The article uses the word "invention" several times, and makes it look like the alphabet was created to make Slavs independent from the West, the Byzantine empire, to create division etc.
It fails to mention the fact that, if you compare the earliest forms of Cyrillic to the contemporary Byzantine Greek alphabet, it's 100% identical to the Greek alphabet. The only difference is that Cyrillic added a few letters for Slavic sounds originally not found in Greek: sh, ch, nasal sounds, etc. Cyrillic was originally nothing more than the Greek alphabet with extra characters. Cyrillic and Greek diverged from each other much later, for purely technical reasons (e.g. letter H in cursive was often written as И and later became the norm).
It's a bit more complicated. The OG cyclic was the the Glagolitic - which is very different from the greek alphabet.
The proper Cyrillic, while based on the greek alphabet, was developed then specifically and consciously as a political project against Byzantium, as of course the byzantines would much prefer to use greek for church and business ...
In fact, the original alphabet was Glagolitic, and it was very very different from both Latin and Greek. What became the foundation of the modern Cyrillic came much later.
Yes the evolution is attested via intermediate "old Cyrillic" forms that still retain a shadow of glagolitic aesthetics but is likely spawned directly from Greek alphabet.
Unlike the Churchmen in Ohrid, Preslav scholars were much more dependent upon Greek models and quickly abandoned the Glagolitic scripts in favor of an adaptation of the Greek uncial to the needs of Slavic, which is now known as the Cyrillic alphabet.[10]
That said, Glagolitic itself derives from the Greek script but it was clearly an attempt to explicitly create something that looks different and not just "branching off" whatever was the current Greek script version of the time. So that would count more as "invention" (similarly to how Georgian and Armenian scripts were invented by a single person, allegedly the same person for both). Whether ties with Greek script is about inspiration or origin is hard to define and perhaps just a matter of degree.
For example, consider alphabet ordering. Even if you totally invent a new script for aesthetic purposes, you may want to keep the letter ordering from your home alphabet just for simplicity. Other invented scripts like Georgian and Armenian, also retain the Greek alphabet ordering. Does that indicate origin/inspiration? Can the ordering be something that was added on later when the need of a stable ordering of words for building lexicons and teaching people was recognized?
> […] the letter ordering from your home alphabet just for simplicity. Other invented scripts like Georgian and Armenian, also retain the Greek alphabet ordering.
The Greek alphabet ordering ascends to the Phoenician alphabet ordering, which has inherited it from the Proto-Sinaic alphabet[0]. It remains a vexing enigma – why letters were originally arranged in the order that we know today.
As far as I know, people have always practiced/learned alphabets by reciting/writing them one-by-one, in the "standard order", over and over again. We did it ourselves at school, too. Maybe that's why it's so retained - we just can't imagine any other order :) And authors of new alphabets were probably already versed in other alphabets and had to learn their "standard order".
Thank God for Wikipedia [0] because this article says absolutely nothing about the actual invention of the script, except to credit it to the wrong people - the script was indeed named after St Cyrill but he and his brother Methodius invented a completely different script, from which a few characters were later taken and combined with Greek letters to make what eventually became modern Cyrillic. The real history is much more interesting than TFA!
As a Polish-American guy, it’s a bit painful to use the Latin alphabet with Slavic languages. It works, but at the cost of your name being unintelligible to anyone west of Vienna.
Cyrillic is much more suited for Slavic languages, but of course there is so much historical baggage there that it’ll never happen. Cyrillic is a civilization-level thing tied to a lot of cultural elements, not merely a different set of symbols.
What will be interesting to see is if Bulgaria, Serbia, and Ukraine continue to use Cyrillic or gradually switch to Latin.
This switch in other Slavic countries, you must understand, is thanks (caused by) the adoption of Catholicism. So nothing to do with what people decided, really, it was a political/church decision. I doubt Bulgarians would ever toss the Cyrillic away, as it gives so much identity to the country and the people there.
