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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
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bosnian_Cyrillic
Selischev A.M. Old Slavonic Language, 1951. Page 39. https://www.academia.edu/126241874/%D0%90_%D0%9C_%D0%A1%D0%B... (PDF downloadable)
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.
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.
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.
Many languages of Russia got their alphabets already in the late nineteenth century or around the 1906 rebellion. If you look at publications then in Mari, Chuvash, Ossetic, etc. the Cyrillic orthography already has most of the special characters that were used in the Soviet era. (Moreover, many of these languages never had a Latin-alphabet phase.)
But in the USSR, official doctrine required crediting the Bolsheviks with the development of minority-language writing, and it became taboo to mention all the pre-1917 developments. Only around the time of glasnost and perestroika was this era revisited in Soviet scholarship, but many ordinary Russians remained unaware they had been taught a myth.
Your claims elsewhere here about Uzbek are out of date. I have traveled extensively in UZ and, as an OSM mapper, I am constantly looking at signage. There is exceedingly little Cyrillic left in most of the country. So little that when one spots it, it seems a bit of a novelty.
After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, most of the former non-Slavic members have abandoned the Cyrillic alphabet previously forced upon them.
Missing context:
What you’re talking about is Likbez - Soviet program to eliminate illiteracy started as soon after the revolution in 1917 that overthrew the tsar as the majority of the population was in fact illiterate, at around 23% or so literacy.
So you’re saying that they re-educated an illiterate population to stop writing in their native alphabet and instead in Cyrillic? In forced re-education camps?
Or am I missing something here?
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.
"She relaxed in the chair under a tree's shade"
"Шe relaxed in фe чair under a tree's шade"
In fact, in Russian, at least, we don't have a "th" sound.
But this is better than using Д in place of "A".
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.
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”.
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.
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...
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
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.
This doesn't follow. People deny historical fact all the time.
I fact this is one of the first "fun facts" you learn in school course of russian history. Come on...
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
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.
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.
Nem/нем literally means "mute" in Serbian, perhaps it's a latter evolution per region either way.
Very far from Serbian only. Bulgarian, Russian, and even Balti-Slavic like Latvian is similar enough.
Same in Russian
нем\немой - mute
немота - muteness
But yes, we do use Germany for country's name :)
I wanted to check; are you implying that Russian is not a Slavic language?
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...
So you'd have the Slavs - the people of word - and the Germans - the mutes.
(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)
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-Eur...
I've heard this claim many times but never the reasoning behind it - by what metric is "ш" superior to "š" and so on?
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.
It's the same with Unicode encoding of Cyrillic letters - й (U+0439) can be written as й (и U+0438 + ◌̆ U+0306)
> 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.
Based on your description it seems that the root cause of the issues is using two letters to represent the digraph - for example N (U+004E) J (U+004A) instead of NJ (U+01CA) - and the sorting issues would be identical if people typed Н (U+041D) Ь (U+042C)instead of Њ (U+040A).
What's the reason for the digraph being substituted by 2 letters in the first case more often than in the second case?
last time I checked we also call them "немцы" (Nemci and sounds exactly the same)
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.
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.
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.
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?
* 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.
Do you know that the first concentration camp in Europe was actually in Greece [0], and Bulgarian priests were put in it and died? So Orthodox, right?
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleo_Trikeri
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.