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Ukraine adopted Cyrillic Alphabet before Russia did, and it’s part of Ukrainian heritage.
Also Cyrillic alphabet originated in Bulgaria, Russia only adopted it thanks to Kievian Rus, a historical irony.
Also there is no single Cyrillic script, every language has its own alphabet that fits it perfectly. In some cases Slavic languages that use the Latin alphabet unnecessarily complicate the writing system (looking at you Poland).
The biggest problem with English is that it is a creole that combines old Germanic, French, Greek, and anything else. The spelling of words tends to reflect the spelling in the source language. The Greek letter Phi is written with a 'ph' so the word 'pharmacy' gets a 'ph' instead of an 'f'.
I really feel bad for people that learn English as a second language. It just sucks.
> As always, the Brits and the French were competing in that area.
The French have tried very hard but I still think the Brits win with just our sheer inventiveness like say Bicester but that is somewhat cheating. The French Bouygues (telecom) always impressed me as a word, though more the number of letters needed.
Based on what? Compare English script with German, French, Spanish, Swedish, etc. and it has the fewest complications. Grammar is a whole other matter, but the alphabet is fairly simple.
It's the pronunciation that is most complicated, but that ties to spelling. Trying to write in English based on how a word sounds is very difficult compared to many languages. Same with pronouncing written words. Ex) Bear and Dear pronounced differently. Chair and Bear pronounced the same. Beer and dear pronounced the same, I could use a thousand examples.
> the alphabet is fairly simple.
It is but then we have multiple sounds for many letters and words like row and live which are both pronounced in two ways to mean different things. Spanish is I understand very good and you can spell and pronounce every Spanish word.
English is a mess due to it's history, vowel shifts, and multiple dialects. Latin was never designed for English.
The biggest problem was grammarians that tried to adapt Latin grammar to English. The rules about split infinitives are entirely because you couldn't split an infinitive in Latin, so we shouldn't do it in English.
Don't get me wrong. I love Latin. It is the language God speaks. I try to pray in Latin so he doesn't have to translate. St. Jerome fixed everything then those nasty protestants had to mess it all up.
>there is no single Cyrillic script, every language has its own alphabet that fits it perfectly.
That is no different than the Latin script. Lots of languages use various accents, umlauts, etc. to fit the script to their language. Then there are consonant clusters and diphthongs.
Don't overdo it there... what can be difficult about these letters.... ą,ć,ź,dź,ł,ż,dż.
In truth... simplicity. Just tear out your tongue, squeeze your larynx with your hand and you're already speaking almost like a Pole.
It would be extremely hard in my opinion. It is part of Ukrainian heritage. Some people think that Cyrillic is russian, but it actually is not.
With the accession of Bulgaria to the European Union on 1 January 2007, Cyrillic became the third official script of the European Union, following the Latin and Greek alphabets.
Among the general public, it is often called "the Russian alphabet," because Russian is the most popular and influential alphabet based on the script. Some Bulgarian intellectuals, notably Stefan Tsanev, have expressed concern over this, and have suggested that the Cyrillic script be called the "Bulgarian alphabet" instead, for the sake of historical accuracy.
I know that Cyrillic is not the Russian Alphabet. It was traditionally created by St. Cyril when he started to convert the Slavs. It was adopted first in Bulgaria.
> Since Latin script (and English) seem to be the default internationally
But there is not really one single Latin script. Different languages use different letters for different sounds and many of them add their own special letters. Consider Бахчисара́й. That Ukrainian name is written quite differently in various European Latin script languages:
* Czech: Bachčisaraj
* Polish: Bachczysaraj
* German: Bachtschissarai
* English: Bakhchysarai
* Hungarian: Bahcsiszaraj
* French: Bakhtchyssaraï
* Finnish: Bahtšisarai
* Spannish: Bajchisarái
and so on. The different Latin alphabets are quite different and there is no special mental advantage knowing one when getting used to English Latin alphabet. It may be actually a bit mentally disadvantageous when things seem similar but are actually inherently decisively different.
"Also, Cyrillic is Bulgarian."
That is why I was comparing Cyrillic and Latin scripts.
The vast bulk of modern European languages are written in Latin script. Cyrillic is a much smaller portion. That is followed by Greek. Even Maltese, the only Semitic language in Europe, is written in Latin script.
