6 ms·

Pinyin (with tones) represents exactly as many distinct syllables as standard Mandarin has. Of course, Chinese isn’t a good example because indeed, many differe

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.
  - zozbot234 4y ago
    This is not a unique development, of course; the letter W/w was originally a digraph written VV or uu (where V/u is of course a single letter).
  - lovenjak 4y ago
    A small correction - lj and nj are separate characters in Slovene alphabet.
    - monodeldiablo 4y ago
      I stand corrected³!
  - mFixman 4y ago
    This reminds me of being taught that "ch" and "ll" were a single letter each in Spanish back when I was in school before they were re-digraphed in the late '90s. Adapting alphabets to languages has a long history: just look at how the Greeks butchered the Phoenician writing system with weird concepts like "vowels" and "F". This is something that makes languages unique, and it should be chosen over having digraphs or diacritics.
forgotmypw17 4y ago
> For languages written with an alphabet, like Russian, there are romanization systems that exactly preserve all the available information. As a Russian speaker, I must say that while this is technically possible, in reality it's only about 80% in most cases, and there is still ambiguity and lack of clarity in the sound transcription, unless you know the original Cyrillic spelling and pronunciation. Russian has more letters. And Russian has sounds and constructions which are just not represented in Latin alphabet at all. For example, how do you differentiate between ё and йо, both valid constructions in Russian, with slightly different pronunciation, usually represented Latinized as yo? Not only that, but the soft and hard signs are also difficult to represent and differentiate between similar letters. You have to start using apostrophes for the soft sign, and then another character for the hard sign, and before you know it you might as well be writing IPA. It's a beautiful language with a beautiful alphabet and script with a lot of beautiful literature to go with them that work well together.
- rippercushions 4y ago
  This problem is not limited to Russian, and is in fact much worse for other languages like Thai, where the spelling of words is only loosely related to the pronunciation. You can optimize for accuracy (transcription) and lose the phonetics, or you can optimize for phonetics (transliteration) and lose the ability to reconstruct the original script, but you can't do both.
- throwaway22032 4y ago
  Right. At least щ, ь, and ъ I don't think have any Latin analogue (native english speaker here who has studied Russian a decent amount). A good way to illustrate the difference is to try to Cyrillicize Latin script. Дринк and Drink are just not pronounced the same way. Chinese speakers just make up names for Western stuff entirely because it can't be said. McDonald's is Maidanglao.
  - Shorel 4y ago
    This also has more to do with the quirks of English pronunciation than something particular to Latin scripts. Like Mercedes having each e pronounced differently. It's madness. An example: Limonada in Spanish and Лимонада in Bulgarian sound the same, and mean the same.
Asooka 4y ago
Not for all languages. For example, I'm Bulgarian and there is no way to transliterate the letter "ъ". Our official latinisation rules (since we need to write e.g. our names in latin characters for international passports etc.) say to use "a", but that's just a close approximation. It's even in the name of the country - България, where it's transliterated as a "u", as that gets the sound across more or less. The fact is, Latin has 5 vowels and Bulgarian has 6, so there is pretty much no way to correctly transliterate Bulgarian into Latin unless we invent some new 6th vowel for the schwa sound. Also the fact that we have letters for "sh", "ch", "zh", "sht", "tz", which we can't write as the digraphs, because we also have words where the individual sounds occur in sequence, i.e. the "s" sound followed by the "h" sound, so "sh" is ambiguous. None of these problems can be solved by diacritics, because computers mostly don't understand diacritics and Americans don't understand diacritics, so they just drop them. Even in cases where there is a way to transcribe diacritics, as in the German umlaut, Americans just drop it, instead of writing it as an "e" following the vowel - using "uber" instead of "ueber", "Schrodinger" instead of "Schroedinger" (the latter even being marked wrong by my spell checker!), etc. So I don't see any way to latinise Bulgarian, as the common Latin alphabet simply does not have enough letters, adding more is not an option, and using diacritics will simply lead to them being dropped in information systems.
- School-Cotton 4y ago
  English has around 14 vowels (the exact number depends on dialect and on how you count). If we can represent English with the five Latin vowel letters, surely we could invent a way to represent Bulgarian. Your point about computer systems is true, but I think they’re slowly getting better at representing diacritics over time.
  - vt85 4y ago
  - dontlaugh 4y ago
    English spelling is famously horrific, so that’s a bad example. But the concept is sound. No language perfectly matches pronunciation and spelling, largely because of regional differences and changes over time. And yet you can spell the majority of Bulgarian or Serbian correctly with the Romanian spelling system.

