Oddly, the article doesn't mention the most interesting part. Most scholars believe that Cyril and Methodius did not design Cyrillic, but instead something called Glagolitic.[0]
Glagolitic very quickly got pushed out by what were essentially Greek letters. If you look at Bulgarian and Byzantine manuscripts from the time, they are almost impossible to tell apart, unless you know the languages.
The reason for that is pretty obvious if you look at the Glagolitic letters themselves: they are horrible UX. You need a lot more strokes than for something like Greek or Latin to record the same information. Because Glagolitic was contrived and not polished with use over the centuries, there was very little reason to use it over Greek.
Cyrillic is probably a successor to Glagolitic. Glagolitic was the first Slavic alphabet, but when they tried to use it in Bulgaria, it had all the UX problems you mentioned. What they did is replace most of the characters with their Greek counterparts, while keeping the Glagolitic writing system and some of the characters with no counterparts. Bulgaria was close to Byzantium, and people were more likely to know and use Greek letters already. Nevertheless, Cyril and Methodius should still get some recognition, as the shape of the letters is not as important as having the system to write down the Slavic language into letters.
Interestingly, it was also a derivative of Greek, but the cursive version. It's harder to write, but apart from that, I like it. Ⱂⱃⰺⰲⰵⱅ, ⱂⰺⱎⰺⱅⰵ Ⰳⰾⰰⰳⱁⰾⰺⱌⰵⰻ!
This is a novel claim to me. I don't think Glagolitic looks particularly like cursive Greek, and I haven't seen this idea in scholarship. What is your source for it?
I guess I don't see this idea around because it wasn't good enough to survive the early 1950s? I am looking at the tables, and while I can see the resemblance in some places, it's quite a significant stretch in others. The fact that the Glagolitic and Greek examples are cherry-picked from different manuscripts with different styles doesn't help.
Wouldn't trust anything about medieval or cultural from someone in general and in this case _mirelaivanova_ who is touched by oxford group think, who is abandon twitter in favor of bluesky, who talks about "the uses and possibilities of the gender theory in the study of medieval world" https://youtu.be/dK9qpHIWXRs?t=118
This is an article with a long introduction and then jumps straight to the point in one, final paragraph: Russia is abusing it for political messaging again. While yes, any tool will be abused like this, it really is also a tool to best codify spoken language of the Slavs (in a sense, it is trivially provable that Cyrillic script is better adapted even to languages which do not use it today, but have to resort to digraphs or glyphs with diacritics — some are thus not using it to distance from a particular influence instead).
None of the interesting bits of Cyrillic invention are covered, like how the original Slavic script was Glagolitic as the sibling mentioned, and only evolved into modern Cyrillic much later. Or how there was no lowercase until a few centuries ago, especially with the reform of Peter the Great.
With Slavic people, it's also worth noting that "Slav" actually means "word" or "letter" (of an alphabet), so legibility was part of the identity. In contrast, most Slavic people call Germans a variation of "Nemci", or mutes (those who cannot speak) — notably, most except Russians who call them Germans. Again, likely to distance themselves from the negative connotation with their aspiring historical partners.
No idea where you're getting it from, Germans are Nemci in Russian as well. It's rather "unable to speak the language", meant for all foreigners but later stuck to Germans, presumably because German traders were the most common foreigners.
Apologies, it was mostly from running across different Russian maps with Германия that I took it as such (in Serbian it is Немачка). I stand corrected!
Nem/нем literally means "mute" in Serbian, perhaps it's a latter evolution per region either way.
It seems to me that you have entirely discredited yourself. You confidently make claims about the Russian language but don't even know the most basic thing about the point you were making.
"Slav" deriving from the Slavic term for "word" is something of a false etymology that was invented in the 19th century. It is implausible on philological grounds: you'd expect a different vowel in this word if this were the case, and the suffix *-ninъ is only otherwise used in terms derived from place names.
It is more likely[0] that the term derives from some toponym. This is in line with how tribal names tend to work in Europe and is not problematic in terms of historical linguistics, however it gives less fuel to romantic nationalism and armchair speculations about national "identities" or "mindsets".
The irony for me being that when I was first learning Polish and looking for any and all mnemonics - “ah, that word is the number nine, and that one is ten because it has an s in the middle and that’s next to t for ten in the alphabet”-levels of desperate - the false etymology helped me set word, słowo, in my head, and the rather delightful dosłownie, literally / to the word, has remained ever since.
(tho while on the subject, it’s hard to beat wieloryb as a wonder that I don’t want to know the true etymology of ever because if there’s even a chance that the word for whale derived from the words great as-in-size + fish, I want to hang on to it forever)
> it really is also a tool to best codify spoken language of the Slavs (in a sense, it is trivially provable that Cyrillic script is better adapted even to languages which do not use it today, but have to resort to digraphs or glyphs with diacritics — some are thus not using it to distance from a particular influence instead
I've heard this claim many times but never the reasoning behind it - by what metric is "ш" superior to "š" and so on?
It's less pronounced with diacritics, but enter Unicode normal forms: you can represent š either as š, or s followed by a diacritic. When you want to compare two strings, you have to normalize them to ensure you are comparing apples to apples. I can guarantee most software is broken in that regard. For Cyrillic, it just works.
With digraphs (lj, nj, dž + sometimes dj for đ too), it's even worse. Even capitalization is ambiguous: sometimes it's Lj and other times it's LJ. Then you have words like konjugacija where nj is not a digraph.
Interestingly — and not many know this — Unicode includes separate codepoints for all of the digraphs too. While well-intentioned, it only makes the problem worse.
Digraphs are especially sucky when you try sorting strings in a phonebook order as LJ comes after L, so you've got ...LI, LK..., LZ, LJA... With exceptions, it is even worse.
So, it's not "trivially provable that Cyrillic is better suited to Slavic languages". But that "the symbols representtion we settled on in software has some difficulties disambiguatuong some, but not all cases of symbol use in a language, a problem that is not unique to Slavic languages, see Dutch IJ, Turkish ı/i, German ß etc."
> some are thus not using it to distance from a particular influence instead
That's not the reason. The real reason is how those regions were Christianised - Cyril and Methodius created the first version of what would later evolve into cyrilic script and they were sent by Constantinople, while missionaries sent by Rome would use latin script.