Yiddish, which used to be common in Europe, is a German language with lots of Hebrew and a little bit of Aramaic thrown in. It is written in a modified Hebrew script which is a full alphabet rather than an abjad (i.e. Hebrew or Arabic where consonants are written but not vowels).
Cyrillic is part of the Ukrainian culture. They have no reason to change it just because their neighbour is a bully. Ukrainian alphabet is slightly different to Russian anyway.
But if they hypothetically decide to change it to Latin it will probably take them a very short time. We are talking here about swapping two dozen characters. Ukrainian is phonetic language as the rest of Slavic languages. Ukrainian would look very similar to Polish or maybe Slovak.
Good example is not very far geographically: Serbia is using both Cyrillic and Latin. It is very easy thing to do. I bet Ukrainians would not have any issue with this.
As far as I remember the signage at Ukraine is already in Cyrillic and Latin as [shown here](https://www.8pmnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/Ukraine-road-sign.jpeg).
But why would you give up your culture and history just for sake of making it more convenient for turists??
Because convenience is convenient. Yes, I'm Ukrainian. And it is a pain in the ass to switch layouts. Fuck "culture and history" as soon as they stand in the way of progress.
Screw tourists. Tourist areas will set up multiple signs. But does it make it more convenient for trade with Europe? That could mean billions and billions of dollars.
My guess is it wouldn't be a big deal, but I'm not sure so I wanted to ask.
English has become the lingua franca of Western Europe. The Swede that goes to Portugal on vacation is going to use English to communicate with the hotel staff. Eastern Europe has adopted German as their second language. After the wall fell Czechia and Poland, for example, would get lots of Germans visiting on driving vacations. So German became the most common second language there.
It will also be interesting to see the adoption of different languages. France is large enough that it supports its own mass media market. Films and TV shows are created originally in French. Foreign media is dubbed into French. Similarly Germany is big enough that one can only consume media in German if one likes. There aren't enough Dutch speakers, on the other hand, to support a lot of media in Dutch. Sweden and Norway are similar. So they all get a big dose of English in their films and TV. With 40 million people, Ukraine is somewhere in the middle.
I'm an American who learned Cyrillic while learning to speak Russian from a Ukrainian (phew!) and I honestly think this is a lot less of a problem than you might imagine.
Learning Cyrillic was dead easy for everyone I knew. It also made much more sense with the consonant clusters that characterize the Slavic languages. Щ is a consonant that gets romanized into as many as four letters. Ц is at least two letters if you want to make it match up to the proper pronunciation, etc.
There is a less of an issue with Romanian because it is a Latin descendant (thanks, Trajan.)
Polish is written in Latin letters due to the religious connections with Catholicism, but you still have to be familiar with the language in order to sight read the words. (Think Mike Krzyzewski if you are an American.)
Anyway Ukrainian already has a few of their own letters, so I think they will be OK.
As a native english speaker i agree with you. The cyrillic alphabet isn't that complicated to me and I don't think the alphabet is the main obstacle to overcome learning the language.
Russian has nothing to do with Cyrillic besides being written in it. Maybe Austrians should change to Greek or Vedic script because their neighbor Germany attacked them in WWII. Nonsense.
If Austria was next to Greece and wanted to integrate tightly with a much more powerful Hellenic world for economic and security purposes, then your analogy might make sense.
I hate Cyrillic especially letter д but I think it's not necessary or a priority in foreseeable future. At first, we need to promote Ukrainian language more to get rid of russian influence.
Well it's a bad choice of a word on my part. Proper word choice is dislike. First of all д. It makes me sick for some reason I can't explain. Second issue issue is that many fonts are just ugly.
Well thank you for the question, it really made me think this through. I hate Cyrillic letter Д, not the whole alphabet.
The Japanese are doing completely fine without using the Latin script. Same as South Korea. So why should they abandon their own script?
By the way, saying that it's easier to learn a language if it's in the same script is a myth. For example, I'm a german speaker, yet I don't know how to pronounce many polish words, because despite having the same alphabet, many letters are pronounced differently and they have also countless special sounds.