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.
- zozbot234 4y ago
  This is not a unique development, of course; the letter W/w was originally a digraph written VV or uu (where V/u is of course a single letter).
- lovenjak 4y ago
  A small correction - lj and nj are separate characters in Slovene alphabet.
  - monodeldiablo 4y ago
    I stand corrected³!
- mFixman 4y ago
  This reminds me of being taught that "ch" and "ll" were a single letter each in Spanish back when I was in school before they were re-digraphed in the late '90s. Adapting alphabets to languages has a long history: just look at how the Greeks butchered the Phoenician writing system with weird concepts like "vowels" and "F". This is something that makes languages unique, and it should be chosen over having digraphs or diacritics.

forgotmypw17 4y ago

> For languages written with an alphabet, like Russian, there are romanization systems that exactly preserve all the available information. As a Russian speaker, I must say that while this is technically possible, in reality it's only about 80% in most cases, and there is still ambiguity and lack of clarity in the sound transcription, unless you know the original Cyrillic spelling and pronunciation. Russian has more letters. And Russian has sounds and constructions which are just not represented in Latin alphabet at all. For example, how do you differentiate between ё and йо, both valid constructions in Russian, with slightly different pronunciation, usually represented Latinized as yo? Not only that, but the soft and hard signs are also difficult to represent and differentiate between similar letters. You have to start using apostrophes for the soft sign, and then another character for the hard sign, and before you know it you might as well be writing IPA. It's a beautiful language with a beautiful alphabet and script with a lot of beautiful literature to go with them that work well together.

rippercushions 4y ago
This problem is not limited to Russian, and is in fact much worse for other languages like Thai, where the spelling of words is only loosely related to the pronunciation. You can optimize for accuracy (transcription) and lose the phonetics, or you can optimize for phonetics (transliteration) and lose the ability to reconstruct the original script, but you can't do both.
throwaway22032 4y ago
Right. At least щ, ь, and ъ I don't think have any Latin analogue (native english speaker here who has studied Russian a decent amount). A good way to illustrate the difference is to try to Cyrillicize Latin script. Дринк and Drink are just not pronounced the same way. Chinese speakers just make up names for Western stuff entirely because it can't be said. McDonald's is Maidanglao.
- Shorel 4y ago
  This also has more to do with the quirks of English pronunciation than something particular to Latin scripts. Like Mercedes having each e pronounced differently. It's madness. An example: Limonada in Spanish and Лимонада in Bulgarian sound the same, and mean the same.

Asooka 4y ago

Not for all languages. For example, I'm Bulgarian and there is no way to transliterate the letter "ъ". Our official latinisation rules (since we need to write e.g. our names in latin characters for international passports etc.) say to use "a", but that's just a close approximation. It's even in the name of the country - България, where it's transliterated as a "u", as that gets the sound across more or less. The fact is, Latin has 5 vowels and Bulgarian has 6, so there is pretty much no way to correctly transliterate Bulgarian into Latin unless we invent some new 6th vowel for the schwa sound. Also the fact that we have letters for "sh", "ch", "zh", "sht", "tz", which we can't write as the digraphs, because we also have words where the individual sounds occur in sequence, i.e. the "s" sound followed by the "h" sound, so "sh" is ambiguous. None of these problems can be solved by diacritics, because computers mostly don't understand diacritics and Americans don't understand diacritics, so they just drop them. Even in cases where there is a way to transcribe diacritics, as in the German umlaut, Americans just drop it, instead of writing it as an "e" following the vowel - using "uber" instead of "ueber", "Schrodinger" instead of "Schroedinger" (the latter even being marked wrong by my spell checker!), etc. So I don't see any way to latinise Bulgarian, as the common Latin alphabet simply does not have enough letters, adding more is not an option, and using diacritics will simply lead to them being dropped in information systems.

School-Cotton 4y ago
English has around 14 vowels (the exact number depends on dialect and on how you count). If we can represent English with the five Latin vowel letters, surely we could invent a way to represent Bulgarian. Your point about computer systems is true, but I think they’re slowly getting better at representing diacritics over time.
- vt85 4y ago
- dontlaugh 4y ago
  English spelling is famously horrific, so that’s a bad example. But the concept is sound. No language perfectly matches pronunciation and spelling, largely because of regional differences and changes over time. And yet you can spell the majority of Bulgarian or Serbian correctly with the Romanian spelling system.