> is trivially provable that Cyrillic script is better adapted even to languages which do not use it today, but have to resort to digraphs or glyphs with diacritics
Take a look at the Cyrillic section of Unicode to see your trivially provable claim being trivially disproven. You'll see all the same digraphs, glyphs, accents, graves etc. as used in Latin scripts.
It's also easy to see it easily disproven if you look at all the languages USSR forced cyrillic alphabet on.
To be fair, the parent post was clearly talking about Slavic languages, not "all the languages USSR forced cyrillic alphabet on", which were not Slavic and which required significant modifications to the alphabet.
Indeed: most notably, Croatian, Slovenian, Bosnian, Serbian and Montenegrin are all unambiguous with Cyrillic, but Latin script dominates, even in officially Cyrillic-first Serbia.
Again, it is seen as a political tool (pro-West or pro-Russia), when Cyrillic is technically better suited (there is certainly history as well, but that's very mixed up in the region).
Again, I am saying this as someone who has worked to implement things like full-text search, collation (lexical ordering/sorting) algorithms and tables, fonts and ligatures, functions like uppercase/titlecase/lowercase...
Eg. an already complex Unicode Collation Algorithm tables can never support exceptions with digraphs like "konjukcija" (nj is usually a digraph, but not here), etc.
I invite you for a walk through Belgrade streets, maybe even with Google Street View. There will be Cyrillic in official signage, but ads and shop names will be predominately in Latin script. If there are some in Cyrillic, they are likely to be part of a newer "hipster" move to differentiate more for the tourists.
Most of the extra glyphs are for non-Slavic (Turk languages of Central Asia and Siberia). You see the same (and worse) in Latin Unicode pages — just look at how many variations of vowels 'a', 'i', or 'e' you have, consonants like 'c', 'z', 's'…
This author is suggesting that Cyrillic is a sort of tool or weapon in the arms of the authority, and is imposed upon the people for purely political reasons. This is just false projection of modern politics onto old times. It's shameless propaganda.
In reality, at the time, it was the Eastern Christian church that was more liberal than Rome. Rome insisted every local church make services in Latin, and didn't translate it in the local language.
The Eastern church instead, had the bible in Greek, but allowed to translate it in local languages and make services in them. Initially, those translations were made with Greek letters, which weren't fully reflecting the phonology of Slavic and other languages, so they were extended, which produced Cyrillic.
As I understand, the same way Coptic script in Egypt, and Ge'ez in Ethiopia were made, thanks to Eastern Christian church allowing this.
p.s. Saint Cyril, in fact, invented the Glagolitic script. Cyrillic was named after him, and initially "Cyrillic" alphabet was mostly Greek, plus some characters from Glagolitic, like Ⱎ, ⱍ and ⱑ.
Cyrillic has been indeed frequently used as a weapon, even if usually not by the Church, but by Tsars or by the Soviet state. Even the Eastern Christian Church, while it allowed various local alphabets, most of which were derived from the Greek alphabet, it was much less tolerant with the Latin alphabet or anything else that could be influenced by the Catholic Church, which was seen as a hostile competitor.
The Russians have forced most of the people they have subjugated (except for the 3 Baltic countries) to switch their writing system to Cyrillic, regardless whether they had previously used Latin, Arabic or other alphabets. This happened both during the time of the Russian Empire and of the Soviet Union.
This was very intentional, to make difficult for the younger people to read any books from before the Russian occupation, if they succeeded to find such books.
This was coupled to a system of education were people were taught in schools a falsified history, were the Russian invaders were presented as liberators and where it was claimed that everything good in science and technology had been discovered or invented by some unknown Russians instead of those about whom the Western "imperialists" say that they were the discoverers/inventors.
Funnily, you don't know or omit the details yourself.
Russian Empire didn't give the conquered nations the alphabet, but USSR did, as part of supporting local nationalists (surprize!). And it first gave them the Latin script.
Secondly, using different scripts for the same language isn't hard. Serbs use both Cyrillic and Latin interchangeably, and many people used Latin traslit in computers and phones when their codepages weren't available yet, and it wasn't a big problem. It takes you at most 2 weeks to learn Arabic script without knowing the language, and with own language of slightly older version, it's even easier.
You also suggest Arabic is their "proper" language, but abjad is not suitable for Turkic languages -- there vowels are significant, and many more than the 3 Arabic vowel diacritics. They had actually Turkic runes instead. Why don't you bash Arabic too?
What about Germanic peoples? Was switching to Latin from their runes an evil oppression?
It is military force and administration, that set school curriculum, use a certain script, and teach an edited history. Not the Cyrillic.
The Latin alphabet and some local alphabets were allowed for some years after the formation of the Soviet Union, but eventually during the thirties Stalin has started the Cyrillisation by force of most of the Soviet republics. Any opponents were deported to forced labor in Siberia or killed.
After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, most of the former non-Slavic members have abandoned the Cyrillic alphabet previously forced upon them.
They're just 3 states, and they have 0 texts from pre-Cyrillic period in the Latin alphabets they came up with.
Azeri language is similar to Turkish, it's an easy job, and they can watch Turkish media with no issues, and there's an infinite corpus of Turkish texts for them.
For Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan the situation is that they used Arabic script before the Soviet times. There are no texts in the Latin they chose, and their scripts and languages are far from Turkish.
If you walk down the street in Tashkent, there are signs and even announcements in Cyrillic, even in public schools. It takes long to take off, and it's probably 2nd if not 3rd version of Latin.
And also, they teach Russian in Uzbekistan too, and watch Russian media, and share political views. You must have good imagination to suggest that the switch to Latin de-colonized them.
In Kazakhstan, Latin was pet project of the former president, and is currently abandoned.
I wonder, what's your take on your alternative scripts. Latin was enforced by Roman catholic church. Poor Germanic peoples! Muslims enforced their Arabic abjad on Indo-European Farsi, where abjad doesn't quite fit.
All these alternatives have a history of bloody colonialism. Any better options?
Cyrillic has been used as a political weapon under the Soviet Union.
For example, in soviet Moldova it was mandatory to learn to read and write cyrillic at schools. They effectively wanted to eradicate the local language and culture in favor of russian.