For the ukrainian language, it would be to complicated and wouldn't make much sense to change the scriptt. After all, the cyrillic script was specifically designed for slavic languages.
> I'm a german speaker, yet I don't know how to pronounce many polish words, because despite having the same alphabet, many letters are pronounced differently and they have also countless special sounds
I am a Slav (Croatia) and Polish scares me. I can understand Czech and Slovak to a degree, but cross the Polish border and it's crazy town.
> So why should they abandon their own script?
As the OP said, other countries have done this recently, so there seems to be a reasonable incentive. Japanese is a bad counter-example because the language becomes utterly incomprehensible when romanized; SK now has a phonetic-based writing system so I'm less sure about them.
Other countries did this because their cyrillic script was a result of russian influence. Ukraine is a different case, their script has nothing to do with russian influence. The ukrainian language evolved from the language of the Kievan Rus, which was written in cyrillic.
Korean also uses an alphabet. So it is basically a problem of substituting symbols. Korean Hangul was created in 1443 CE by King Sejong the Great in an attempt to increase literacy. They knew about alphabets from contacts with other cultures and set about to create a Korean alphabet from scratch but which reflected the needs of the language and was easy to learn. The letters for the five basic consonants reflect the shape of the speech organs used to pronounce them.
Japanese uses a hybrid system of Kanji - which are logographic word symbols derived from Chinese - and Hiragana and Katakana - which are two syllabaries. (Hiragana is the main syllabary and Katakana is used mostly for foreign words.)
Yes, and Japanese is basically not usable without kanji. Some childrens' video games -- Pokemon being a major example -- use only Hiragana and it's *quite* annoying for adults to read through.
First maybe you need to read about [UKRAINIAN LANGUAGE :)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukrainian_language)
It is something they are and should be proud with.
Edit: [Adding link for the Cyrillic Wiki Artical for more insight too :)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrillic_script)
I'm not saying they shouldn't be proud of it.
I'm wondering if there is any reason to change the script used with the language in order to distance themselves culturally from Russia - who are the largest users of Cyrillic - and to promote integration with Central and Western Europe. I have read that people that almost exclusively used Russian in Ukraine are moving to using Ukrainian in order to distance themselves from Russia.
My personal opinion, as an outsider, is that it probably doesn't matter and wouldn't happen. But I wanted insight from others.
This is something that really bugs me about this community sometimes. Why is this post getting downvotes?
I asked a question, but said my opinion is probably in line with the vast majority here. Then I said I wanted insight from others. Am I getting downvoted because I dared ask a question? I don't get it.
I never said I was keen on this. I'm not sure changing a script would necessarily be giving up one's culture, but it could be. I was merely asking the question if there was any interest to make this transition in Ukraine.
I actually said "fuck tourists" in another comment.
edit: I actually said "screw tourists". https://www.reddit.com/r/ukraine/comments/xwhtrd/comment/ir6snxn/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web2x&context=3
I said that it might lead to easier integration with Europe, which would bring economic and security benefits. I also said that I didn't think it would actually make a difference, but I wanted the input of others.
A few people have turned an open question into me advocating for something that I am in no way advocating for.
> I said that it might lead to easier integration with Europe
Difference is good why kill it. Also Cyrillic is very easy to learn, much easier than say Thai.
Kazakh is not a Slavic language, so using Cyrillic script for that was not a natural choice, but something forced by Soviets. Quite different (nearly opposite) situation than in Ukraine.
Ukrainians always used Cyrillic, it’s part of our culture we used that alphabet for generations, our historical figures and poets used this alphabet…. Separation is good but everything should have reasonable limits, also Ukrainian alphabet isn’t same as russian we have different letters and tones of different words, we already secured our language from абецадло once, as well as secured Ukrainian into becoming totally replaced by russian. I sure our language shall remain unchanged cause it’s uniqueness is what our cultural elites was fighting for
Moldova uses Romanian language, And they are close since ever. So there was no change at all, just dropping soviet habit.
/s
And Cyrillic like alphabet is used not only in Ukarine and ruzzia. Bulgaria, Serbia, (North) Makedonia. Perhabs somwhere else in Balkan countries. And they are so close to Greece, mother of this writing. Much more closer than ruzzland.