I mean in the longer term. Bulgaria has a lot of population issues and seems somewhat torn between the West and the Russian spheres, so I don’t think it’s inconceivable that in 50 years (after generations grow up online familiar with computer-based Latin alphabets) they formally switch to using it.
Serbia would probably switch first, though. When I was there a half decade ago, Latin and Cyrillic were used interchangeably. But it’s my understanding that Latin is much more popular amongst the young.
It doesn't seem like you know what you're talking about. Have you ever been to Bulgaria, or are you just fantasizing? People in Bulgaria are already familiar with the 'computer-based Latin alphabet' and speak English decently well (at least anyone under 40). Also, I'm not sure what the population issue has to do with what alphabet they use. People will magically switch to the Latin alphabet because... there are fewer of them? By that same logic, should we expect Japan and South Korea to start using Latin characters too ?
Let me state this again, because people really seem to have a difficult time understanding my comment:
I said it was plausible that Bulgaria could switch to the Latin alphabet in a long time. The word plausible implies that it could happen, but is not guaranteed, or even likely. It is conceivable, it is a possible future. It doesn’t mean I think it will absolutely happen.
The reasons I think this switch is plausible are:
- the growing adoption of Western and EU Latin-based culture amongst the youth. The government and institutional power structures in Bulgaria are still largely populated by people who are over 35 years old. In 50 years, this won’t be the case, and the people filling the jobs will have been influenced by Latin-alphabet culture for decades.
- The population decline of the country is going to present serious issues. Some of the solutions to it will probably be closer integration to the EU, which almost entirely uses the Latin alphabet. Also factor in the Bulgarian diaspora which is growing up in Latin-language places elsewhere in the EU.
- The current geopolitical situation, wherein future Bulgarians may (again, plausibly) want to distance themselves from the Russian-dominated Orthodoxy world, of which the Cyrillic alphabet is still a fairly strong connection. Also consider that Orthodoxy itself is in decline, and so having this connection might not be that important to the Bulgarians of 2074. I foresee a similar thing amongst the youth in Poland and Catholicism.
No one is having difficulty understanding your comment. It's just very clear to someone who lives in Bulgaria that you don't have first-hand knowledge of what you're talking about, and your speculations about what might happen 50 years from now are not grounded in reality. No one in Bulgaria uses the Latin alphabet to write in Bulgarian, and there's no indication that this will change. As the French say, 'avec des 'si' on mettrait Paris en bouteille'.
As someone who is familiar with the political and social atmosphere in the country, I'll give it a try.
The growing adoption of "Latin-based culture" is not interfering with the usage of Bulgarian. Bilinguality is the norm for the newer generations. More than a decade ago in the pre-Unicode world, writing emails and communication in Bulgarian with Latin letters was acceptable because of encoding issues. Nowadays, it is no longer the norm, is frowned upon and is even ridiculed.
There is a considerable part of the intellectual elite that is pro-Western and seeks further integration with the west. They are perfectly fine with the alphabet and switching it is not on their agenda. These are, for example, professors, philosophers and linguists from Sofia university.
Thanks for an actual reply, I appreciate it. I agree it’s unlikely for a switch (and my original comment expressed nothing more than saying it was plausible) but I do wonder if younger generations will be more Latinized. The bilingual approach is an interesting one and seems quite likely to continue, I agree.
Between the existence of Austria-Hungary empire, when the Latin alphabet was very relevant for all the Balkans, and the end of WW2, when the Cyrillic became much more relevant for them is just 1945-1918=27 years.
In Serbia, Latin is "popular" because it is the default in all computers and phones. Most don't bother switching or don't know how. In the old days, when sending an SMS had a price, using cyrillic letters was expensive as hell. You could barely write one third of an SMS for the same price. And that adds up pretty quickly!
On a side note, as someone who has to use multiple keyborad layouts each day, it is annoying.
And in a few generations, you don’t think this usage of computers and phones is going to have a serious impact on how Cyrillic is used? People are going to use Latin on phones and computers all day long but still use Cyrillic just as much?
