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This is an article with a long introduction and then jumps straight to the point in one, final paragraph: Russia is abusing it for political messaging again. W
by necovek 6mo ago
This is an article with a long introduction and then jumps straight to the point in one, final paragraph: Russia is abusing it for political messaging again. While yes, any tool will be abused like this, it really is also a tool to best codify spoken language of the Slavs (in a sense, it is trivially provable that Cyrillic script is better adapted even to languages which do not use it today, but have to resort to digraphs or glyphs with diacritics — some are thus not using it to distance from a particular influence instead).
None of the interesting bits of Cyrillic invention are covered, like how the original Slavic script was Glagolitic as the sibling mentioned, and only evolved into modern Cyrillic much later. Or how there was no lowercase until a few centuries ago, especially with the reform of Peter the Great.
With Slavic people, it's also worth noting that "Slav" actually means "word" or "letter" (of an alphabet), so legibility was part of the identity. In contrast, most Slavic people call Germans a variation of "Nemci", or mutes (those who cannot speak) — notably, most except Russians who call them Germans. Again, likely to distance themselves from the negative connotation with their aspiring historical partners.
- orbital-decay 6mo agoNo idea where you're getting it from, Germans are Nemci in Russian as well. It's rather "unable to speak the language", meant for all foreigners but later stuck to Germans, presumably because German traders were the most common foreigners.
- mootothemax 6mo ago> Germans are Nemci in Russian as well I wanted to check; are you implying that Russian is not a Slavic language?
- orbital-decay 6mo agoNo, GP is saying that Russian uses the Latin root for Germans, I'm saying it doesn't. (it does for Germany though: "Germaniya").
- mootothemax 6mo agoI think I may have fallen victim to a GP midflight edit - I agree with you fwiw, it’s a stone cold fact.
- necovek 6mo agoApologies, it was mostly from running across different Russian maps with Германия that I took it as such (in Serbian it is Немачка). I stand corrected! Nem/нем literally means "mute" in Serbian, perhaps it's a latter evolution per region either way.
- gibber878 6mo agoIt seems to me that you have entirely discredited yourself. You confidently make claims about the Russian language but don't even know the most basic thing about the point you were making.
- necovek 6mo agoIt seems that I was wrong only partially, and this was totally not the core of my point (they do call the country Germaniya). If making one mistake discredits the entire take, I'd hate to be your conversing partner ever.
- gibber878 6mo agoIt takes tremendous study to arrive at a conclusion and your inability to get _basic_ details correct, that your narrative depends on, betray that you have not done that study. You are not my conversing partner. You are simply someone who emits nonsense onto the internet and people should be aware of you willingness to confabulate reality.
- xxs 6mo ago>"mute" in Serbian Very far from Serbian only. Bulgarian, Russian, and even Balti-Slavic like Latvian is similar enough.
- konart 6mo ago>Nem/нем literally means "mute" in Serbian, Same in Russian нем\немой - mute немота - muteness But yes, we do use Germany for country's name :)
- Antibabelic 6mo ago"Slav" deriving from the Slavic term for "word" is something of a false etymology that was invented in the 19th century. It is implausible on philological grounds: you'd expect a different vowel in this word if this were the case, and the suffix *-ninъ is only otherwise used in terms derived from place names. It is more likely[0] that the term derives from some toponym. This is in line with how tribal names tend to work in Europe and is not problematic in terms of historical linguistics, however it gives less fuel to romantic nationalism and armchair speculations about national "identities" or "mindsets". ----- [0] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Slavic/slov%C4%9Bnin%D1%8A https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Slavic/s...
- mootothemax 6mo agoThe irony for me being that when I was first learning Polish and looking for any and all mnemonics - “ah, that word is the number nine, and that one is ten because it has an s in the middle and that’s next to t for ten in the alphabet”-levels of desperate - the false etymology helped me set word, słowo, in my head, and the rather delightful dosłownie, literally / to the word, has remained ever since. (tho while on the subject, it’s hard to beat wieloryb as a wonder that I don’t want to know the true etymology of ever because if there’s even a chance that the word for whale derived from the words great as-in-size + fish, I want to hang on to it forever)
- acadapter 6mo agoFalse etymology? You can roll back sound changes further to *ḱlew- in Proto-Indo-European https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-European/%E1%B8%B1l%C3%A9wos https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-Eur...
- rich_sasha 6mo agoDunno. A nice parallel fact is that the word for "Germans" in at least a few Slavic languages literally means "mutes" - the ones who don't speak. So you'd have the Slavs - the people of word - and the Germans - the mutes.