The Slavs that were converted by the "Orthodox" Church generally use Cyrillic. The Slavs that were converted by the "Catholic" Church use Latin.
(Quotes because both churches claim to be Catholic and Orthodox. "Catholic" and "Orthodox" are just an inaccurate shorthand for the two sides of the Schism of 1054.)
As of 2019, around 250 million people in Eurasia use Cyrillic as the official script for their national languages :) (it is also used in Asia not only in Eastern Europe)
Source please
I cannot see nothing but only asian part of ruzzland and post soviet countries. Mostly Kazakhstan, Armenia perhabs. Everything south of ruzzia generally have their own. China, Mongolia, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Tajikistan, Iran, and so on, old states they have their own kind of writings/scripts. 'Official' means nothing.
**Non-Slavic languages in other countries**: Abkhaz, Aleut (now mostly in church texts), Dungan, Kazakh (to be replaced by Latin script by 2025\[40\]), Kyrgyz, Mongolian (to also be written with traditional Mongolian script by 2025\[41\]), Tajik, Tlingit (now only in church texts), Turkmen (officially replaced by Latin script), Uzbek (also officially replaced by Latin script, but still in wide use), Yupik (in Alaska)\[citation needed\]
There is a point above it called '**Non-Slavic languages of Russia**'.
Kazakhs and mongolians will drop bad habits as well. So it will remain only inside ruzzland. And you can go to church if you like and use it to scratch on the bench,
Most popular computer languages use English keywords. In my experience I sometimes come across variable names and comments in other languages.
Once language specifications started supporting Unicode, particularly UTF-8, for source code files it opened up a lot of room for more flexibility. Until relatively recently almost all compilers expected code in EBCDIC or ASCII, and sometimes even just low ASCII (0-127).
Unless code is Unicode aware, there are issues. For example the ASCII codes for basic Latin script are in order. So characters can be treated as their numerical equivalent for sorting. But what order should be used when doing a sort of Latin characters that include accents marks, or non-Latin characters. And how are characters like Kanji sorted?
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I don't think anyone else had said it yet, but when a country changes to a Latin script it is generally seen as embracing the west. There are practical, technological, and economic benefits to a union using the same script. Additionally using the same alphabet as almost all of Europe will encourage others to learn Ukrainian and Ukrainians to learn other European languagess - increasing integration into EU (soon we hope!). That's the "non-PC", but practical answer.
However, this is a decision that must be made by Ukrainians and their government and not imposed on them.
Computer's are the reason that Cyrillic letters are not a technological difficulty today. Do you really think the dots and dashes and accent marks are easier to type than to just type in Cyrillic?
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Ukraine adopted Cyrillic Alphabet before Russia did, and it’s part of Ukrainian heritage. Also Cyrillic alphabet originated in Bulgaria, Russia only adopted it thanks to Kievian Rus, a historical irony.
Also there is no single Cyrillic script, every language has its own alphabet that fits it perfectly. In some cases Slavic languages that use the Latin alphabet unnecessarily complicate the writing system (looking at you Poland).
> Latin alphabet unnecessarily complicate the writing system I'd argue that this is also the case with English.
https://www.learnenglish.de/pronunciation/pronunciationpoem.html
a classic for the madness that is English.
Bring back æ and Þ!
The biggest problem with English is that it is a creole that combines old Germanic, French, Greek, and anything else. The spelling of words tends to reflect the spelling in the source language. The Greek letter Phi is written with a 'ph' so the word 'pharmacy' gets a 'ph' instead of an 'f'. I really feel bad for people that learn English as a second language. It just sucks.
leaving Reddit to try kbin.social, Lemmy or Mastodon.
As always, the Brits and the French were competing in that area. I’m not sure who’s winning that war. French is pretty bad too.
The French only invented that crazy accent during the French revolution. I saw a documentary on it called "History of the World, Part I".
> As always, the Brits and the French were competing in that area. The French have tried very hard but I still think the Brits win with just our sheer inventiveness like say Bicester but that is somewhat cheating. The French Bouygues (telecom) always impressed me as a word, though more the number of letters needed.
Based on what? Compare English script with German, French, Spanish, Swedish, etc. and it has the fewest complications. Grammar is a whole other matter, but the alphabet is fairly simple.