No, you're wishfully thinking. What made people absorb the Soviet version of history and politics, was school curriculum, and central TV, and teaching Russian to keep them in orbit. Cyrillic alone won't allow this.
If you look at the earliest versions of Cyrillic, it's basically identical, in shape and form, to the variant of the Greek alphabet used in the Byzantine Empire at the time, they just added letters for the sounds not found in Greek, like ts, ch, sh, zh. "Invention" is a stretch. I'm not sure why the article spins a political angle so much, it's the same as West Europeans adapting Latin for their needs, except they usually preferred digraphs for non-Latin sounds while Slavs decided to use special characters instead. Cyrillic and Greek alphabets later diverged to look more different from one another, but it was much later.
Glagolitic was created by Cyril and Methodius which was the precursor for Cyrillic. Whether they were Greek or Bulgarian is still in contention, but that doesn't matter. What matters is that Cyrillic itself was created later by students of theirs in Bulgaria at the Preslav Literary School.
On the political aspect Russia has always hated the fact that small Bulgaria gave them their alphabet/culture and has used it's influence to bitch, moan and subjugate ever since. Most recent rage bait is with bullshit like saying that it's actually from (the country now known as) North Macedonia.
>> Russia has always hated the fact that small Bulgaria gave them their alphabet
The wording is entirely accurate, since even during the Roman Empire, the region where Sts. Cyril and Methodius were later born and worked was known as Macedonia. And, of course, no one in Russia is trying to deny the contribution of the First Bulgarian Empire to the creation of the Slavic alphabet, since that would contradict historical facts.
148 years ago, in December 1877, Russian troops dealt a severe insult to the Bulgarian people by driving the civilized and enlightened Turkish troops out of Sofia and literally forcing the rebellious Bulgarians to accept their hated independence.
The insult was so great that throughout its subsequent history, Bulgaria fought exclusively against Russia in every world war, and in the intervals between them, it diligently undermined Russia, all the while not forgetting to shout about “eternal brotherly friendship”.
> The insult was so great that throughout its subsequent history, Bulgaria fought exclusively against Russia in every world war, and in the intervals between them, it diligently undermined Russia, all the while not forgetting to shout about “eternal brotherly friendship”.
You cannot expect eternal gratitude esp. when Russian Empire is constantly trying to influence its "vasals" using local puppets. Now is about time for you to fcuk off I would say -- we don't want to have anything in common with you people.
The Bulgarians were “insulted” a second time after World War II, when - having forgotten about the Soviet submarines sunk and aircraft shot down by the Bulgarians, and having forgotten about the Bulgarian medical trains on the Eastern Front that had diligently cared for the soldiers of the Third Reich - and having forgotten about the towns and villages of the Non-Chernozem region that had been ravaged with the help of the Bulgarian junta, the USSR rushed to rebuild the non-existent economy of its “brothers.”
As a result of gratuitous Soviet aid, Bulgaria’s total gross national product (GNP) grew more than 14-fold over the 40 postwar years, and per capita - nearly 30-fold. Between 1946 and 1986, approximately 80% of Bulgaria’s industrial capacity, more than a third of its agricultural capacity, up to 90% of its energy sector, 70% of its transportation network, 80% of its port infrastructure, and more than 80% of all housing, healthcare, educational, scientific, and cultural facilities were built. For a population of 8.9 million (in 1986), there were 27 universities, 185 state museums, 10,400 public libraries, 55 theaters, and so on. All of this was achieved exclusively through material, technical, and financial assistance from the USSR, as well as through Soviet personnel. Adjusted for today’s prices, the USSR invested hundreds of billions of dollars in Bulgaria! One must also account for compensation for Bulgarian goods exported to the Soviet Union: despite the low cost of Bulgarian products, Moscow paid Sofia at rates close to world market prices. For Bulgaria, the prices of Soviet goods supplied were kept artificially low.
Naturally, it was impossible to endure such humiliation, and the “brothers’” wounded national pride found a fertile outlet in the primitive Russophobia that the Bulgarian government has been relentlessly promoting ever since its liberation from the Soviet yoke...
I don't know if you're willfully ignorant or actively spreading misinformation, but the USSR seized Bulgaria's gold reserves after the war and the following coup. They also seized the national archives, which are still not returned to this day. Everything you tout as being "given" by USSR was paid with Bulgaria's own funds!
I really don't understand (French) communists (if you are in fact French, assuming from your bio) such as yourself spouting nonsense. You have all the information and experience of people who have lived under such a regime or in the fallout of one, and yet you keep talking bullshit. You have no idea what it was like to live under such a regime. This left-wing wave that's festering in the Western world should've never been allowed to happen. If people such as yourself actually paid attention to what really happened to every country in the East, all of us in Europe would've been in a much better state nowadays...
>> I don't know if you're willfully ignorant or actively spreading misinformation
In 1960, the banks of Great Britain, France, Germany, and Italy demanded early repayment of loans, a whopping $135 million. Thus, they provoked an economic crisis in Bulgaria. Over time, it had ballooned to an astronomical sum. If nothing else, Bulgaria had to pay off the enormous interest that had accumulated on those loans. The Soviet Union came to the aid - they bought (and at the London Stock Exchange rate) Bulgaria's gold reserves.
In accordance with a written request from the chairman of the People's Bank of the BNR, the USSR State Bank paid off Western loans by purchasing 22 tons of Bulgarian gold and 50 tons of silver. The payment of these assets was made in a convertible currency at the market rate. Moreover, Moscow undertook to support the Bulgarian economy by subsidizing it with the supply of petroleum products at prices significantly below market prices.
There are a few more points to add to what has been said above:
After the end of World War II, in accordance with the agreements signed at the 1947 Paris Peace Conference, Bulgaria - as an ally of Nazi Germany - was required to pay reparations totaling $70 million over an eight-year period. However, this is mere pocket change compared to the billion dollars that Greece, actively egged on by the British, wanted to squeeze out of Sofia! And it would have succeeded - had the USSR not intervened to stand up for its “brothers.”
Citing blitz.bg... That's like citing a soiled piece of toilet paper found in a public bathroom.
We can all cherry pick "facts", but history requires context. Your replies are all in bad faith. I'm done with this "discussion". To future readers - beware! This is how actual misinformation and disinformation works.