- 6mo ago
- troupo 6mo ago> is trivially provable that Cyrillic script is better adapted even to languages which do not use it today, but have to resort to digraphs or glyphs with diacritics Take a look at the Cyrillic section of Unicode to see your trivially provable claim being trivially disproven. You'll see all the same digraphs, glyphs, accents, graves etc. as used in Latin scripts. It's also easy to see it easily disproven if you look at all the languages USSR forced cyrillic alphabet on.
- Antibabelic 6mo agoTo be fair, the parent post was clearly talking about Slavic languages, not "all the languages USSR forced cyrillic alphabet on", which were not Slavic and which required significant modifications to the alphabet.
- necovek 6mo agoIndeed: most notably, Croatian, Slovenian, Bosnian, Serbian and Montenegrin are all unambiguous with Cyrillic, but Latin script dominates, even in officially Cyrillic-first Serbia. Again, it is seen as a political tool (pro-West or pro-Russia), when Cyrillic is technically better suited (there is certainly history as well, but that's very mixed up in the region). Again, I am saying this as someone who has worked to implement things like full-text search, collation (lexical ordering/sorting) algorithms and tables, fonts and ligatures, functions like uppercase/titlecase/lowercase... Eg. an already complex Unicode Collation Algorithm tables can never support exceptions with digraphs like "konjukcija" (nj is usually a digraph, but not here), etc.
- ymolodtsov 6mo agoSerbia is still mostly Cyrillic though. It's a very interesting experiment since Croatia isn't and the languages are basically the same.
- necovek 6mo agoI invite you for a walk through Belgrade streets, maybe even with Google Street View. There will be Cyrillic in official signage, but ads and shop names will be predominately in Latin script. If there are some in Cyrillic, they are likely to be part of a newer "hipster" move to differentiate more for the tourists.
- Tade0 6mo ago> some are thus not using it to distance from a particular influence instead That's not the reason. The real reason is how those regions were Christianised - Cyril and Methodius created the first version of what would later evolve into cyrilic script and they were sent by Constantinople, while missionaries sent by Rome would use latin script.
- tkot 6mo ago> it really is also a tool to best codify spoken language of the Slavs (in a sense, it is trivially provable that Cyrillic script is better adapted even to languages which do not use it today, but have to resort to digraphs or glyphs with diacritics — some are thus not using it to distance from a particular influence instead I've heard this claim many times but never the reasoning behind it - by what metric is "ш" superior to "š" and so on?
- necovek 6mo agoIt's less pronounced with diacritics, but enter Unicode normal forms: you can represent š either as š, or s followed by a diacritic. When you want to compare two strings, you have to normalize them to ensure you are comparing apples to apples. I can guarantee most software is broken in that regard. For Cyrillic, it just works. With digraphs (lj, nj, dž + sometimes dj for đ too), it's even worse. Even capitalization is ambiguous: sometimes it's Lj and other times it's LJ. Then you have words like konjugacija where nj is not a digraph. Interestingly — and not many know this — Unicode includes separate codepoints for all of the digraphs too. While well-intentioned, it only makes the problem worse. Digraphs are especially sucky when you try sorting strings in a phonebook order as LJ comes after L, so you've got ...LI, LK..., LZ, LJA... With exceptions, it is even worse.
- troupo 6mo agoSo, it's not "trivially provable that Cyrillic is better suited to Slavic languages". But that "the symbols representtion we settled on in software has some difficulties disambiguatuong some, but not all cases of symbol use in a language, a problem that is not unique to Slavic languages, see Dutch IJ, Turkish ı/i, German ß etc."
- necovek 6mo agoDecoupling choice of script from "symbols representation" is a weird approach — this is how people type them out. Yes, problems are not unique to Slavic languages, but at least for _some_ Slavic languages, Cyrillic has been taken to the most simplified form that is _accidentally_ easy to process on a computer too. But yes, I was a bit too absolutist, I agree — as ever, everything is more nuanced, so perhaps not "trivially provable", but in "closer to full differentiation in graphical representation while being simple and unambiguous to process on a computer"?
- konart 6mo ago> Slavic people call Germans a variation of "Nemci", or mutes (those who cannot speak) — notably, most except Russians who call them Germans. last time I checked we also call them "немцы" (Nemci and sounds exactly the same)
- gostsamo 6mo agoSlav comes from slovo == слово which means word or speech, a.k.a slavs are people who can talk to each other which is a pattern in many other ethnic groups about differentiating between themselves and outsiders. Немци or mutes are those who cannot speak the language.