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Cyrillic versus Latin script | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| chelovek Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5898 days ago 413 posts - 461 votes  5 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Russian | Message 25 of 66 03 June 2008 at 4:45pm | IP Logged | ||
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Chung, I don't think anyone here is arguing that every language should use one script. The general idea is that some scripts are better suited to certain languages.
In the case of Polish and perhaps all other Slavic languages, it would be more sensible to use the Cyrillic alphabet, which already covers most/all of the phonetic bases. When they use the Latin script, the essentially have to make up their own letter combinations that don't really follow any logical pattern (as far as I can tell). In practical terms, making such changes would be quite difficult, but just hypothetically, I think various script changes could do certain languages quite a bit of good. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Leopejo Bilingual Triglot Senior Member Italy Joined 5920 days ago 675 posts - 724 votes Speaks: Italian*, Finnish*, English Studies: French, Russian | Message 26 of 66 03 June 2008 at 5:03pm | IP Logged | ||
I love Polish as it is, and I find it the best "transliteration" there is, very readable and logic. I would hate it to be in cyrillic - and it would still need special characters. On a side note, I must be the only one whose ideal is not "one character for each sound". Using combinations of two-three letters for certain sounds is for me perfectly acceptable if not better than having a new character. And even having one character represent more sounds is not so terrible per se. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6514 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 27 of 66 03 June 2008 at 5:47pm | IP Logged | ||
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I have two issues with the Russian alphabet: the digraph ы (which even contains a copy of a totally different letter ь) and the letter й with its diacritic - I don't like diacritics because they slow down my handwriting.
But ultimately we can't change the orthography of the languages we study, so we can just as well rejoice in the weird little details of the languages we of our own free volition have chosen to study. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 6967 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 28 of 66 03 June 2008 at 5:50pm | IP Logged | ||
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That's what I'm not so sure of, chelovek. This belief that Slavonic languages would be much better off expressed in Cyrillic seems very comparable to saying that all Germanic languages would be much better off expressed in Gothic or Norse runes.
After having spent time learning Slavonic languages that use Latin or Cyrillic alphabets (or both), I feel that I may be able to offer some points for thought. In my experience, I did not see any compelling reason to change the Latin alphabets of Czech, Polish or Slovak. We could map a Cyrillic alphabet (to a large extent already) to these languages, but what would be the point? For example with "special" Slovak consonants š ш č ч ť ть ď дь ň нь ŕ ĺ ľ ль ž ж It's up to you how you want to express long syllabic r and l with Cyrillic. Perhaps p and л with acute accents? (My computer can't put out those hypothetical forms unfortunately) Let's look at the special characters in Polish: ą (nasal vowel - make up a Cyrillic equivalent, perhaps "ą" also?) ć чь cz ч ę (nasal vowel - make up whatever Cyrillic equivalent, perhaps "ę" also?) ł (this is pronounced a bit like Ukrainian final "в" or English "w", but Polish already has "B/b", so you'd need to make up a Cyrillic equivalent in order to avoid confusion.) ń нь ó у sz ш ś шь ż ж ź жь I ask again, what makes the Cyrillic proposal automatically superior to the existing Latin-based alphabet? That's what I don't get but the sense that I get from the proponents of Cyrillic is that somehow a Cyrillic alphabet would provide a better solution. Is there something undesirable about merely taking the existing Latin-based inventory and "stretching" it with diagraphs or symbols with diacritical marks? On the other hand, I could suggest changes to the Latin alphabet of Slovenian and the dual alphabets of BCS/Serbo-Croatian because these languages have vowel reduction (Slovenian only), pitch-accent, variable stress and vowel length. Outside a couple of words, the current alphabets for these South Slavonic languages do not reflect any of these features. I have the same difficulties in reading unfamiliar texts printed in the Latin or Cyrillic forms of BCS/Serbo-Croatian because neither alphabet in this language(s) reflect the features that I have just listed. If a theoretical Slovenian alphabet in Cyrillic would have the same flaws of omission in the current Latin-based one, then we'd be no better off from when we began. To "iron out" Slovenian orthography, why not augment the established Latin alphabet with diacritical marks on existing letters or add other