I wonder if Ukraine will do the same in a distant future...
[1] https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20180424-the-cost-of-ch...
> One can learn multiple scripts and almost all literate people know the latin script globally nowadays.
If almost all literate people know the latin script, there's a benefit to writing your language in it. Of course, the switching cost is high.
The results are likely much better than random texts using cyrillic, greek, arabic, hangul, etc.
Otoh, If they're typists, I expect they can likely type them into a search, probably sans diacritics, but that's likely good enough for searching or looking through a translation dictionary.
Greek and Cyrillic may share enough symbols that a latin script user can make due with an onscreen keyboard or a dictionary with great effort. But a completely different script would need even more effort.
thats way wi dont rayt English veri efishent ither
Semitic languages are easy to write without vowels because the meaning is very obvious even if you omit the vowels, but in many languages you have a great deal of collisions if you omit vowels.
It's the same reason Chinese characters are a poor fit for Korean and Japanese. Chinese is not an inflected language so one symbol for a word works quite nicely, but other languages need a way to add prefixes and suffixes to works.
Also, middle persian had a native abjad [1]. (As well as a derived alphabet [2])
Sometimes, that is the point.
They're already working on moving to the European train gauge, they set Christmas to December 25th, etc. but there's still a long way to go.
It's like to say that Britain must adopt Cyrillic to move away from USA because they both use English language. :-/
Only in the world where Britain is in France.
Ukraine traces its lineage to Ruthenia (Русь), not to Russia (Росія). These words are related etymologically, but so are Brittany and Britain, or Cornouaille and Cornwall. You can’t just treat Ruthenia and Russia as the same thing — just like you can’t treat Brittany and Britain as the same thing.
> During its existence, Kievan Rus' was known as rusĭskaja zemlja, translated as the "land of Rus'",[21] or the "Rus' land" (Old East Slavic: роу́сьскаꙗ землꙗ́), with Rus' being derived from the ethnonym Роусь, Rusĭ (Medieval Greek: Ῥῶς, romanized: Rhos; Arabic: الروس, romanized: ar-Rūs), in Greek as Ῥωσία, Rhosia, in Old French as Russie, Rossie, in Latin as Rusia or Russia (with local German spelling variants Ruscia and Ruzzia), and from the 12th century also as Ruthenia or Rutenia.[22][23]
But we're not speaking Old French, we're speaking 21-century English. In 21-century English, Russia ≠ Ruthenia, Brittany ≠ Britain.
The quote you've provided is irrelevant.
That might be true, but Latin script is not a neutral option. It has its own problematic history in Ukraine.
Historically, Latin script for Ukrainian (abecadło) was associated with polonisation. While Ukrainian-Polish relationships are quite good now, this history is not easy to discard. This history still affects politics (the recent debacle with the Order of the White Eagle is a good example).
So, I don’t see Ukrainian ditching Cyrillic anytime soon.
I do, however, expect Ukrainians to eventually develop their own style of Cyrillic. I totally expect Ukrainian fonts to drift away from Russian ones. There are already steps in that direction. E.g. the font e-Ukraine Head seen on many official websites introduces Latin-like к (curiously, that’s how my great grandmother used to write к — she went to a Polish school in Western Ukraine) and ȣ-like у. I expect to see more of that. There’s a enough of interest in a distinct visual identity for Ukrainian, and there are talented designers working on it.
In the 1800s when we switched to Latin, it didn't happen abruptly, there were several intermediary alphabets which mixed Latin an Cyrillic[1].
Example:
ши се варсъ (Cyrillic)
шi se вapsъ (transition alphabet)
și se varsă (Latin)
ʃi se varsə (IPA for reference)
ши се варсэ
Ukraine always had Cyrillic alphabet. There is no way, they will reject their culture just to punish foe. Also Cyrillics is tied to orthodox Christianity which has very big role in Ukraine.
In that context is more interesting that way more pro-russian Belarus, has some use of Latin (mostly in geographical standards) based on Latin variant, heavily inspired by Polish language.
By the way, parent of Belarusian and Ukrainian, the Ruthenian language (not related to Russian, Ruthenian was the second language of PLC), has a lot of alphabets including Latin and Arabics. First was caused by spread of Polish language, and second by large number of Tatar Muslims settled there.
(This comment will make a lot of Polish people very upset.)
Barszcz, pierogi, fermented everything, pickles, sour rye, and many dishes built around wheat/rye, mushrooms, dairy, and Eastern-style fillings are much more like Ukrainian/Belarusian/Russian food.
The biggest German influences are probably the sausages and the beer culture.
When it was a poor backwater "somewhere over there", it wasn't part of Europe. When it was Soviet, it wasn't Europe. Now that it's a bulwark against a militaristic Russia and a convenient place to do lower-cost manufacturing: "Hello, my European compatriots!"
They have their own weirdnesses. How is Chicago "mid-west" when it is so far east? How is Virginia south?
Also, you'd be surprised at how widespread pickled herring is in Bavaria. Herring has been a trading good for millennia in Europe, was and is still consumed in the winter months in Bavaria. You can easily get a "Fischsemmel" at the Oktoberfest in Munich. Bavarians also used to pickle everything for the winter: cucumbers, beets, cabbage, beans.
> Directly at the German-Polish border, you'll enter Eastern Europe, then when you arrive in the mentioned cities, you're suddenly back in Central Europe.
I mean I get that impression even before crossing the border to Poland. It's just very rural and not exactly wealthy on either side of the border.
The cuisine up here in Berlin/Brandenburg is much closer to that of Poland than it is to that of Bavaria. I say that as a person who lives in Berlin with Polish roommate, and travels pretty regularly to visit friends in Munich.
Just like Christianity arrived in Poland by marriage of Mieszko with Czech princess Doubravka/Dobrawa in 10th century, we also adapted Czech alphabet (and thus Latin) from Jan Hus efforts of codifying Czech language. Scholars believe that around same time Polish began to develop as a separate language. And up until the 13th century it was still possible to communicate with southern neighbors without much of issues.
Between 15th and 16th century Polish orthography forms; Stanisław Zaborowski and Jan Kochanowski tried to customize alphabet by introducing letters that would accurately reflected Polish phonology at that time - their alphabets proposals were really long.
Jumping to the Partitions period, where heavy russification aims at eradicating the Polish language and culture. There were attempts of introducing Cyrillic script but occupier's efforts eventually failed - Polish people stood up; literature of these times was full of titles exploring patriotism, love for homeland as a theme.
Linguistic reform of 1936 molds language to what we know today. The communistic period introduced second person plural within the public language, which naturally exists today in Czech and Slovak (vykání). Here it didn't lasted as it was unnatural and politically branded. While Polish language divides into dialects, that time also forms the standard Polish dialect, as post-WW2 migrations blurred the differences.
Today our language is heavily populated with borrowed words and terms from English, which in some case become "naturalized" - hater become hejter.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_the_Czech_Republic
Poland on the other hand has Catholicism as a key identity marker, although IME living in Poland for a decade, this is fading rapidly with younger people.