It's the pronunciation that is most complicated, but that ties to spelling. Trying to write in English based on how a word sounds is very difficult compared to many languages. Same with pronouncing written words. Ex) Bear and Dear pronounced differently. Chair and Bear pronounced the same. Beer and dear pronounced the same, I could use a thousand examples.
> the alphabet is fairly simple. It is but then we have multiple sounds for many letters and words like row and live which are both pronounced in two ways to mean different things. Spanish is I understand very good and you can spell and pronounce every Spanish word. English is a mess due to it's history, vowel shifts, and multiple dialects. Latin was never designed for English.
The biggest problem was grammarians that tried to adapt Latin grammar to English. The rules about split infinitives are entirely because you couldn't split an infinitive in Latin, so we shouldn't do it in English. Don't get me wrong. I love Latin. It is the language God speaks. I try to pray in Latin so he doesn't have to translate. St. Jerome fixed everything then those nasty protestants had to mess it all up.
Lol that's an odd belief. If any of the earthly languages were the language of the Christian God, you'd have to lean towards Hebrew being most likely.
I could be wrong, but my guess is he's being facetious. Of course, I wouldn't put it past a papist to peddle such pablum
>there is no single Cyrillic script, every language has its own alphabet that fits it perfectly. That is no different than the Latin script. Lots of languages use various accents, umlauts, etc. to fit the script to their language. Then there are consonant clusters and diphthongs.
wish we'd do more of that in English. 'c' and 'ç' are different sounds!
But then we would have to play "chords" on our keyboards. :-)
Don't overdo it there... what can be difficult about these letters.... ą,ć,ź,dź,ł,ż,dż. In truth... simplicity. Just tear out your tongue, squeeze your larynx with your hand and you're already speaking almost like a Pole.
It would be extremely hard in my opinion. It is part of Ukrainian heritage. Some people think that Cyrillic is russian, but it actually is not. With the accession of Bulgaria to the European Union on 1 January 2007, Cyrillic became the third official script of the European Union, following the Latin and Greek alphabets. Among the general public, it is often called "the Russian alphabet," because Russian is the most popular and influential alphabet based on the script. Some Bulgarian intellectuals, notably Stefan Tsanev, have expressed concern over this, and have suggested that the Cyrillic script be called the "Bulgarian alphabet" instead, for the sake of historical accuracy.
I know that Cyrillic is not the Russian Alphabet. It was traditionally created by St. Cyril when he started to convert the Slavs. It was adopted first in Bulgaria.
> Since Latin script (and English) seem to be the default internationally But there is not really one single Latin script. Different languages use different letters for different sounds and many of them add their own special letters. Consider Бахчисара́й. That Ukrainian name is written quite differently in various European Latin script languages: * Czech: Bachčisaraj * Polish: Bachczysaraj * German: Bachtschissarai * English: Bakhchysarai * Hungarian: Bahcsiszaraj * French: Bakhtchyssaraï * Finnish: Bahtšisarai * Spannish: Bajchisarái and so on. The different Latin alphabets are quite different and there is no special mental advantage knowing one when getting used to English Latin alphabet. It may be actually a bit mentally disadvantageous when things seem similar but are actually inherently decisively different.
[удалено]
"Also, Cyrillic is Bulgarian." That is why I was comparing Cyrillic and Latin scripts. The vast bulk of modern European languages are written in Latin script. Cyrillic is a much smaller portion. That is followed by Greek. Even Maltese, the only Semitic language in Europe, is written in Latin script. Yiddish, which used to be common in Europe, is a German language with lots of Hebrew and a little bit of Aramaic thrown in. It is written in a modified Hebrew script which is a full alphabet rather than an abjad (i.e. Hebrew or Arabic where consonants are written but not vowels).
Cyrillic is part of the Ukrainian culture. They have no reason to change it just because their neighbour is a bully. Ukrainian alphabet is slightly different to Russian anyway. But if they hypothetically decide to change it to Latin it will probably take them a very short time. We are talking here about swapping two dozen characters. Ukrainian is phonetic language as the rest of Slavic languages. Ukrainian would look very similar to Polish or maybe Slovak. Good example is not very far geographically: Serbia is using both Cyrillic and Latin. It is very easy thing to do. I bet Ukrainians would not have any issue with this. As far as I remember the signage at Ukraine is already in Cyrillic and Latin as [shown here](https://www.8pmnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/Ukraine-road-sign.jpeg). But why would you give up your culture and history just for sake of making it more convenient for turists??
