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Cyrillic versus Latin script | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7157 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes  20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 2 of 66 05 March 2008 at 9:57pm | IP Logged | ||
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Latin alphabet all the way for me. :-) Thank God that until I started learning Ukrainian, I kept using modified Latin alphabets for Croatian, Czech, Polish, Slovak and Slovenian.
Although the appearance of my Cyrillic handwriting seems a little nicer to me than the appearance of my Latin handwriting/chicken scratches, old habits die hard. It's still a little hard for me to get used to я and ю in Ukrainian. I sometimes catch myself adding "a" after "я" or "y" after "ю" since I'm thinking of the sound "ya" and "yu" respectively. Then again this argument is a little bit like saying is it better for Americans to use euros instead of dollars. Changing the currency doesn't make transactions any easier (think exchange rates), any more than replacing one alphabet with another makes a language better or worse off. For your interest, try your hand at Serbian. Serbian can be expressed in Latin or Cyrillic and from what I can tell, the dual-use doesn't seem to bother the Serbs. Edited by Chung on 05 March 2008 at 10:02pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| guilon Pentaglot Senior Member Spain Joined 6193 days ago 226 posts - 229 votes Speaks: Spanish*, PortugueseC2, FrenchC2, Italian, English | Message 3 of 66 05 March 2008 at 10:01pm | IP Logged | ||
I don't think English needs Cyrillic writing to be a language full of phonetic gaps, it already is so with Latin script. As for me, Polish with cyrillics wouldn't look Polish. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7157 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 5 of 66 06 March 2008 at 8:49am | IP Logged | ||
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Russian doesn't have nasal vowels. Polish still has nasal vowels.
What you may be forgetting is that Russian has "akannye" which the spelling system (never mind the alphabet) doesn't reflect. In my view, changing the look of the alphabet doesn't imply spelling becomes more phonetic (which I find is a more pressing problem than mere appearance). If we were to reverse things and express Russian using a Latin alphabet, I don't believe that Russian would be worse off. (Incidentally, I remember reading about an attempt in the 19th century to create a Latin alphabet for Ukrainian but it never took off partially for political reasons since the script resembled Polish's and there was tension between Polish and Ukrainian nationalists at that time.) Again, look at Serbian as the example (it's the only one) of a Slavonic language that uses both alphabets. Except for one sound, each letter in Serbian Latin matches a letter in Serbian Cyrillic. The Latin alphabet of Serbian (and Bosnian and Croatian) used the Czech and Polish alphabets as models, while its Cyrillic alphabet is the same as Russian's apart from a few unique characters devised by its reformers. In any case, do you think that Serbian is better expressed in Latin or Cyrillic? Why not look at the modified Slavonic Latin alphabet that is used in Czech, Slovak, Slovenian and BCS? It avoids the Polish doubled consonants that seem to bother you (e.g. š = sz, ř = rz), but I don't see a real problem. As long as I know that "sz" is pronounced as "sh", it shouldn't matter that Slovaks for example express the sound as one letter (š) or the Poles use two letters (sz) for that sound. The expression seems cosmetic, no? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Julie Heptaglot Senior Member PolandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6904 days ago 1251 posts - 1733 votes 5 sounds Speaks: Polish*, EnglishB2, GermanC2, SpanishB2, Dutch, Swedish, French | Message 6 of 66 06 March 2008 at 10:25am | IP Logged | ||
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I can't be objective as I'm used to the Latin script... but I do find the Latin script with some diacritics good for Slavonic languages, including Polish. It's pretty logical and unambiguous. If you see a word, you usually know how to read it - that's a big difference in comparison with English. Using two letters to express one sound is not that strange, a similar situation is e.g. in German. And, as Chung mentioned, Slovaks and Czechs have invented some letters like š instead of using digraphs.
Cyrillic script isn't that great and easy - for me it makes learning Russian much more difficult. And it's not just because of reading/writing, but because it makes Russian phonetics more difficult to me. The biggest difference between Polish and Russian writing system is the way you're dealing with soft/hard consonants. In Polish you have for instance: "la" (soft) and "ła" (hard). In Russian: "ля" (soft) and "ла" (hard). So the information about hardness/softness is in Polish added to the letters representing consonants (usually in form of diacritics or a digraph) and in Russian to the letters representing vowels (and there are two sets of "vowel letters") or as the "soft sign". (*) Cyrillic script is almost perfect for Russian because it was created for this language. Writing Polish using it wouldn't be that easy as it seems to be, because of some phonetic differences - not only nasal vowels, that are pronounced in most cases as two sounds anyway, but because of a different system of soft and hard consonants (some of them being in Polish historically soft). If you have a good teacher (or a good book) you'll probably see a nice table with three sets of consonants: hard - soft - hard, but historically soft s - ś - sz c - ć - cz z - ź - ż/rz dz - dź - dż The differences between these sounds are analogical. What's worth to mention is that not all these sounds exist in Russian. You probably find it easier to use Cyrillic script because Russian was the first Slavonic language you learned and now it seems to be more natural. But you'll get accustomed to Polish writing system as well. Actually, it's not more complicated than the German one (with some additional letters, some combinations of letters like "sch", some strange diphthong like "ei" read as "ai", some problems with writing as a one or two words). Latin script isn't perfect for German and nor is for Polish, but it works for both languages just fine. (*) I don't know much about Russian phonetics so my explanations may show rather the way a Polish speaker perceive Russian pronunciation. If you have any questions about Polish language, feel free to ask. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| yobar Diglot Groupie United States Joined 7033 days ago 52 posts - 54 votes Speaks: English*, Russian Studies: German, Spanish, Irish | Message 7 of 66 06 March 2008 at 3:51pm | IP Logged | ||
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Russian is the first Slavic language I studied and I'm biased toward appreciating the Cyrillic. When I started studying Czech and Croatian I visualized them in Cyrillic while I read aloud. I never bothered with transliterated Russian until I ran into the ugliness of the coding issues (nasty MSWincode) back in the Nineties. Many mailing lists and Usenet newsgroups were a mish-mash of Cyrllic and various Latin translit methods. After a while I became used to seeing j, ', zh, ", 4, and other "letters" mixed in with the Russian. I was just wondering if you had to deal with much transliterated Russian. It may help you with the Polish. It help me with that soft, mushy language. ;)
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| MarcoDiAngelo Tetraglot Senior Member Yugoslavia Joined 6448 days ago 208 posts - 345 votes Speaks: Serbian*, English, Spanish, Russian Studies: Thai, Polish | Message 8 of 66 07 March 2008 at 2:22am | IP Logged | ||
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Serbian cyrillic script uses one letter per sound, which is not the case with Serbian latin alphabet. Thus is the more efficient.
Examples: љ - lj њ - nj џ - dž 1 person has voted this message useful |
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