Mate, I can provide you with sources, but it would require you to dig deeper, to question what you’ve been taught, as it will reveal that our entire civilization is built on lies.
But it would truly require you to actually dig, look for real facts, ask critical questions, and realize that humanity - especially our Western civilization - has always sought to rewrite history.
While the Russian army was the main force in the war against the Turkish empire, in the beginning it was close to losing the war, so it had to request help from the Romanian Principates.
Only the combined Russian-Romanian forces have succeeded to defeat the Turkish army, so Russia does not have alone the merit for making Bulgaria independent.
Moreover, Bulgaria was very lucky that Romania was interposed between it and Russia.
Otherwise, after the Russian victory Bulgaria would not have stayed independent but it would have been incorporated in the Russian Empire, with bad consequences for them. The Russian Empire already had a long series of wars with the Turkish Empire, during which various territories had been transferred from the Turkish Empire to the Russian Empire. Russia did not start any of those wars to make independent countries, but only to grab land from the Turkish Empire.
Before the war, Russia actually secretly hoped to also incorporate Romania in the Russian Empire, but this could not be accomplished because of their initial defeats by the Turkish army, so after they were forced to request Romanian help they had to treat them as allies, so they could not fulfill their initial plans. Thus after the war both Romania and Bulgaria became independent of both neighboring empires.
In comparison with the Russian Empire, the Turkish Empire can be considered, as you say, more "civilized and enlightened", so this is not successful sarcasm.
The Turkish Empire imposed heavy tributes, i.e. heavy taxes in the dependent territories, but otherwise there was little discrimination between citizens based on nationality and little interference with local customs, culture or religion. This was very different from the Russification policies applied in the Tsarist Empire and then in its successor, the Soviet Union. People of many nationalities have maintained their identity for centuries under Turkish occupation, while others have lost theirs after a few decades of Russian occupation.
> And, of course, no one in Russia is trying to deny the contribution of the First Bulgarian Empire to the creation of the Slavic alphabet, since that would contradict historical facts.
This doesn't follow. People deny historical fact all the time.
I'm Romanian, so I geographically sit between the Bulgarian and the Russian cultural spaces, have to say that Bulgaria back in the '80s (grew up as a kid just across the Danube from Silistra during those years) was very much under Soviet/Russian influence, at least culturally, that's what partially made it more "evolved" compared to us here in Romania. Can't and won't speak about the post-Cold War years because I eventually moved from my home-town and it would get too political, just wanted to say that there are a lot more things that the Bulgarians and Russians share compared to the things that they don't share, again, at least from a cultural pov.
Also, ever since reading about Sviatoslav I's [1] assault on Silistra at the end of the 900s I've always wondered how history would have unfolded had he managed to solidly set foot here at the Lower Danube, I think that Russia, Bulgaria (and current Ukraine and Romania) wouldn't have been the same, maybe Europe as a whole wouldn't have been the same.
>Russia has always hated the fact that small Bulgaria gave them their alphabet/culture
As someone who lived in Russia for 36 years (also studied linguistics there), it's my first time hearing this.
>Most recent rage bait is with bullshit like saying that it's actually from (the country now known as) North Macedonia.
To be honest, I only heard Bulgarians and North Macedonians pay attention to things like this ("actually, it was Macedonia, not Bulgaria" and vice versa). I googled a bit, and I guess you refer to a single case in 2017 when Putin said Cyrillic comes from Macedonia during a meeting with Macedonian president (usual boring diplomatic smalltalk) and Bulgaria got offended and there were multiple angry statements and posts from ordinary Bulgarians and their government :) And that makes you conclude Russians hate that Bulgaria invented Cyrillic? More like it's Bulgaria which has insecurity issues. A few years earlier during a state visit to Bulgaria Russia's patriarch said Cyrillic comes from Bulgaria. I'm sure that time Macedonia was the one offended. It has nothing to do with Russia, it's your usual purely regional Bulgaria vs. Macedonia thing.
"In the 890s, having recently converted to Orthodox Christianity, Boris ensured his church would be independent from the Patriarchate of Constantinople." --- I thought Orthodox Christianity was created by the Great Schism in 1054.
The article feels like AI hallucinated slop. Just a quick scroll through the page:
* Sviatoslav was not a local ruler - he ruled Kievan Rus' 1500km north-east and he remained a pagan until his death, even if his mother had converted to Christianity.
* Sviatoslav was born nearly 60 years after both Cyril and Methodius had died.
* In 890 Boris was no longer in power but his firs son, who coincidentally tried to reverse the Christianity conversion and was kicked off the throne a few years later.
* " Just after the invasion of Ukraine in July 2021" check the date.
Just what type of slop this one is? It was not "just after the invasion", it was ~7 months before the invasion. At least if I understand correctly that the start of Russo-Ukrainian war is called "invasion" here.
Oddly, the article doesn't mention the most interesting part. Most scholars believe that Cyril and Methodius did not design Cyrillic, but instead something called Glagolitic.[0]
Glagolitic very quickly got pushed out by what were essentially Greek letters. If you look at Bulgarian and Byzantine manuscripts from the time, they are almost impossible to tell apart, unless you know the languages.
The reason for that is pretty obvious if you look at the Glagolitic letters themselves: they are horrible UX. You need a lot more strokes than for something like Greek or Latin to record the same information. Because Glagolitic was contrived and not polished with use over the centuries, there was very little reason to use it over Greek.
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[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glagolitic_script
Cyrillic is probably a successor to Glagolitic. Glagolitic was the first Slavic alphabet, but when they tried to use it in Bulgaria, it had all the UX problems you mentioned. What they did is replace most of the characters with their Greek counterparts, while keeping the Glagolitic writing system and some of the characters with no counterparts. Bulgaria was close to Byzantium, and people were more likely to know and use Greek letters already. Nevertheless, Cyril and Methodius should still get some recognition, as the shape of the letters is not as important as having the system to write down the Slavic language into letters.
Bosančica, or Bosnian Cycillic is also an interesting take on this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bosnian_Cyrillic
Interestingly, it was also a derivative of Greek, but the cursive version. It's harder to write, but apart from that, I like it. Ⱂⱃⰺⰲⰵⱅ, ⱂⰺⱎⰺⱅⰵ Ⰳⰾⰰⰳⱁⰾⰺⱌⰵⰻ!