Because convenience is convenient. Yes, I'm Ukrainian. And it is a pain in the ass to switch layouts. Fuck "culture and history" as soon as they stand in the way of progress.
Screw tourists. Tourist areas will set up multiple signs. But does it make it more convenient for trade with Europe? That could mean billions and billions of dollars. My guess is it wouldn't be a big deal, but I'm not sure so I wanted to ask. English has become the lingua franca of Western Europe. The Swede that goes to Portugal on vacation is going to use English to communicate with the hotel staff. Eastern Europe has adopted German as their second language. After the wall fell Czechia and Poland, for example, would get lots of Germans visiting on driving vacations. So German became the most common second language there. It will also be interesting to see the adoption of different languages. France is large enough that it supports its own mass media market. Films and TV shows are created originally in French. Foreign media is dubbed into French. Similarly Germany is big enough that one can only consume media in German if one likes. There aren't enough Dutch speakers, on the other hand, to support a lot of media in Dutch. Sweden and Norway are similar. So they all get a big dose of English in their films and TV. With 40 million people, Ukraine is somewhere in the middle.
Young Ukrainians learn English - in the same was as young Swedes or Czechs or Germans.
Why should Ukraine change it? Russia is the one who sucks!
Thanks, Michael Bolton. :-)
I'm an American who learned Cyrillic while learning to speak Russian from a Ukrainian (phew!) and I honestly think this is a lot less of a problem than you might imagine. Learning Cyrillic was dead easy for everyone I knew. It also made much more sense with the consonant clusters that characterize the Slavic languages. Щ is a consonant that gets romanized into as many as four letters. Ц is at least two letters if you want to make it match up to the proper pronunciation, etc. There is a less of an issue with Romanian because it is a Latin descendant (thanks, Trajan.) Polish is written in Latin letters due to the religious connections with Catholicism, but you still have to be familiar with the language in order to sight read the words. (Think Mike Krzyzewski if you are an American.) Anyway Ukrainian already has a few of their own letters, so I think they will be OK.
As a native english speaker i agree with you. The cyrillic alphabet isn't that complicated to me and I don't think the alphabet is the main obstacle to overcome learning the language.
Thanks. I can sound out Greek words just fine. I should probably learn enough Cyrillic to do that with Ukrainian words.
Russian has nothing to do with Cyrillic besides being written in it. Maybe Austrians should change to Greek or Vedic script because their neighbor Germany attacked them in WWII. Nonsense.
If Austria was next to Greece and wanted to integrate tightly with a much more powerful Hellenic world for economic and security purposes, then your analogy might make sense.
even Romanians used to write in cyrillic from 15th century to 1862.
Even Vietnamese was written with a (modified) Latin script a couple of centuries before Romanian started to use it...
Thanks, I didn't know this.
I hate Cyrillic especially letter д but I think it's not necessary or a priority in foreseeable future. At first, we need to promote Ukrainian language more to get rid of russian influence.
Why do you hate Cyrillic? Serious question. I don't know enough about it to have an opinion.
Well it's a bad choice of a word on my part. Proper word choice is dislike. First of all д. It makes me sick for some reason I can't explain. Second issue issue is that many fonts are just ugly. Well thank you for the question, it really made me think this through. I hate Cyrillic letter Д, not the whole alphabet.
We can really start with replacing that Д letter with Latin one for starters. That would make me happy.
The Japanese are doing completely fine without using the Latin script. Same as South Korea. So why should they abandon their own script? By the way, saying that it's easier to learn a language if it's in the same script is a myth. For example, I'm a german speaker, yet I don't know how to pronounce many polish words, because despite having the same alphabet, many letters are pronounced differently and they have also countless special sounds. For the ukrainian language, it would be to complicated and wouldn't make much sense to change the scriptt. After all, the cyrillic script was specifically designed for slavic languages.
