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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
The flaw in your argument is the implied presumption that Latin preserve all information for languages that have always used the Latin alphabet.
For some language it is closer to truth, like Spanish and German, which mostly are pronounced like they are written
English and French, identical spelling represent varying sounds. English example: lose, rose, tone,... all different "o" sounds, yet they all use the same written "o".
The point about Cyrillic having more letters is also misguided: you can make sounds with letter combinations. French has dozens and dozens of letter combos for various sounds, let just list a small subset: au, eau, eu, ou, ui, oi, euil, ouil, un, an, in, en, oui, ui, sh, ch, cl, cr, tr, ....
I'm curious, I use the same "o" sound for "rose" and "tone", do many native English speakers not? But "not" has a different o sound. As does "ton" and "curious" and "book" (I'm not sure if there are any words that represent the "book" vowel with just a single "o" - though sometimes it's "ou").
Either way, any alphabet change that leads to less correspondence between written and spoken language doesn't seem like a desirable thing...
The vast, vast majority of English speakers will nasalize the o in tone, and the vast, vast majority of even the small fraction who don't will still pronounce the o farther back than they would for rose.
Try this. Pinch your nose closed with your thumb and forefinger. Say "tone" but stop before you articulate the n.
Now do the same with "rose," stopping before you articulate the s.
I'm betting you felt a lot more vibration in your nose on the first one.
There might be a small number of heavy-NCVS speakers for whom there is truly no difference. David Boreanaz, perhaps. Bobby Generic's mom, likely.
That's what's shown for the phonetics, yes, but we aren't talking about phonemes, we're talking about phonological effects, specifically the anticipatory assimilation of [n] into the preceding vowel.
(Note: One wonderfully weird thing about English is that different types of phonological assimilation happen in different directions, e.g., voice assimilation happens the other way, so "fads" is pronounced as if it had a "z" at the end and "putz" is pronounced as if it had an "s" at the end, i.e., "fadz"/"puts" rather than "fats"/"pudz")
>The point about Cyrillic having more letters is also misguided: you can make sounds with letter combinations. French has dozens and dozens of letter combos for various sounds, let just list a small subset: au, eau, eu, ou, ui, oi, euil, ouil, un, an, in, en, oui, ui, sh, ch, cl, cr, tr, ....
Could you please explain how you would represent these different sound and letter combinations in Latin script in a way that would make it obvious how to pronounce them correctly:
ща(вель), ша(тун), сча(стье);
че(й), чё(рный), чье(-то);
This is just two random, very limited examples off the top of my head, not even the tip of the iceberg, but the point of the tip.
By the way, Russian also has many regional dialects and accents.
Finnish has good
correspondence between written and spoken form. This is achieved with extra letters compared to latin and not using some letters. German already had the extras: Ö and Ä. C and Q are not used, instead it's basically always K. There are no spelling bees in Finland. Everything that is said can only be spelled in one way. Everything that is written can only be spoken one way. Estonian has Ō in addition because they really have one more wovel.
A latinized Russian should have a different character for each s-like character like it's now in cyrillic.
Also, everybody should look at English and French spelling as something definitely NOT to do.
Spanish is also good but they are actually close to latin so it's no surprise the latin alphabet also works.
German is not so great as the match between spoken and written is quite loose. Both wovels and consonants change with context.
Is there really an ambiguity there or is this just a spelling quirk? Like are there any two words spelled differently in Russian that can be mixed up when transliterated?
I imagine, there's an official transliteration scheme because names in international passports have to be spelled in latin alphabet for reference. Is it ambiguous, too? Even if so, it's probably not to hard to come up with more two-letter combinations to encode every letter of Russian alphabet in an unambiguous way and so that even people who doesn't know the encoding could read it close enough.
Yes, there is ambiguity if you want to achieve both readability and pronunciation accuracy.
If you want to just encode the "data" or just get close (but not exact) pronunciation, you can do reasonably well, though nowhere near as good as Cyrillic.
If you want full parity, you just can't. Not unless you rewrite the entire language's grammar and re-teach people how to read Latin script in a way that is very different from how it is read in other languages.
It's similuh to riting inglish pyoorlee fuhnetiklee.
For 'two letter combinations', etc. it's worth looking at languages like Polish and Czech, which are fundamentally Slavic, and look at how the Catholic church had to bend the Latin alphabet to fit the sounds we simply don't have Latin letters for.
For example, the Polish 'szcz' (as in the town name Szczecin) can be represented as a single letter in Cyrillic (щ, as another commentor has highlighted).
You don't have to look far to find jokes/criticisms about Polish names being 'too full of consonants and not enough vowels'.
Transliteration rules exist, but they change. Me and my sibling have a different latin last name due to this.