It most certainly will have a big impact. It will take a few more decades, but at some point everybody will simply switch. Both formes are equal in the eyes of the consitution, but Cyrillic is prefered by official insitutions, except if you deal with a lot of foreign affairs. Then it is more practical to simply use Latin all the way.
I remember back around 20 years ago someone on this radio station https://bg.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9C%D0%B8%D0%BA%D1%80%D0%BE... was expressing support of the idea of switching to the Latin alphabet as a natural step in the integration of the country in Europe/ new digital age/ or something along those lines. His conclusion seemed to be that "society wasn't mature enough".
Bulgaria’s population is set to halve by 2100, so again, considering the importance of Latin-based languages globally, integration into the EU, etc. I don’t think it’s that inconceivable. Maybe just not likely soon because of the historical connection to Cyrillic.
Again, I didn’t say it will happen, just that it seems conceivable to me.
Maybe reflect on what made you think that a nation would just scratch more than a thousand years of culture so that it is easier for facebook engineers to encode their web page. Have no other comment, really.
There are plenty of other examples of countries switching to a new alphabet, even when it would cut people off from their history. Turkish being a prime example. It has nothing to do with making life easier for Facebook engineers and I’m not sure what that has to do with anything. It has everything to do with what real people do in their daily lives, and what government institutions mandate.
These sarcastic replies are so tiresome and intellectually uncurious.
When met with extreme obliviousness, sarcasm is the only escape of the mind.
Turkey switched lots of things as a deliberate act of cutting off with its past, including form of government, constitution, and legitimacy model, and after losing wars and territories for centuries. The fact that you disregard the context to arrive at the desired conclusion might have something to do with the intellectual difficulties you find yourself in.
You can’t seem to leave any comment without adding some sort of sarcastic rude put down, which really isn’t in the nature of this site, nor is it conducive for having an interesting discussion about the future of language. Learn some manners and try again, this time with actual arguments.
Your example using Turkish isn't that good. Turkic languages like Turkish or Kazakh switched to a latin alphabet because the arabic or cyrillic writing systems didn't suit them. The cyrillic script was explicitly created for slavic languages, so there's no need for slavic languages to switch to a latin based alphabet.
Turkish switched to the Latin alphabet and thereby cut itself off from over a thousand years of history and interaction with the Islamic world via Persian and Arabic. This decision was made more for political reasons, as Ätaturk wanted to Westernize the country, than for strictly linguistic ones.
Atatürk also commented on one occasion that the symbolic meaning of the reform was for the Turkish nation to "show with its script and mentality that it is on the side of world civilisation".[26] The second president of Turkey, İsmet İnönü further elaborated the reason behind adopting a Latin alphabet: "The alphabet reform cannot be attributed to ease of reading and writing. That was the motive of Enver Pasha. For us, the big impact and the benefit of an alphabet reform was that it eased the way to cultural reform. We inevitably lost our connection with Arabic culture."
Ok, and just because a few countries did it, in what way implies that Bulgaria will? Your arguments have no basis other than "Country A did it, so Bulgaria is also more likely to do it".
Ok. Well I’ve written a few long comments on why I think it is plausible, but you and the other commenter don’t seem to have actual responses, just insults. Hence this conversation is a waste of time.
It’s hard to see how switching alphabet would help euro integration. Looking at other countries - economical and political reforms required for EU membership is the real barrier, not the alphabet. And switching alphabet would have a huge cost not helping the economy.
For a while in the early 2000s to late 2000s there was a very widespread usage of 4 and 6 replacing the ch and sh sounds. In hindsight, this was more likely to replace the letters 'ч' and 'ш' than Latin letters.
There’s a new wave of nationalism emerging in Bulgaria. Any interference with the national identity would be seen as blasphemy, done by foreign agents paid by the “embassy”.
That’s why I said in 50 years. 50 years ago, before Solidarity in Poland, before Reagan, etc. - the Soviet Union seemed like it would last centuries. It’s a long time.
