Alpha. Bravo. Cyrillic

https://daily.jstor.org/alpha-bravo-cyrillic/

by sohkamyung • 4 years ago

53 100 4 years ago

daily.jstor.org

throwaway220322• 4 years ago

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.

pigsty• 4 years ago

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.

umanwizard3• 4 years ago

One interesting thing is that as Cyrillic has spread, new local characters have been added depending on the language

Isn’t this true of Latin characters, too? German has ß; French doesn’t. Inversely for ù.

zozbot2344• 4 years ago

Unicode has all kinds of weird exotic characters that are still considered part of the Latin script. Though diacritics are generally more common.

gilleain• 4 years ago

Vietnamese is one of the few recent adopters I know of to add unique accent marks, although they still use the same character set.

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.

Asooka4• 4 years ago

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.

Ygg2• 4 years ago

On hand it's loss of language diversity as they latinize and lose certain specific traits.

On the other hand. No language rules forever. See lingua franca.

umanwizard3• 4 years ago

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• 4 years 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• 4 years 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.

forgotmypw173• 4 years 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.

Asooka4• 4 years 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.

vetinari• 4 years ago

They will lose part of their history and cultural heritage. The younger generations won't be able to read the older works, so they will be forgotten.

~100 years ago, Turkey switched from Arabic to Latin; you can study the impact.

zozbot2344• 4 years ago

OTOH by transcribing those older works to the more widespread Latin script, you'd also make them a bit more available internationally.

mda• 4 years ago

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.

powera• 4 years ago

"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?

dontlaugh2• 4 years ago

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.

gsich6• 4 years 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.

jjtheblunt6• 4 years 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}.

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).

bloak• 4 years ago

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.

PeterisP• 4 years ago

The issue is that, unlike slavic languages, those particular turkic languages lose as much or even more detail by being transcripted in cyrillic.

LudwigNagasena2• 4 years ago

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.

mFixman3• 4 years ago

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.

tgv• 4 years ago

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.

gumby2• 4 years ago

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!

Timpy• 4 years ago

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.

That being said, I am wistful of the change.

mFixman3• 4 years ago

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.

gumby2• 4 years ago

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.

numpad0• 4 years ago

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.

Timwi• 4 years ago

There's always Bopomofo (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bopomofo).

iavael• 4 years ago

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.

Aspos2• 4 years ago

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.

reisse4• 4 years ago

Do you have any proofs of the funding? JSTOR is funded by Andrew Mellow Foundation [1].

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSTOR

Aspos2• 4 years ago

I don't have any proofs. I just see a coordinated effort and this particular article miraculously matches the narrative. Pure coincidence, of course.

Not sure who Andrew Mellow is and not sure how they vet their content creators.

actionfromafar• 4 years ago

It was such an abrupt ending too, just when the article was getting started!

reisse4• 4 years ago

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.

petargyurov• 4 years ago

In the next paragraph they kind of allude to it:

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.

bombcar2• 4 years ago

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.

reisse4• 4 years ago

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.

q1w22• 4 years ago

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...

reisse4• 4 years ago

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").

zoomablemind• 4 years ago

"...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?

desireco42• 4 years ago

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.

sologoub2• 4 years ago

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.

Koshkin• 4 years ago

a bit easier

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?")

inkyoto• 4 years ago

[…] 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».

sologoub2• 4 years ago

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.

krunck• 4 years ago

It's odd that the article does not mention that Cyrillic is not a Russian invention but from 9th century Bulgaria.

Asooka4• 4 years ago

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.

nikolay• 4 years ago

But how is using the Cyrillic alphabet Russification as it's not even a Russian alphabet!

lancelot-ru2• 4 years ago

Of course by now your hatred for Russians is of the same species as nazi hatred for the jews, but you will never admit it to yourselves.

You are hating people who were dispossessed, humiliated, and dehumanized by you, superrace.

lancelot-ru2• 4 years ago

So, HN decided to stop removing my posts..

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.

Alpha. Bravo. Cyrillic

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