As an interesting side effect, you can tell Ukrainians by the way their names are transliterated - it’s Iurii (not Yuri), Olha (not Olga), Hryhorii (not Grigori) etc.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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?
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.
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).
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.
>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.
> 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.
Oh, 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.
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.
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.
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.
I wish East Slavic languages were more consistently transliterated into something like Czech. I don’t understand the trend to transliterate into English, where you end up with hard to parse compounds like “shzh” and idiosyncratic mixes of Ys, Is, Js, not to even mention the various acutes and apostrophes…
We don't have Czech letters on our keyboards. That is pretty much the entire reason - it's hard to impossible to type these characters on a standard US QWERTY keyboard, so we don't. Plus the DOS systems will probably balk at them as well.
You don't need Czech letters on your keyboard; I don't have them on mine. That's the beauty of diacritics: they are compositional. I use compose key to type various letters like é, č, ö, ø, æ, ï, etc on my plain American ANSI keyboard.
OTOH to type fast, you might want a more ergonomic input mechanism. (But I won't dive into the rabbit hole of really ergonomic keyboard layouts; if you're curious, search for KMonad, and think about e.g. the convenience of having modifier keys right in the home row.)
I happen to write in Spanish and German, for which the us-international layout is just perfect. But I did customize my xkb for some other keys, and I used to use kmonad before.
If I wrote a ton of German, or Swedish, or Czech, I'd likley create a layer dedicated to these letters with diacritics, just to access them in 2 keypresses rather than in 3.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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...
No, that's absolutely not technicalities. By omitting the real timelines the article suggests that the efforts to eliminate Cyrillic are somehow connected or caused by Russia, and you're making the same mistake. But in reality the main cause for switch to Latin was and is the nation-building process happening since the collapse of Soviet Union.
Maybe the Russian actions could accelerate the process, but honestly, at least for Uzbekistan, the switch to Latin alphabet was mostly done in 00s already, not much to accelerate here.
> 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...
Y'know this sounds like a Russian propaganda talking points, right?
Uzbekistan certainly didn't do that, and I think Kazakhstan didn't do that either. They mostly used positive reinforcement instead of negative (e. g. "you can conduct commerce in Russian, but you have to provide service in Uzbek too").
> the nation-building process happening since the collapse of Soviet Union.
You're making a semantic argument here. The impact of "de-russification" is the same, regardless of how you want to label the motives.
> Y'know this sounds like a Russian propaganda talking points, right?
I'm stating a fact. ...and yes, the Russian media does absolutely capitalize on the restrictions on the Russian language - which is an added problem. ...but that doesn't mean that those rules don't exist. And they exist for good reason.
The restriction of the Russian language is a legitimate mechanism to limit Russian influence in their country and to build a new national identity. Ukraine, the Baltics, Central Asia - everyone has been doing it - and it has accelerated.
"...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?
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.
> 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_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.
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?")
> […] 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».
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.
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.
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.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 196 ms ] thread"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.
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.
Isn’t this true of Latin characters, too? German has ß; French doesn’t. Inversely for ù.
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
They don't just have diacritics, they _stack_ them to form towers of diacritics. Ok, so only 2 high, but even so.
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.)
On the other hand. No language rules forever. See lingua franca.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
For some language it is closer to truth, like Spanish and German, which mostly are pronounced like they are written
English and French, identical spelling represent varying sounds. English example: lose, rose, tone,... all different "o" sounds, yet they all use the same written "o".
The point about Cyrillic having more letters is also misguided: you can make sounds with letter combinations. French has dozens and dozens of letter combos for various sounds, let just list a small subset: au, eau, eu, ou, ui, oi, euil, ouil, un, an, in, en, oui, ui, sh, ch, cl, cr, tr, ....
Either way, any alphabet change that leads to less correspondence between written and spoken language doesn't seem like a desirable thing...
Try this. Pinch your nose closed with your thumb and forefinger. Say "tone" but stop before you articulate the n.
Now do the same with "rose," stopping before you articulate the s.
I'm betting you felt a lot more vibration in your nose on the first one.
There might be a small number of heavy-NCVS speakers for whom there is truly no difference. David Boreanaz, perhaps. Bobby Generic's mom, likely.
https://youglish.com/pronounce/rose/english/aus
https://youglish.com/pronounce/tone/english/aus
But I would have thought I use -əʊ- for both, which is what's shown as the Br-E pronunciation for both words on that site.
(Note: One wonderfully weird thing about English is that different types of phonological assimilation happen in different directions, e.g., voice assimilation happens the other way, so "fads" is pronounced as if it had a "z" at the end and "putz" is pronounced as if it had an "s" at the end, i.e., "fadz"/"puts" rather than "fats"/"pudz")
Could you please explain how you would represent these different sound and letter combinations in Latin script in a way that would make it obvious how to pronounce them correctly:
ща(вель), ша(тун), сча(стье);
че(й), чё(рный), чье(-то);
This is just two random, very limited examples off the top of my head, not even the tip of the iceberg, but the point of the tip.