And although I have only visited Bulgaria and not lived there, I do live in a neighboring country and see how much Western culture / EU culture dominates the local youth culture.
On the institutional level, it would likely take the efforts of an Ataturk-like figure that wants to tie Bulgaria more to the West.
In the longer term, too many unpredictable factors can collide, so anything is possible.
Particularly in Bulgaria, the youth is dominated by western culture only at the surface level. It’s in their consumption patterns, the outfit and the slang. Apart from that, it’s not a western culture by a long shot. The competitive individualism is not there. The family is expected to give a good and steady start to their children, at the cost of the comfort of the parents. The national symbols like the alphabet are encoded and institutionalised through the educational system. For example, all schools are marching through cities on the 24th of May, to celebrate the alphabet and enlightenment (просвета) in general.
> What will be interesting to see is if Bulgaria, Serbia, and Ukraine continue to use Cyrillic or gradually switch to Latin.
Turkmenistan of all places is currently undergoing a gradual switch to Latin, which has happened in fits and starts with various mandates to do so, and then to stop doing so. But the culture seems pretty undeniably to be trending to romanization.
I'd disagree that Cyrillic is not a natural fit. No writing system was a natural fit for Turkic languages.
Arabic script? Turkic languages have lots of vowels, which are very important, and a lot less fricative consonants. You must add a lot of "diacritics" (points above or below).
Latin adapted for Turkish has same issues: a lot of diacritics, and also the infamous i/I distinction (like peek & pick in English) that causes typos.
Cyrillic for Turkic languages simply introduced more letters. For example, in Kazakh the vowels а, о, у, э, е, ы were extended with ә, ө, ұ, ү, і. Consonants got their fricative counterparts: к, г => қ, ғ. The only inconvenience I see is Latin "h" (e.g. жиhаз, furniture) which can't be capitalized -- it will collide with Cyrirllic Н (N). I actually find it easier to transcribe German in Kazakh letters than in pure Russian ones.
The flip side is you need a bigger keyboard, the number row gets used for letters too.
In Kazakhstan, the transition to Latin lost traction even in the state organs: every legal document is written in Cyrillic. In Uzbekistan the attempt was made ~25 years ago, IIRC, and still even state organs print a lot in Cyrillic. They allowed writing in both systems as legally equal for 10 years, but had to extend the transition period for another 20, IIRC.
So supposing it's the cultural trend is quite disputable -- I'd say only nationalists with decolonization agenda may want it (but then why not the old Arabic writing system?). The majority doesn't care nor want to switch.
> These languages are Turkic though so cyrillic script is not such a natural fit.
What do you mean? It's a set of symbols. No different from any other set, except potentially in size. What would a "natural fit" between a script and a language look like?
Cyrillic was not a bad choice for Tajik. In any case, I think it is better (than Arabic script) suited for Indo-European languages like Persian. (On the other hand, it would have been fun to see Spanish also use Arabic script. :)
Not quite - several Slavic languages have so called contrastive palatalization, i.e. almost all consonants come in palatalized/non-palatalized pairs, and they're hard to express using unmodified Latin alphabet. Some Slavic languages lost most of the contrastive palatalization (say, Serbian), and Turkic languages never had it to begin with, so they're easier to switch.
In Europe, Polish and Irish are two examples of a language with extensive contrastive palatalization which uses the Latin alphabet, and they're probably among the least readable/elegant writing systems in Europe.
Turkic languages do have constrastive palatalization system, going together with "soft" & "hard" vowels. (Example from German: a, e, o, u would be "hard", ä, ö and ü would be "soft" vowels for Kazakh speaker) In Kazakh, kerek (need) is palatized completely, while in kara (black) consonants are not. In "shanyrak" (yurt roof top window) consonants aren't palatized and "k" is fricative, in shelek (bucket) "k" is palatized and non-fricative. Since palatized consonants go together with "soft" vowels, one may omit this distinction in writing. But the difference is still there. N.B. Some Turkic languages have lost this feature.
