Hacker News Reader

Comment by holoduke | Hacker News Reader

Ukraine switching to Latin? I have never heard that before. It would be very annoying. Latin alfabet is not suited for eastern slavic languages. My Latin Russian is already so rusty. There are 10 different ways to write certain letters in latin. In Cyrillic just one.

View on HN

> In Cyrillic just one

That's not true. Depends on the language, of course, but at least in Russian there are definitely more than one way to express many sounds using different letters. For example, there is no difference in pronunciation between "ёлка" and "йолка", although only one of them is accepted as correct

There have been several Latin based scripts proposed for Ukrainian over many decades. So, if you haven't heard, you just haven't been interested.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ukrainian_Latin_alphabet

Linguistically it would be pretty annoying, I agree. Although perhaps not dramatically different from the romanization of Slovak or Polish.

The point is more that there are many obvious political reasons why a future Ukraine might go down this path.

Ukrainian written in Latin really highlights the fact that it has more common words with Polish than with Russian. In general, the two languages look remarkably similar and sound close to each other, too.

Some Ukrainian writers used Latin script for their works in 19 century, so at least there’s a precedent.

99.9% of the Ukrainians never ever would have a latin version or their language. Maybe some extremists from Kiev. Sponsored by the west probably.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com