This is a novel claim to me. I don't think Glagolitic looks particularly like cursive Greek, and I haven't seen this idea in scholarship. What is your source for it?
Селищев А.М. Старославянский язык, 1951, страница 39 https://maxbooks.ru/images/slavimg/52.jpg
Selischev A.M. Old Slavonic Language, 1951. Page 39. https://www.academia.edu/126241874/%D0%90_%D0%9C_%D0%A1%D0%B... (PDF downloadable)
I guess I don't see this idea around because it wasn't good enough to survive the early 1950s? I am looking at the tables, and while I can see the resemblance in some places, it's quite a significant stretch in others. The fact that the Glagolitic and Greek examples are cherry-picked from different manuscripts with different styles doesn't help.
Oh, I see. Good point, thanks.
Wouldn't trust anything about medieval or cultural from someone in general and in this case _mirelaivanova_ who is touched by oxford group think, who is abandon twitter in favor of bluesky, who talks about "the uses and possibilities of the gender theory in the study of medieval world" https://youtu.be/dK9qpHIWXRs?t=118
This is an article with a long introduction and then jumps straight to the point in one, final paragraph: Russia is abusing it for political messaging again. While yes, any tool will be abused like this, it really is also a tool to best codify spoken language of the Slavs (in a sense, it is trivially provable that Cyrillic script is better adapted even to languages which do not use it today, but have to resort to digraphs or glyphs with diacritics — some are thus not using it to distance from a particular influence instead).
None of the interesting bits of Cyrillic invention are covered, like how the original Slavic script was Glagolitic as the sibling mentioned, and only evolved into modern Cyrillic much later. Or how there was no lowercase until a few centuries ago, especially with the reform of Peter the Great.
With Slavic people, it's also worth noting that "Slav" actually means "word" or "letter" (of an alphabet), so legibility was part of the identity. In contrast, most Slavic people call Germans a variation of "Nemci", or mutes (those who cannot speak) — notably, most except Russians who call them Germans. Again, likely to distance themselves from the negative connotation with their aspiring historical partners.
No idea where you're getting it from, Germans are Nemci in Russian as well. It's rather "unable to speak the language", meant for all foreigners but later stuck to Germans, presumably because German traders were the most common foreigners.
Apologies, it was mostly from running across different Russian maps with Германия that I took it as such (in Serbian it is Немачка). I stand corrected!
Nem/нем literally means "mute" in Serbian, perhaps it's a latter evolution per region either way.
>Nem/нем literally means "mute" in Serbian,
Same in Russian
нем\немой - mute
немота - muteness
But yes, we do use Germany for country's name :)
>"mute" in Serbian
Very far from Serbian only. Bulgarian, Russian, and even Balti-Slavic like Latvian is similar enough.
It seems to me that you have entirely discredited yourself. You confidently make claims about the Russian language but don't even know the most basic thing about the point you were making.
It seems that I was wrong only partially, and this was totally not the core of my point (they do call the country Germaniya).
If making one mistake discredits the entire take, I'd hate to be your conversing partner ever.
> Germans are Nemci in Russian as well
I wanted to check; are you implying that Russian is not a Slavic language?
No, GP is saying that Russian uses the Latin root for Germans, I'm saying it doesn't. (it does for Germany though: "Germaniya").
I think I may have fallen victim to a GP midflight edit - I agree with you fwiw, it’s a stone cold fact.
"Slav" deriving from the Slavic term for "word" is something of a false etymology that was invented in the 19th century. It is implausible on philological grounds: you'd expect a different vowel in this word if this were the case, and the suffix *-ninъ is only otherwise used in terms derived from place names.
It is more likely[0] that the term derives from some toponym. This is in line with how tribal names tend to work in Europe and is not problematic in terms of historical linguistics, however it gives less fuel to romantic nationalism and armchair speculations about national "identities" or "mindsets".
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[0] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Slavic/s...
The irony for me being that when I was first learning Polish and looking for any and all mnemonics - “ah, that word is the number nine, and that one is ten because it has an s in the middle and that’s next to t for ten in the alphabet”-levels of desperate - the false etymology helped me set word, słowo, in my head, and the rather delightful dosłownie, literally / to the word, has remained ever since.
(tho while on the subject, it’s hard to beat wieloryb as a wonder that I don’t want to know the true etymology of ever because if there’s even a chance that the word for whale derived from the words great as-in-size + fish, I want to hang on to it forever)
False etymology? You can roll back sound changes further to *ḱlew- in Proto-Indo-European
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-Eur...
Dunno. A nice parallel fact is that the word for "Germans" in at least a few Slavic languages literally means "mutes" - the ones who don't speak.
So you'd have the Slavs - the people of word - and the Germans - the mutes.
> it really is also a tool to best codify spoken language of the Slavs (in a sense, it is trivially provable that Cyrillic script is better adapted even to languages which do not use it today, but have to resort to digraphs or glyphs with diacritics — some are thus not using it to distance from a particular influence instead
I've heard this claim many times but never the reasoning behind it - by what metric is "ш" superior to "š" and so on?
It's less pronounced with diacritics, but enter Unicode normal forms: you can represent š either as š, or s followed by a diacritic. When you want to compare two strings, you have to normalize them to ensure you are comparing apples to apples. I can guarantee most software is broken in that regard. For Cyrillic, it just works.
With digraphs (lj, nj, dž + sometimes dj for đ too), it's even worse. Even capitalization is ambiguous: sometimes it's Lj and other times it's LJ. Then you have words like konjugacija where nj is not a digraph.
Interestingly — and not many know this — Unicode includes separate codepoints for all of the digraphs too. While well-intentioned, it only makes the problem worse.
Digraphs are especially sucky when you try sorting strings in a phonebook order as LJ comes after L, so you've got ...LI, LK..., LZ, LJA... With exceptions, it is even worse.
So, it's not "trivially provable that Cyrillic is better suited to Slavic languages". But that "the symbols representtion we settled on in software has some difficulties disambiguatuong some, but not all cases of symbol use in a language, a problem that is not unique to Slavic languages, see Dutch IJ, Turkish ı/i, German ß etc."