>Since palatized consonants go together with "soft" vowels, one may omit this distinction in writing. But the difference is still there.
Sure, many languages have palatalized consonants, influenced by surrounding phonetic context (such as, vowel harmony in Turkic makes surrounding consonants "softer" too).
The true "contrastive palatalization" I was referring to is about having minimal pairs where words have totally different meanings based on whether the consonants are palatalized or not.
For example, in Russian (where I specify the palatalization of a preceding consonant with ʲ):
mer "a mayor"
mʲer "of measures"
mʲerʲ "measure!" (imperative)
Latin alphabet has no means to express it naturally, while in Cyrillic there're already all the required letters for it. Just omitting it in writing will introduce confusion.
I don't think it's really about Latin vs Cyrillic. Cyrillic is indeed very natural even for Slavic languages that only use Latin (modulo language-specific tweaks), but same results can be achieved with diacritics in Latin - take a look at Czech, Slovak and Serbo-Croatian alphabets. On the other hand, Polish alphabet really feels painful to an outsider, but that seems to be more about how it uses Latin, not about Latin itself.
It's interesting to observe how foreign writing systems fit the needs of the languages they are were designed to record.
Korean Hangeul is the gold standard here. Letter shapes represent their articulation and harmony and modify in regular ways to represent related pronunciations. You find similar observations in the writing systems for Arabic, Hindi, and Chinese. In the case of Cyrillic, it's that vowels come in soft and hard pairs.
Perhaps it's bias, but the Latin alphabet seems unopinionated by comparison. It has a good spread of characters for consonants and vowels and is amenable to diacritics or even novel characters. The only thing it's seriously lacking is a good way to transcribe tones. Chinese characters are great for writing a language with a near-1:1 morpheme:syllable correspondence, but its adaptation to write Japanese was famously clumsy.
It's a shame that Glagolitic hasn't caught up and remained relevant like Cyrillic did. On the upside, at least now we have our own historically accurate fantasy script. ;)|
One interesting consequence of the Latin-Cyrillic split in America is that Cyrillic names got transliterated into English-understandable ones, whereas Polish Latin names often didn’t. With the result that the originally-Cyrillic names are actually easier to understand in daily life.
Compare for example, Kuznetsov (fairly easy to say in English) vs. Kwiatkowski (ported directly from Polish.)
It's a different issue not related with alphabet only with American tradition regarding Surnames. Same issue exists for example with Polish and Lithuanian both using latin alphabet.
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.
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
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.
This article seems to miss the drastic religious importance and confuses it for politics. Of course religion affects politics, but I don’t think that was really the aim nor the main reason Sts Cyril and Methodios are held in such high honour.
First and foremost they are honoured as “equal to the apostles, enlighteners of the Slavs” as they were first and foremost missionaries. That the article calls them “diplomats” before even mentioning their mission work is already rather telling. Of course being sent somewhere by an emperor on the request of a duke will inevitably entail some diplomatic work, but that was hardly the point.
But I think it’s hard to overstate also the benefit the Slavic people saw in having Christianity in a language they understood as well as the benefit of having their religion and all the necessary literary tradition that comes with it being broadly compatible with the spoken vernacular.
Bulgaria has one of the world’s fastest-shrinking populations, primarily attributed to a high death rate and a low birth rate. Major health-related issues, such as high rates of smoking and alcohol consumption, contribute to Bulgaria’s elevated mortality rate. Furthermore, Bulgaria faces challenges in retaining its younger population due to a lack of economic opportunities and declining living standards in certain areas, indirectly contributing to its demographic decline.
After joining EU and NATO. No army. No agriculture. No serious manufacturing capability. Corruption. Crime. Failing infrastructure. And now fractured energy sector.
The cheap IT labor and political mafia money laundering keeps the illusion a float.