characters? (e.g. "schwa" anyone?) As I'm studying Ukrainian, I would say that it would not hurt to modify the existing Cyrillic alphabet to reflect the language's variable stress and reduction of unstressed я. However, I would not advocate a replacement of Ukrainian Cyrillic with Latin characters (any more than I would say for Czech, Polish, Slovak or Slovenian with Cyrillic) since if a proposed Ukrainian Latin alphabet would still omit those "tricky" features that I listed, then the information-value of a Ukrainian text written in the proposed Latin version would be no improvement over an existing Cyrillic one. If you think about it, a script is just some squiggle, or combination of lines or other shapes (circles, triangles, squares, polygrams in general). In any case, Cyrillic and Latin share a common ancestor in the Greek alphabet. Whether one uses Latin or Cyrillic as the base shouldn't really matter for an alphabet as long as it suits the purpose of the target language. That's my point. I do suspect that extra-linguistic matters do come around and render the point moot of the neutrality of scripts, be it Latin, Cyrillic, Hangul, Runic or whatever. For example, Stalin initially approved Latin-based scripts for the Uralic, Altaic, Caucasian and Iranian peoples living in the USSR in the 1920s, but quickly revised the decision and approved Cyrillic-based alphabets instead. There was nothing inherently wrong with the Latin-based scripts compared with the Cyrillic-based ones, but expediency and politics were the main factors. Since the official language was Russian, expressing Caucasian, Iranian, Uralic and Altaic languages in the same "script-base" as the official language would make things slightly easier for those ethnic minorities who'd be exposed to Russian. Just as Latin wouldn't necessarily be superior, neither would Cyrillic. With either script, one could get creative and devise new symbols or diagraphs using the existing inventory. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Sennin Senior Member Bulgaria Joined 5845 days ago 1457 posts - 1759 votes 5 sounds | Message 29 of 66 03 June 2008 at 11:59pm | IP Logged | ||
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Too many digraphs just mean that a given language is not very well suited for the used script. They are subtle in their graphical representation (a single stroke, small circle etc) and should be used only for minor phonetic tweaks. So they can't stretch the alphabet too far (or at least it wouldn't be practical.)
edit: Ops. Sorry, I was actually thinking about dîáçrîtîçs. But it is also true about digraphs to some extend, because they are more cumbersome than dual-sound characters. Edited by Sennin on 04 June 2008 at 12:13am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| zhiguli Senior Member Canada Joined 6252 days ago 176 posts - 221 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Russian, Mandarin | Message 30 of 66 09 June 2008 at 7:07am | IP Logged | ||
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Chung hit the nail on the head. What alphabet a language ends up with rarely has anything to do with purely linguistic considerations, but rather political/religious/cultural reasons. The split between Latin/Catholic vs Cyrillic/Orthodox in the Slavic languages is proof enough of this. Edited by zhiguli on 09 June 2008 at 7:07am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Vlad Trilingual Super Polyglot Senior Member Czechoslovakia foreverastudent.com Joined 6395 days ago 443 posts - 576 votes 2 sounds Speaks: Czech*, Slovak*, Hungarian*, Mandarin, EnglishC2, GermanC2, ItalianC1, Spanish, Russian, Polish, Serbian, French Studies: Persian, Taiwanese, Romanian, Portuguese | Message 31 of 66 09 June 2008 at 9:25am | IP Logged | ||
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From a Slovak speakers point of view I have one argument for and one against the cyrillic alphabet for Slovak:
Positive: In Slovak we don't mark whether you pronounce the 'd,t,n,l' sounds soft or hard, when followed by 'e' and 'i'. So: de, te, ne, le and di, ti, ni, li can be pronounced both platalized and non-platalised, but this is not marked in writing. So: nivelizácia, nikotín - both 'n' and 'l' are non-platalized nič, nikdy, - platalized if you were to use the cyrillic alphabet, you would not have this problem нъивелъизация, нъикотин нич, никды Negative: As you can see, Slovak has long and short vowels, which would need to be diacritically marked in cyrillic. Russianbear: I really liked your English cyrillic improvisation: Инглыш риттн ын Серрилык вуд рак зъэ моуст. :-) Edited by Vlad on 09 June 2008 at 9:27am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 6967 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 32 of 66 07 January 2009 at 3:45pm | IP Logged | ||
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If anyone is still interested, I just read an article from about 20 years ago that deals with spelling in Slavonic languages. Still rather thought-provoking as we occasionally discuss alphabets on this forum.
http://www.spellingsociety.org/journals/j8/slavonic.php 1 person has voted this message useful |
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