> some are thus not using it to distance from a particular influence instead
That's not the reason. The real reason is how those regions were Christianised - Cyril and Methodius created the first version of what would later evolve into cyrilic script and they were sent by Constantinople, while missionaries sent by Rome would use latin script.
> Slavic people call Germans a variation of "Nemci", or mutes (those who cannot speak) — notably, most except Russians who call them Germans.
last time I checked we also call them "немцы" (Nemci and sounds exactly the same)
> is trivially provable that Cyrillic script is better adapted even to languages which do not use it today, but have to resort to digraphs or glyphs with diacritics
Take a look at the Cyrillic section of Unicode to see your trivially provable claim being trivially disproven. You'll see all the same digraphs, glyphs, accents, graves etc. as used in Latin scripts.
It's also easy to see it easily disproven if you look at all the languages USSR forced cyrillic alphabet on.
To be fair, the parent post was clearly talking about Slavic languages, not "all the languages USSR forced cyrillic alphabet on", which were not Slavic and which required significant modifications to the alphabet.
Indeed: most notably, Croatian, Slovenian, Bosnian, Serbian and Montenegrin are all unambiguous with Cyrillic, but Latin script dominates, even in officially Cyrillic-first Serbia.
Again, it is seen as a political tool (pro-West or pro-Russia), when Cyrillic is technically better suited (there is certainly history as well, but that's very mixed up in the region).
Again, I am saying this as someone who has worked to implement things like full-text search, collation (lexical ordering/sorting) algorithms and tables, fonts and ligatures, functions like uppercase/titlecase/lowercase...
Eg. an already complex Unicode Collation Algorithm tables can never support exceptions with digraphs like "konjukcija" (nj is usually a digraph, but not here), etc.
Serbia is still mostly Cyrillic though. It's a very interesting experiment since Croatia isn't and the languages are basically the same.
I invite you for a walk through Belgrade streets, maybe even with Google Street View. There will be Cyrillic in official signage, but ads and shop names will be predominately in Latin script. If there are some in Cyrillic, they are likely to be part of a newer "hipster" move to differentiate more for the tourists.
Since we're talking about Serbian below, here are some characters from Cyrillic Serbian Alphabet:
Ђ/ђ
Ћ/ћ
Љ/љ
Њ/њ
Џ/џ
Ј/ј
Various diacritical marks, digraph, a jod... What makes this Cyrillic more unambiguous than the Latin equivalents?
Most of the extra glyphs are for non-Slavic (Turk languages of Central Asia and Siberia). You see the same (and worse) in Latin Unicode pages — just look at how many variations of vowels 'a', 'i', or 'e' you have, consonants like 'c', 'z', 's'…
Even within Slavic languages there is plenty of weirdness: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48064121
This author is suggesting that Cyrillic is a sort of tool or weapon in the arms of the authority, and is imposed upon the people for purely political reasons. This is just false projection of modern politics onto old times. It's shameless propaganda.
In reality, at the time, it was the Eastern Christian church that was more liberal than Rome. Rome insisted every local church make services in Latin, and didn't translate it in the local language.
The Eastern church instead, had the bible in Greek, but allowed to translate it in local languages and make services in them. Initially, those translations were made with Greek letters, which weren't fully reflecting the phonology of Slavic and other languages, so they were extended, which produced Cyrillic.
As I understand, the same way Coptic script in Egypt, and Ge'ez in Ethiopia were made, thanks to Eastern Christian church allowing this.
p.s. Saint Cyril, in fact, invented the Glagolitic script. Cyrillic was named after him, and initially "Cyrillic" alphabet was mostly Greek, plus some characters from Glagolitic, like Ⱎ, ⱍ and ⱑ.
Cyrillic has been indeed frequently used as a weapon, even if usually not by the Church, but by Tsars or by the Soviet state. Even the Eastern Christian Church, while it allowed various local alphabets, most of which were derived from the Greek alphabet, it was much less tolerant with the Latin alphabet or anything else that could be influenced by the Catholic Church, which was seen as a hostile competitor.
The Russians have forced most of the people they have subjugated (except for the 3 Baltic countries) to switch their writing system to Cyrillic, regardless whether they had previously used Latin, Arabic or other alphabets. This happened both during the time of the Russian Empire and of the Soviet Union.
This was very intentional, to make difficult for the younger people to read any books from before the Russian occupation, if they succeeded to find such books.
This was coupled to a system of education were people were taught in schools a falsified history, were the Russian invaders were presented as liberators and where it was claimed that everything good in science and technology had been discovered or invented by some unknown Russians instead of those about whom the Western "imperialists" say that they were the discoverers/inventors.
Funnily, you don't know or omit the details yourself.
Russian Empire didn't give the conquered nations the alphabet, but USSR did, as part of supporting local nationalists (surprize!). And it first gave them the Latin script.
Secondly, using different scripts for the same language isn't hard. Serbs use both Cyrillic and Latin interchangeably, and many people used Latin traslit in computers and phones when their codepages weren't available yet, and it wasn't a big problem. It takes you at most 2 weeks to learn Arabic script without knowing the language, and with own language of slightly older version, it's even easier.
You also suggest Arabic is their "proper" language, but abjad is not suitable for Turkic languages -- there vowels are significant, and many more than the 3 Arabic vowel diacritics. They had actually Turkic runes instead. Why don't you bash Arabic too?
What about Germanic peoples? Was switching to Latin from their runes an evil oppression?
It is military force and administration, that set school curriculum, use a certain script, and teach an edited history. Not the Cyrillic.
The Latin alphabet and some local alphabets were allowed for some years after the formation of the Soviet Union, but eventually during the thirties Stalin has started the Cyrillisation by force of most of the Soviet republics. Any opponents were deported to forced labor in Siberia or killed.
After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, most of the former non-Slavic members have abandoned the Cyrillic alphabet previously forced upon them.
They're just 3 states, and they have 0 texts from pre-Cyrillic period in the Latin alphabets they came up with.
Azeri language is similar to Turkish, it's an easy job, and they can watch Turkish media with no issues, and there's an infinite corpus of Turkish texts for them.
For Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan the situation is that they used Arabic script before the Soviet times. There are no texts in the Latin they chose, and their scripts and languages are far from Turkish.
If you walk down the street in Tashkent, there are signs and even announcements in Cyrillic, even in public schools. It takes long to take off, and it's probably 2nd if not 3rd version of Latin.