By the way, Russian also has many regional dialects and accents.
A latinized Russian should have a different character for each s-like character like it's now in cyrillic.
Also, everybody should look at English and French spelling as something definitely NOT to do.
Spanish is also good but they are actually close to latin so it's no surprise the latin alphabet also works.
German is not so great as the match between spoken and written is quite loose. Both wovels and consonants change with context.
I imagine, there's an official transliteration scheme because names in international passports have to be spelled in latin alphabet for reference. Is it ambiguous, too? Even if so, it's probably not to hard to come up with more two-letter combinations to encode every letter of Russian alphabet in an unambiguous way and so that even people who doesn't know the encoding could read it close enough.
If you want to just encode the "data" or just get close (but not exact) pronunciation, you can do reasonably well, though nowhere near as good as Cyrillic.
If you want full parity, you just can't. Not unless you rewrite the entire language's grammar and re-teach people how to read Latin script in a way that is very different from how it is read in other languages.
For 'two letter combinations', etc. it's worth looking at languages like Polish and Czech, which are fundamentally Slavic, and look at how the Catholic church had to bend the Latin alphabet to fit the sounds we simply don't have Latin letters for.
For example, the Polish 'szcz' (as in the town name Szczecin) can be represented as a single letter in Cyrillic (щ, as another commentor has highlighted).
You don't have to look far to find jokes/criticisms about Polish names being 'too full of consonants and not enough vowels'.
As an interesting side effect, you can tell Ukrainians by the way their names are transliterated - it’s Iurii (not Yuri), Olha (not Olga), Hryhorii (not Grigori) etc.
Your point about computer systems is true, but I think they’re slowly getting better at representing diacritics over time.
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.
~100 years ago, Turkey switched from Arabic to Latin; you can study the impact.
Even though latin Turkish alphabet is a bit problematic for software (I -> ı capitalization issues) I think Uzbec and Kazakh alphabets avoided this issue.
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?
Depends on the source script. For Cyrillic->Latin the changes are minute. Most characters have a 1:1 mapping.
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).
I would consider that as 1:1 mapping while technically being 2 characters in most latin languages.
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.
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.
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.
But it was invented too late, and lacked an expansionist empire, or a widespread religion, to bring it to enough neighboring peoples.
Ц -> Z
Ш -> Sch
Ч -> Tsch
one could argue that german should also have one character for the "sch"-Sound instead of 3.
The postfix-h notation was a good idea, but the fact that e.g. "ch" is interpreted differently in English, German, and French derails it instantly :(
OTOH to type fast, you might want a more ergonomic input mechanism. (But I won't dive into the rabbit hole of really ergonomic keyboard layouts; if you're curious, search for KMonad, and think about e.g. the convenience of having modifier keys right in the home row.)
I happen to write in Spanish and German, for which the us-international layout is just perfect. But I did customize my xkb for some other keys, and I used to use kmonad before.
No need to strike for DOS compatibility anymore.
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!
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.
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.
But rest assured, modern Chinese language having tons of homophones, itself, has nothing to do with the Latin script. They always had them.
> 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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSTOR
Not sure who Andrew Mellow is and not sure how they vet their content creators.
He's been dead for almost a century, so I don't think he's vetting much of anything at the moment
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.
> 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.
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...
Maybe the Russian actions could accelerate the process, but honestly, at least for Uzbekistan, the switch to Latin alphabet was mostly done in 00s already, not much to accelerate here.
> 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...
Y'know this sounds like a Russian propaganda talking points, right?
Uzbekistan certainly didn't do that, and I think Kazakhstan didn't do that either. They mostly used positive reinforcement instead of negative (e. g. "you can conduct commerce in Russian, but you have to provide service in Uzbek too").
You're making a semantic argument here. The impact of "de-russification" is the same, regardless of how you want to label the motives.
> Y'know this sounds like a Russian propaganda talking points, right?
I'm stating a fact. ...and yes, the Russian media does absolutely capitalize on the restrictions on the Russian language - which is an added problem. ...but that doesn't mean that those rules don't exist. And they exist for good reason.
The restriction of the Russian language is a legitimate mechanism to limit Russian influence in their country and to build a new national identity. Ukraine, the Baltics, Central Asia - everyone has been doing it - and it has accelerated.
https://thediplomat.com/2022/01/2021-another-year-of-the-rus...
https://thediplomat.com/2020/05/can-uzbekistan-put-the-uzbek...
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?
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.
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_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.
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?")
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».
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.
You are hating people who were dispossessed, humiliated, and dehumanized by you, superrace.
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.