be 1:1, although it would be nice if it weren't as messy as English. And the Latin alphabet is certainly no worse than Cyrillic or Arabic. Look how Czech manages its various phonemes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czech_language#Orthography https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czech_language#Orthography.
- gumby 4y ago
  It's a matter of attitude. The German umlaut and ß are basically contractions (ß ambiguously less so); accents in French change pronunciation and/or semantics (French circumflex shows where a no longer pronounced letter used to be) while in Spanish they only denote atypical stress (which can disambiguate an otherwise homonym), similar to the Vietnamese use where they are pretty explicitly phonic in nature. While in, say, Swedish, letters like Å, Ä and Ö (and, to this non-swede, arguably W) are diacritically-marked letters that became fully-fledged ones, like mitochondria becoming "part of a cell". Actually the swedish alphabet is remarkable to me in that it preserves many otherwise useless letters like Q and Swedish orthography is quite tolerant of the use of non-letters like á ("non-letter" meaning "not part of the official alphabet"). The only diacritic used in English, the diaresis, is clearly completely optional and I suspect many people go through their entire lives without encountering it!
  - 082349872349872 4y ago
    The diaeresis is no longer preëminent, but if we coöperate in reïgniting usage maybe we can reënter it in quotidian use?
Timpy 4y ago
Chinese pinyin isn't meant to be read as an alphabet though, it's just a different set of information that isn't explicitly available in the ideogram. At least as a foreign language learner, it's not possible to reliably identify initial, final, and tone from the Hanzi alone (although certain patterns do emerge). Transliterating Kazakhstani Cyrillic to a Latin alphabet won't change the underlying information available in the characters, it will only change the way the characters are being presented. No detail lost. That being said, I am wistful of the change.
mFixman 4y ago
The "it just looks wrong" makes me appreciate the effort of medieval scholars that added random silent consonants to English words to make their spelling closer to their Latin and Greek originals, like the 'b' in "doubt". It makes learning English a bit harder, but it also makes the language a big nicer. Sometimes they got it wrong: "island" comes from Old English and never had an 's', but it sounds close enough to the Latin "isla" that they just tacked the letter in there.
- gumby 4y ago
  To me it makes English easier because it makes spelling more semantic rather than phonetic, so that if you see an unfamiliar word you're more likely to figure out its meaning than if you simply had the sound.
numpad0 4y ago
I think what you are upset with is the fact that it is Latin script that is used in Pinyin where it should be a hypothetical “Chinese alphabet”, rather than that the Latin-based-Pinyin being not perfect. That might be felt like the Western hegemony is bulldozing Amazon rainforests worldwide, and it might be true to extents that it needs some actions and remediations. But rest assured, modern Chinese language having tons of homophones, itself, has nothing to do with the Latin script. They always had them.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- Timwi 4y ago
  There's always Bopomofo (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bopomofo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bopomofo).
iavael 4y ago
Uzbek language is not represented well with Russian alphabet as neither Latin. In both cases for cyrillic and latin-based Uzbek alphabets there are some adapted symbols to represent sounds specific for this language. They are not dumb transliteration for Uzbek language.

Aspos 4y ago

Russians are funding content with pretty much the same narrative which was summarized in the last phase of this article: > the recent, nationalism-inspired wave of alphabet reform is a risky gambit with dubious benefits. Completely unfounded, unsubstantiated closing statement with a threat it in. "Don't change your alphabet, you nationalists, or we will invade." Go chase your warship, russia. Such articles with content nearly identical to this one pop up regularly, but it is the first time I am seeing it in English.

reisse 4y ago
Do you have any proofs of the funding? JSTOR is funded by Andrew Mellow Foundation [1]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSTOR https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSTOR
- Aspos 4y ago
  I don't have any proofs. I just see a coordinated effort and this particular article miraculously matches the narrative. Pure coincidence, of course. Not sure who Andrew Mellow is and not sure how they vet their content creators.
  - isbjorn16 4y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Mellon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Mellon He's been dead for almost a century, so I don't think he's vetting much of anything at the moment
actionfromafar 4y ago
It was such an abrupt ending too, just when the article was getting started!

reisse 4y ago

> In the past few years, the governments of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan have both made a rather bold commitment: They will soon use the Latin alphabet to write their respective Turkic languages. Oh... They didn't do even basic fact-checking, like, spending five minutes to check Wikipedia page for Uzbekistan. Uzbekistan made a decision switch from Cyrillic to Latin back in 1992, and it already went through three different iterations of Latin alphabet on the way. The 30-years transition period officially ends 1 Jan. 2023, but de-facto a lot of things from education to official documents are in Latin (or have both Latin and Cyrillic versions) for at least 20 years.

petargyurov 4y ago
In the next paragraph they kind of allude to it: > The question of alphabet reform is hardly new for these countries—over the last 150 years or so, Kazakh has been written in Arabic, Latin, and Cyrillic, each prevailing at different points in the language’s history.
bombcar 4y ago
I wonder if the decision to switch in 1992 made much more sense given the computers of the era versus now when most everything "roughly" supports Unicode.
- reisse 4y ago
  It didn't really, at least not in the beginning, because the Latin alphabet used in 1992 was similiar to a Turkish one, with many special symbols for Turkic sounds. However, few years later (I don't exactly remember when) it was simplified to include only a subset of "English" Latin glyphs, and special symbols were replaced by glyph pairs - so "sh" or "o`" both were a single letters in Uzbek alphabet. And now they are moving back to the special symbols.
q1w2 4y ago
I think you're focusing too much on the technicalities. It's most accurate to say that after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s, many former soviet states tried to "un-russify" themselves for the benefit of gaining access to global markets. That process slowed and as Russia reconstituted, many reconnected with the Russian economy in the 2000s when oil prices were persistently high. Then when Russia began invading neighbors to "secure" Russian speaking territories, many of the CIS states re-invigorated their efforts to eliminate Russian/Cyrillic from their countries to prevent Russia from doing the same to them. They've been doing such things as curbing Russian-language education, shutting down Russian TV/radio stations, fining people for conducting commerce in Russian, etc...