And also, they teach Russian in Uzbekistan too, and watch Russian media, and share political views. You must have good imagination to suggest that the switch to Latin de-colonized them.
In Kazakhstan, Latin was pet project of the former president, and is currently abandoned.
I wonder, what's your take on your alternative scripts. Latin was enforced by Roman catholic church. Poor Germanic peoples! Muslims enforced their Arabic abjad on Indo-European Farsi, where abjad doesn't quite fit.
All these alternatives have a history of bloody colonialism. Any better options?
Cyrillic has been used as a political weapon under the Soviet Union.
For example, in soviet Moldova it was mandatory to learn to read and write cyrillic at schools. They effectively wanted to eradicate the local language and culture in favor of russian.
No, you're wishfully thinking. What made people absorb the Soviet version of history and politics, was school curriculum, and central TV, and teaching Russian to keep them in orbit. Cyrillic alone won't allow this.
Poles and Czechs are happy they dodged that bullet.
If you look at the earliest versions of Cyrillic, it's basically identical, in shape and form, to the variant of the Greek alphabet used in the Byzantine Empire at the time, they just added letters for the sounds not found in Greek, like ts, ch, sh, zh. "Invention" is a stretch. I'm not sure why the article spins a political angle so much, it's the same as West Europeans adapting Latin for their needs, except they usually preferred digraphs for non-Latin sounds while Slavs decided to use special characters instead. Cyrillic and Greek alphabets later diverged to look more different from one another, but it was much later.
Glagolitic was created by Cyril and Methodius which was the precursor for Cyrillic. Whether they were Greek or Bulgarian is still in contention, but that doesn't matter. What matters is that Cyrillic itself was created later by students of theirs in Bulgaria at the Preslav Literary School.
On the political aspect Russia has always hated the fact that small Bulgaria gave them their alphabet/culture and has used it's influence to bitch, moan and subjugate ever since. Most recent rage bait is with bullshit like saying that it's actually from (the country now known as) North Macedonia.
>> Russia has always hated the fact that small Bulgaria gave them their alphabet
The wording is entirely accurate, since even during the Roman Empire, the region where Sts. Cyril and Methodius were later born and worked was known as Macedonia. And, of course, no one in Russia is trying to deny the contribution of the First Bulgarian Empire to the creation of the Slavic alphabet, since that would contradict historical facts.
148 years ago, in December 1877, Russian troops dealt a severe insult to the Bulgarian people by driving the civilized and enlightened Turkish troops out of Sofia and literally forcing the rebellious Bulgarians to accept their hated independence.
The insult was so great that throughout its subsequent history, Bulgaria fought exclusively against Russia in every world war, and in the intervals between them, it diligently undermined Russia, all the while not forgetting to shout about “eternal brotherly friendship”.
> The insult was so great that throughout its subsequent history, Bulgaria fought exclusively against Russia in every world war, and in the intervals between them, it diligently undermined Russia, all the while not forgetting to shout about “eternal brotherly friendship”.
You cannot expect eternal gratitude esp. when Russian Empire is constantly trying to influence its "vasals" using local puppets. Now is about time for you to fcuk off I would say -- we don't want to have anything in common with you people.
The Bulgarians were “insulted” a second time after World War II, when - having forgotten about the Soviet submarines sunk and aircraft shot down by the Bulgarians, and having forgotten about the Bulgarian medical trains on the Eastern Front that had diligently cared for the soldiers of the Third Reich - and having forgotten about the towns and villages of the Non-Chernozem region that had been ravaged with the help of the Bulgarian junta, the USSR rushed to rebuild the non-existent economy of its “brothers.”
As a result of gratuitous Soviet aid, Bulgaria’s total gross national product (GNP) grew more than 14-fold over the 40 postwar years, and per capita - nearly 30-fold. Between 1946 and 1986, approximately 80% of Bulgaria’s industrial capacity, more than a third of its agricultural capacity, up to 90% of its energy sector, 70% of its transportation network, 80% of its port infrastructure, and more than 80% of all housing, healthcare, educational, scientific, and cultural facilities were built. For a population of 8.9 million (in 1986), there were 27 universities, 185 state museums, 10,400 public libraries, 55 theaters, and so on. All of this was achieved exclusively through material, technical, and financial assistance from the USSR, as well as through Soviet personnel. Adjusted for today’s prices, the USSR invested hundreds of billions of dollars in Bulgaria! One must also account for compensation for Bulgarian goods exported to the Soviet Union: despite the low cost of Bulgarian products, Moscow paid Sofia at rates close to world market prices. For Bulgaria, the prices of Soviet goods supplied were kept artificially low.
Naturally, it was impossible to endure such humiliation, and the “brothers’” wounded national pride found a fertile outlet in the primitive Russophobia that the Bulgarian government has been relentlessly promoting ever since its liberation from the Soviet yoke...
I don't know if you're willfully ignorant or actively spreading misinformation, but the USSR seized Bulgaria's gold reserves after the war and the following coup. They also seized the national archives, which are still not returned to this day. Everything you tout as being "given" by USSR was paid with Bulgaria's own funds!
I really don't understand (French) communists (if you are in fact French, assuming from your bio) such as yourself spouting nonsense. You have all the information and experience of people who have lived under such a regime or in the fallout of one, and yet you keep talking bullshit. You have no idea what it was like to live under such a regime. This left-wing wave that's festering in the Western world should've never been allowed to happen. If people such as yourself actually paid attention to what really happened to every country in the East, all of us in Europe would've been in a much better state nowadays...
>> I don't know if you're willfully ignorant or actively spreading misinformation
In 1960, the banks of Great Britain, France, Germany, and Italy demanded early repayment of loans, a whopping $135 million. Thus, they provoked an economic crisis in Bulgaria. Over time, it had ballooned to an astronomical sum. If nothing else, Bulgaria had to pay off the enormous interest that had accumulated on those loans. The Soviet Union came to the aid - they bought (and at the London Stock Exchange rate) Bulgaria's gold reserves.
