Comment by culebron21
4 hours ago
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.
2 replies →
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.