zoomablemind 4y ago

"...A little more than a decade after the First Turcological Congress [presenting the Latinised alphabets], many of its participants—including Baitursynov, who remains a national hero in Kazakhstan—were executed over accusations of nationalism." It seems that the whole Soviet "indigenisation" project was a mere, however protracted and disguised, effort to identify the local cultural and indigenous leaders and to subsequently terminate them. It rather seems consistent with an imperial safeguarding action. For all empires, the indigenous identity is a direct threat. Especially so this is in the case of russian empire in whatever reincarnation. This only underscores the absurdity of this conglomerate of forcefully "united" people - not allowing them to develop on their own, yet having not much in common in order to being able to effectively lead them. Let alone, lead where?? I wonder who is considered a ruling class in the present day russia?

desireco42 4y ago

Serbian here. We use both latin and cyrillic and like others pointed out, it doesn't really make huge difference. Computers can handle any kind of script, instead of figuring out how to make them more versatile, we are trying to cram every language in 26 characters. I am in general not happy where computing is going, I feel like we can use them more to automate, augment our knowledge and enhance creativity. Instead they are used for pretty much enslaving people. I always felt that knowing both alphabets is something that enriches me, not the opposite.

sologoub 4y ago

> Instead of all-out alphabet reform for Russian, the early Soviet Union mandated spelling reform, wiping the language clean of archaic or redundant Cyrillic characters. Overall poor quality article with a bunch of issues already pointed out. I’ll throw in one more - the reform was originally proposed during early 20th century and was viewed as idiotic and a hack job on the language. Soviets realized that they could make old text almost unreadable to the newly educated people and ceased on that as a way to break with the past. Soviets instituted a near monopoly on print after and eventually enforced the monopoly with oppression. See for more info https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reforms_of_Russian_orthography https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reforms_of_Russian_orthograp... While I find Cyrillic letters to better represent sounds found in Slavic languages (latin scripts require more combinations of letters and special symbols, where Cyrillic has a dedicated letter), switching between say Polish and English reading is a bit easier/faster mentally.

Koshkin 4y ago
> a bit easier I don't know about that... W Szczebrzeszynie chrząszcz brzmi w trzcinie / I Szczebrzeszyn z tego słynie. / Wół go pyta: „Panie chrząszczu, / Po cóż pan tak brzęczy w gąszczu?” (In Szczebrzeszyn a beetle sounds in the reeds / And Szczebrzeszyn is famous for this. / An ox asks him: "Mister beetle, / What are you buzzing in the bushes for?")
inkyoto 4y ago
> […] switching between say Polish and English reading is a bit easier/faster mentally. How so? Specifically with Polish «szcz», «cz» and «ź» – for which English has no approximants; with the devilish «y» and with «ą» and «ę» causing the consonant mutation. It is akin to saying that Welsh «ymddwyn» or Icelandic «hvort» are easy to mentally switch to by virtue of both making use of the same alphabet that English does. Good luck getting a unsuspecting English speaker to mentally grasp the Polish «szlachta».
- sologoub 4y ago
  Not quite what I meant. I don’t expect a non-Polish speaker to either be able to understand or pronounce words you used or some of the other classic examples like “Grzegorz Brzęczyszczykiewicz”. In fact, while letters look the same, the rules for pronouncing are different. All I was saying, mentally for me after reading English for a day, “szlachta” clicks faster than шляхта. It’s just personal experience, may not generalize for all I know.

krunck 4y ago

It's odd that the article does not mention that Cyrillic is not a Russian invention but from 9th century Bulgaria.

Asooka 4y ago
It's complicated :) . While it was indeed made in the 9th century for writing Old Bulgarian (aka Old Church Slavonic), Russia, or rather Russia importing the printing press, imposed letterform changes to make the letters closer to Latin ones - so you wouldn't need to manufacture too many Cyrillic-specific slugs. There is also the orthographic (spelling) reform that happened under socialist rule. Of course, they ought to have mentioned the origin of the alphabet, considering how often countries' contributions to world history are forgotten or ascribed to their larger, more powerful neighbours, especially given how important Cyrillic was for Bulgaria and the region as a whole.

nikolay 4y ago

But how is using the Cyrillic alphabet Russification as it's not even a Russian alphabet!

lancelot-ru 4y ago

Of course by now your hatred for Russians is of the same species as nazi hatred for the jews, but you will never admit it to yourselves. You are hating people who were dispossessed, humiliated, and dehumanized by you, superrace.

lancelot-ru 4y ago
So, HN decided to stop removing my posts.. To put things in the right context, I have posted the comment on this thread out of frustration with my inability to have my voice be heard in your land of the free. So, though the comment does not really belong here, it definitely reflects what I think about you and your exceptional nation.