In accordance with a written request from the chairman of the People's Bank of the BNR, the USSR State Bank paid off Western loans by purchasing 22 tons of Bulgarian gold and 50 tons of silver. The payment of these assets was made in a convertible currency at the market rate. Moreover, Moscow undertook to support the Bulgarian economy by subsidizing it with the supply of petroleum products at prices significantly below market prices.
https://web.archive.org/web/20100408235132/http://www.blitz....
There are a few more points to add to what has been said above:
After the end of World War II, in accordance with the agreements signed at the 1947 Paris Peace Conference, Bulgaria - as an ally of Nazi Germany - was required to pay reparations totaling $70 million over an eight-year period. However, this is mere pocket change compared to the billion dollars that Greece, actively egged on by the British, wanted to squeeze out of Sofia! And it would have succeeded - had the USSR not intervened to stand up for its “brothers.”
Citing blitz.bg... That's like citing a soiled piece of toilet paper found in a public bathroom.
We can all cherry pick "facts", but history requires context. Your replies are all in bad faith. I'm done with this "discussion". To future readers - beware! This is how actual misinformation and disinformation works.
Mate, I can provide you with sources, but it would require you to dig deeper, to question what you’ve been taught, as it will reveal that our entire civilization is built on lies.
But it would truly require you to actually dig, look for real facts, ask critical questions, and realize that humanity - especially our Western civilization - has always sought to rewrite history.
>> influence its "vasals" using local puppets
The USA has military bases all over the world, at least 4 in Bulgaria, so all the host countries are puppet's of the US. "L" - logic
While the Russian army was the main force in the war against the Turkish empire, in the beginning it was close to losing the war, so it had to request help from the Romanian Principates.
Only the combined Russian-Romanian forces have succeeded to defeat the Turkish army, so Russia does not have alone the merit for making Bulgaria independent.
Moreover, Bulgaria was very lucky that Romania was interposed between it and Russia.
Otherwise, after the Russian victory Bulgaria would not have stayed independent but it would have been incorporated in the Russian Empire, with bad consequences for them. The Russian Empire already had a long series of wars with the Turkish Empire, during which various territories had been transferred from the Turkish Empire to the Russian Empire. Russia did not start any of those wars to make independent countries, but only to grab land from the Turkish Empire.
Before the war, Russia actually secretly hoped to also incorporate Romania in the Russian Empire, but this could not be accomplished because of their initial defeats by the Turkish army, so after they were forced to request Romanian help they had to treat them as allies, so they could not fulfill their initial plans. Thus after the war both Romania and Bulgaria became independent of both neighboring empires.
In comparison with the Russian Empire, the Turkish Empire can be considered, as you say, more "civilized and enlightened", so this is not successful sarcasm.
The Turkish Empire imposed heavy tributes, i.e. heavy taxes in the dependent territories, but otherwise there was little discrimination between citizens based on nationality and little interference with local customs, culture or religion. This was very different from the Russification policies applied in the Tsarist Empire and then in its successor, the Soviet Union. People of many nationalities have maintained their identity for centuries under Turkish occupation, while others have lost theirs after a few decades of Russian occupation.
> And, of course, no one in Russia is trying to deny the contribution of the First Bulgarian Empire to the creation of the Slavic alphabet, since that would contradict historical facts.
This doesn't follow. People deny historical fact all the time.
No they don't.
I fact this is one of the first "fun facts" you learn in school course of russian history. Come on...
I don't know what they teach in Russian schools, but even American ones are full of propaganda and bad history.
I'm Romanian, so I geographically sit between the Bulgarian and the Russian cultural spaces, have to say that Bulgaria back in the '80s (grew up as a kid just across the Danube from Silistra during those years) was very much under Soviet/Russian influence, at least culturally, that's what partially made it more "evolved" compared to us here in Romania. Can't and won't speak about the post-Cold War years because I eventually moved from my home-town and it would get too political, just wanted to say that there are a lot more things that the Bulgarians and Russians share compared to the things that they don't share, again, at least from a cultural pov.
Also, ever since reading about Sviatoslav I's [1] assault on Silistra at the end of the 900s I've always wondered how history would have unfolded had he managed to solidly set foot here at the Lower Danube, I think that Russia, Bulgaria (and current Ukraine and Romania) wouldn't have been the same, maybe Europe as a whole wouldn't have been the same.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Sviatoslav_I
>Russia has always hated the fact that small Bulgaria gave them their alphabet/culture
As someone who lived in Russia for 36 years (also studied linguistics there), it's my first time hearing this.
>Most recent rage bait is with bullshit like saying that it's actually from (the country now known as) North Macedonia.
To be honest, I only heard Bulgarians and North Macedonians pay attention to things like this ("actually, it was Macedonia, not Bulgaria" and vice versa). I googled a bit, and I guess you refer to a single case in 2017 when Putin said Cyrillic comes from Macedonia during a meeting with Macedonian president (usual boring diplomatic smalltalk) and Bulgaria got offended and there were multiple angry statements and posts from ordinary Bulgarians and their government :) And that makes you conclude Russians hate that Bulgaria invented Cyrillic? More like it's Bulgaria which has insecurity issues. A few years earlier during a state visit to Bulgaria Russia's patriarch said Cyrillic comes from Bulgaria. I'm sure that time Macedonia was the one offended. It has nothing to do with Russia, it's your usual purely regional Bulgaria vs. Macedonia thing.
"In the 890s, having recently converted to Orthodox Christianity, Boris ensured his church would be independent from the Patriarchate of Constantinople." --- I thought Orthodox Christianity was created by the Great Schism in 1054.
I don't know if you are trolling or what, but you win at the internets today
The article feels like AI hallucinated slop. Just a quick scroll through the page:
* Sviatoslav was not a local ruler - he ruled Kievan Rus' 1500km north-east and he remained a pagan until his death, even if his mother had converted to Christianity.
* Sviatoslav was born nearly 60 years after both Cyril and Methodius had died.
* In 890 Boris was no longer in power but his firs son, who coincidentally tried to reverse the Christianity conversion and was kicked off the throne a few years later.
* " Just after the invasion of Ukraine in July 2021" check the date.
Most of the article feels like a straw man made from a very old birch bark.
> Just after the invasion of Ukraine in July 2021
Just what type of slop this one is? It was not "just after the invasion", it was ~7 months before the invasion. At least if I understand correctly that the start of Russo-Ukrainian war is called "invasion" here.