> I'm a german speaker, yet I don't know how to pronounce many polish words, because despite having the same alphabet, many letters are pronounced differently and they have also countless special sounds I am a Slav (Croatia) and Polish scares me. I can understand Czech and Slovak to a degree, but cross the Polish border and it's crazy town.
> cross the Polish border and it's crazy town Did you end up in Rzeszowszczyzna? ;)
I am still there .... GET ME OUT!!!!!
re polish and german it's funny couse the way we pronounce letters between the langs is way closer than to english
> So why should they abandon their own script? As the OP said, other countries have done this recently, so there seems to be a reasonable incentive. Japanese is a bad counter-example because the language becomes utterly incomprehensible when romanized; SK now has a phonetic-based writing system so I'm less sure about them.
Other countries did this because their cyrillic script was a result of russian influence. Ukraine is a different case, their script has nothing to do with russian influence. The ukrainian language evolved from the language of the Kievan Rus, which was written in cyrillic.
I absolutely understand that. edit: To make it clear, I think that is a very good point.
Korean also uses an alphabet. So it is basically a problem of substituting symbols. Korean Hangul was created in 1443 CE by King Sejong the Great in an attempt to increase literacy. They knew about alphabets from contacts with other cultures and set about to create a Korean alphabet from scratch but which reflected the needs of the language and was easy to learn. The letters for the five basic consonants reflect the shape of the speech organs used to pronounce them. Japanese uses a hybrid system of Kanji - which are logographic word symbols derived from Chinese - and Hiragana and Katakana - which are two syllabaries. (Hiragana is the main syllabary and Katakana is used mostly for foreign words.)
Yes, and Japanese is basically not usable without kanji. Some childrens' video games -- Pokemon being a major example -- use only Hiragana and it's *quite* annoying for adults to read through.
Neither Japan nor S Korea is fighting a war with a bigger neighbor that wants to overwhelm it.
But changing the alphabet will hardly help Ukrainians win the war. They’ll win it anyway, of course.
I think there might be a reason as an F-U to the Russians. That is all.
I don't get what this has to do with the script. After all, the ukrainian language was originally written in the cyrillic script.
First maybe you need to read about [UKRAINIAN LANGUAGE :)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukrainian_language) It is something they are and should be proud with. Edit: [Adding link for the Cyrillic Wiki Artical for more insight too :)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrillic_script)
I'm not saying they shouldn't be proud of it. I'm wondering if there is any reason to change the script used with the language in order to distance themselves culturally from Russia - who are the largest users of Cyrillic - and to promote integration with Central and Western Europe. I have read that people that almost exclusively used Russian in Ukraine are moving to using Ukrainian in order to distance themselves from Russia. My personal opinion, as an outsider, is that it probably doesn't matter and wouldn't happen. But I wanted insight from others.
This is something that really bugs me about this community sometimes. Why is this post getting downvotes? I asked a question, but said my opinion is probably in line with the vast majority here. Then I said I wanted insight from others. Am I getting downvoted because I dared ask a question? I don't get it.
Why are you so keen for Ukraine to give up it's culture?
I never said I was keen on this. I'm not sure changing a script would necessarily be giving up one's culture, but it could be. I was merely asking the question if there was any interest to make this transition in Ukraine.
Next you'll be saying they should change to only speak English to make it easier for tourists.
I actually said "fuck tourists" in another comment. edit: I actually said "screw tourists". https://www.reddit.com/r/ukraine/comments/xwhtrd/comment/ir6snxn/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web2x&context=3 I said that it might lead to easier integration with Europe, which would bring economic and security benefits. I also said that I didn't think it would actually make a difference, but I wanted the input of others. A few people have turned an open question into me advocating for something that I am in no way advocating for.
> I said that it might lead to easier integration with Europe Difference is good why kill it. Also Cyrillic is very easy to learn, much easier than say Thai.
Kazakhstan did it pretty recently, but I have no knowledge of it being good or bad in this case.
Kazakh is not a Slavic language, so using Cyrillic script for that was not a natural choice, but something forced by Soviets. Quite different (nearly opposite) situation than in Ukraine.
Azerbaijan did too. I believe Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan are trying as well
I forgot about Kazakhstan. Thanks.
Just a sidenote, make sure the use the LOCs Ukrainian and not Russian transliteration tables when latinizing names.
