Comment by necovek
4 hours ago
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.
"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...
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.
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...
> 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)
> 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?
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.
> 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").
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> 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.
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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'…