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> 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 diacri

by 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 ago
To 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 ago
  Indeed: 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 ago
    Serbia is still mostly Cyrillic though. It's a very interesting experiment since Croatia isn't and the languages are basically the same.
    - necovek 6mo ago
      I 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.
      - AndriyKunitsyn 6mo ago
        There are so many Russian émigrés in Belgrade that you hear Russian more than Serbian in the city center.
  - foobarian 6mo ago
    The unique quirk with South Slavic languages is the linguistic work e.g. associated with Vuk Karadžić [1] which resulted in a cleaned up purely phonetic alphabet. This was done across the region and ended up getting plumbed through both alphabets, so e.g. the Croatians/Slovenes write in latin but with a handful of special characters for the unique sounds like "š" or the double-letter characters "dž" "lj", which also map 1-1 to stuff on the Serbian Cyrillic side. It's the kind of legacy cleanup you love to see :-) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vuk_Karad%C5%BEi%C4%87 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vuk_Karad%C5%BEi%C4%87
- troupo 6mo ago
  Since we're talking about Serbian below, here are some characters from Cyrillic Serbian Alphabet: Ђ/ђ Ћ/ћ Љ/љ Њ/њ Џ/џ Ј/ј Various diacritical marks, digraph, a jod... What makes this Cyrillic more unambiguous than the Latin equivalents?
  - anonymars 6mo ago
    None of those are digraphs or have diacritics, each is a single letter/character Compare with: Š/S (Š = S + diacritic) Nj (this "letter" is made up of two other letters)
    - troupo 6mo ago
      > None of those are digraphs or have diacritics, each is a single letter/character Okay, you got me, these don't have diacritics, but other Slavic languages do. Unicode committee decided that some of these are separate letters (Ѓ, Й, Ё etc.) and some are not (Ў), but still doesn't make these "trivially provable to suit Slavic languages better". > Nj (this "letter" is made up of two other letters) Indeed it is. Invented in 1818. E.g. Russian uses two "нь" for the same thing. My point is, even if I may confuse my linguistic terminology from time to time, is... How does all this make Cyrillic "trivially provable" to be better suited for Slavic languages than Latin script? It's all the same: invent new letters or new letter combinations, or slap a few diacritics on top. And when that is not enough, borrow from Latin. E.g., j in Serbian, ї in Ukrainian and й in Russian for the same sound.
      - foobarian 6mo ago
        Some of this was a top-down overhaul of the writing system in the 19th century. Before that it was an awful mess and people just "vibe-wrote" the weird Slavic sounds using latin how they saw fit; try reading some old writings from that era. Or read some modern Polish or Czech text :-D
        troupo 6mo ago
        So the original claim of "is trivially provable that Cyrillic script is better adapted even to languages which do not use it today" boils down to "in the 19th Century they cleaned up the writing system" (similarly, there was a top-down cleanup of Russian, with Bolsheviks removing ѣ,ѳ, і, ѵ and ъ version of yer)
ceedaxp 6mo ago
Most of the extra glyphs are for non-Slavic (Turk languages of Central Asia and Siberia). You see the same (and worse) in Latin Unicode pages — just look at how many variations of vowels 'a', 'i', or 'e' you have, consonants like 'c', 'z', 's'…
- troupo 6mo ago
  Even within Slavic languages there is plenty of weirdness: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48064121 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48064121

by troupo 6mo ago

Antibabelic 6mo ago

To 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 ago
Indeed: 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 ago
  Serbia is still mostly Cyrillic though. It's a very interesting experiment since Croatia isn't and the languages are basically the same.
  - necovek 6mo ago
    I 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.
    - AndriyKunitsyn 6mo ago
      There are so many Russian émigrés in Belgrade that you hear Russian more than Serbian in the city center.
- foobarian 6mo ago
  The unique quirk with South Slavic languages is the linguistic work e.g. associated with Vuk Karadžić [1] which resulted in a cleaned up purely phonetic alphabet. This was done across the region and ended up getting plumbed through both alphabets, so e.g. the Croatians/Slovenes write in latin but with a handful of special characters for the unique sounds like "š" or the double-letter characters "dž" "lj", which also map 1-1 to stuff on the Serbian Cyrillic side. It's the kind of legacy cleanup you love to see :-) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vuk_Karad%C5%BEi%C4%87 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vuk_Karad%C5%BEi%C4%87
troupo 6mo ago
Since we're talking about Serbian below, here are some characters from Cyrillic Serbian Alphabet: Ђ/ђ Ћ/ћ Љ/љ Њ/њ Џ/џ Ј/ј Various diacritical marks, digraph, a jod... What makes this Cyrillic more unambiguous than the Latin equivalents?
- anonymars 6mo ago
  None of those are digraphs or have diacritics, each is a single letter/character Compare with: Š/S (Š = S + diacritic) Nj (this "letter" is made up of two other letters)
  - troupo 6mo ago
    > None of those are digraphs or have diacritics, each is a single letter/character Okay, you got me, these don't have diacritics, but other Slavic languages do. Unicode committee decided that some of these are separate letters (Ѓ, Й, Ё etc.) and some are not (Ў), but still doesn't make these "trivially provable to suit Slavic languages better". > Nj (this "letter" is made up of two other letters) Indeed it is. Invented in 1818. E.g. Russian uses two "нь" for the same thing. My point is, even if I may confuse my linguistic terminology from time to time, is... How does all this make Cyrillic "trivially provable" to be better suited for Slavic languages than Latin script? It's all the same: invent new letters or new letter combinations, or slap a few diacritics on top. And when that is not enough, borrow from Latin. E.g., j in Serbian, ї in Ukrainian and й in Russian for the same sound.
    - foobarian 6mo ago
      Some of this was a top-down overhaul of the writing system in the 19th century. Before that it was an awful mess and people just "vibe-wrote" the weird Slavic sounds using latin how they saw fit; try reading some old writings from that era. Or read some modern Polish or Czech text :-D
      - troupo 6mo ago
        So the original claim of "is trivially provable that Cyrillic script is better adapted even to languages which do not use it today" boils down to "in the 19th Century they cleaned up the writing system" (similarly, there was a top-down cleanup of Russian, with Bolsheviks removing ѣ,ѳ, і, ѵ and ъ version of yer)

ceedaxp 6mo ago

Most of the extra glyphs are for non-Slavic (Turk languages of Central Asia and Siberia). You see the same (and worse) in Latin Unicode pages — just look at how many variations of vowels 'a', 'i', or 'e' you have, consonants like 'c', 'z', 's'…

troupo 6mo ago
Even within Slavic languages there is plenty of weirdness: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48064121 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48064121