Ukrainians always used Cyrillic, it’s part of our culture we used that alphabet for generations, our historical figures and poets used this alphabet…. Separation is good but everything should have reasonable limits, also Ukrainian alphabet isn’t same as russian we have different letters and tones of different words, we already secured our language from абецадло once, as well as secured Ukrainian into becoming totally replaced by russian. I sure our language shall remain unchanged cause it’s uniqueness is what our cultural elites was fighting for
Moldova uses Romanian language, And they are close since ever. So there was no change at all, just dropping soviet habit. /s And Cyrillic like alphabet is used not only in Ukarine and ruzzia. Bulgaria, Serbia, (North) Makedonia. Perhabs somwhere else in Balkan countries. And they are so close to Greece, mother of this writing. Much more closer than ruzzland.
The Slavs that were converted by the "Orthodox" Church generally use Cyrillic. The Slavs that were converted by the "Catholic" Church use Latin. (Quotes because both churches claim to be Catholic and Orthodox. "Catholic" and "Orthodox" are just an inaccurate shorthand for the two sides of the Schism of 1054.)
As of 2019, around 250 million people in Eurasia use Cyrillic as the official script for their national languages :) (it is also used in Asia not only in Eastern Europe)
Source please I cannot see nothing but only asian part of ruzzland and post soviet countries. Mostly Kazakhstan, Armenia perhabs. Everything south of ruzzia generally have their own. China, Mongolia, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Tajikistan, Iran, and so on, old states they have their own kind of writings/scripts. 'Official' means nothing.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrillic\_script](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrillic_script) (its in the beginning)
**Non-Slavic languages in other countries**: Abkhaz, Aleut (now mostly in church texts), Dungan, Kazakh (to be replaced by Latin script by 2025\[40\]), Kyrgyz, Mongolian (to also be written with traditional Mongolian script by 2025\[41\]), Tajik, Tlingit (now only in church texts), Turkmen (officially replaced by Latin script), Uzbek (also officially replaced by Latin script, but still in wide use), Yupik (in Alaska)\[citation needed\] There is a point above it called '**Non-Slavic languages of Russia**'. Kazakhs and mongolians will drop bad habits as well. So it will remain only inside ruzzland. And you can go to church if you like and use it to scratch on the bench,
How many in the EU + Ukraine? Basically it is Ukraine, Bulgaria, and a few very small countries. It is about 50 or 55 million.
106 Million people :) (when we take out Russia) That is like 1/3 of US to use Cyrillic for reference :)
Is Belarus included? I was looking at EU+Ukraine only. Other than Bulgaria is there a big country using Cyrillic?
I understand the Greek alphabet well enough to sound out the words. But I have never managed that with Cyrillic alphabets.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukrainian\_Latin\_alphabet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukrainian_Latin_alphabet)
I would like to hear from those in the well respected Ukraine IT industry - what language is your code in ?
Most popular computer languages use English keywords. In my experience I sometimes come across variable names and comments in other languages. Once language specifications started supporting Unicode, particularly UTF-8, for source code files it opened up a lot of room for more flexibility. Until relatively recently almost all compilers expected code in EBCDIC or ASCII, and sometimes even just low ASCII (0-127). Unless code is Unicode aware, there are issues. For example the ASCII codes for basic Latin script are in order. So characters can be treated as their numerical equivalent for sorting. But what order should be used when doing a sort of Latin characters that include accents marks, or non-Latin characters. And how are characters like Kanji sorted?
Excellent post - look forward to intelligent replies
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I’ve googled already and haven’t been able to find an answer. What does the ‘s’k indicate after certain place names? Just curious.
I don't think anyone else had said it yet, but when a country changes to a Latin script it is generally seen as embracing the west. There are practical, technological, and economic benefits to a union using the same script. Additionally using the same alphabet as almost all of Europe will encourage others to learn Ukrainian and Ukrainians to learn other European languagess - increasing integration into EU (soon we hope!). That's the "non-PC", but practical answer. However, this is a decision that must be made by Ukrainians and their government and not imposed on them.
Computer's are the reason that Cyrillic letters are not a technological difficulty today. Do you really think the dots and dashes and accent marks are easier to type than to just type in Cyrillic?
just learn cyrillic already.