4 ms·
>"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
by 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 agoCyrillic 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 agoTransliterated-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 agogood point, but there is no soft-sign and hard-sign of Cyrillic in (for example) English characters, so it's not quite isomorphic.
- gsich 4y agoOne could use apostrophes or dashes.
- jjtheblunt 4y agounambiguously?
- gsich 4y agoMaybe. Other languages also don't have consistency all the time in latin, so not sure if you need to force it.
- monodeldiablo 4y ago> So you get horrendous spellings if using Latin characters for the Slavic sounds, like you see in Polish. I'm not sure where you get this from. Several Slavic languages (Czech, Slovenian, Croatian, etc) use Latin-derived alphabets and managed to preserve their pronunciation with 100% fidelity. The Polish orthography is not the only solution to this, and I think it's a stretch to regard Croatian spellings as "horrendous". I am, of course, biased. But the number of characters in a word in Croatian maps 1:1 with its Cyrillic spelling, for example.
- jjtheblunt 4y agoOh, I know, and agree, and i should have said horrendous to explain to others not familiar with it. I mean they use multiple letters for a sound (or diacritics which is neater in my opinion) is all I'm saying, like modern english does for voiced and unvoiced "th" whereas older germanic had eth and thorn glyphs, and iceland still uses them.
- jjtheblunt 4y agohow do you denote soft-sign and hard-sign (merkiznak i tvortiznak ?) in Croatian ?