Lost identity and culture. 500 years under Ottoman Empire. 45 under Soviets (statistically economy and population growth in the period). And 34 under Britain and USA (total failure and no sovereignty).
Cyrillic alphabet is the most phonetically accurate, they have a letter for every sound you make with your mouth. One sad story for the country founded in 681 b.c.
The First Bulgarian Empire (Church Slavonic: блъгарьско цѣсарьствиѥ, romanized: blŭgarĭsko tsěsarǐstvije; Bulgarian: Първо българско царство) was a medieval state that existed in Southeastern Europe between the 7th and 11th centuries AD. It was founded in 680–681 after part of the Bulgars, led by Asparuh, moved south to the northeastern Balkans.
Meanwhile, Bulgaria is a survivor. I'm sure it will outlive the EU, NATO, and many Western European States. It will also outlive Great Islamistan (presently known as the United Kingdom).
Surviving and thriving are two separate states, often incompatible, and Bulgaria is a champion of the first.
There are Byzantine Armenian dimensions to this story that I suspect not many people know. Cyrill and Methodius were taught by Leo the Philosopher and Photios, in the University established by Bardas, all Greek-Armenians who clearly knew the transformative effect of having your own writing system (it saved Armenians from assimilation just a few centuries prior to these events). It took Hellenic culture of Byzantine period and Armenian experience to give birth to the first Slavic writing of Moravia and Bulgaria, and later most of Eastern Europe.
Incidentally, the first writing system (Glagolithic) didn't stick nearly as well as the subsequent iteration (Cyrillic) because the latter was so much closer to Greek, and every educated person already knew how to read/write Greek so it was a much easier sell. Regardless, this invention and its promotion was very much a planned and well-understood Byzantine project.
> Thus Bardas founded the Magnaura School with seats for philosophy, grammar, astronomy and mathematics, supported scholars like Leo the Mathematician and promoted the missionary activities of Cyril and Methodius to Greater Moravia.
Did you mean the second paragraph as Cyrillic being closer to Greek? That makes sense but I was confused at first and thought you meant Glagolitic being closer, which makes very little sense.
Actually, the Cyrillic alphabet was invented in the First Bulgarian Empire by the disciples of St. Cyril and Methodius who created the Glagolic alphabet before that. The Cyrillic alphabet is the greatest civilizational achievement of Bulgaria for its entire history.
That "Sviatoslav" the article talks about is actually Svatopluk [0], who was not a "Slavonic speaker" as Old Church Slavonic is a sort of pidgin based on a local Macedonian dialect.
So, author boils everything down to anti-Western politics a 1000 years ago and insists Cyrillic just got lucky that it spread so wide. And then puts Putin next to it, so that this celebration looked definitely shameful. That's just as ridiculous as pumping it with anti-Western sentiment from the other side.
To put it in a perspective, imagine what tone would a piece on the day of Arabic writing have.
> So, author boils everything down to anti-Western politics a 1000 years ago and insists Cyrillic just got lucky that it spread so wide.
It's a mix of accurate and inaccurate. It is based on a 1000 years old anti-western politics, but also anti-Eastern politics. And it didn't just get lucky, but there was a massive, massive effort on part of the First Bulgarian Empire to spread it via missionaries and the like, which is what set the foundations for its later use up North, where later the Russian Empire became a thing and so on ...
I want to point out that spreading the script back then meant spreading it in churches. I don't know for sure, but it might have come with first translations of Bible into local languages.
We nowadays instead perceive the question like whether or not a whole country will 99% literacy should switch writing system.
If it helps you put things in prospective, Ivanova is a slavic family name. Most likely bulgarian. And the conclusions are not in the context of east vs west but in terms of power structures and how they are enabled and shaped by technology.
Adding some more historical context, check the bulgarian kingdom end of IX, beginning of X century. It is mentioned in the article, but not expanded to what degree the state invested in adopting, adapting, and spreading the new alphabet.
I think there are 2 completely different topics mixed up in this article:
1. East-West opposition back 1000 years ago was 100% religious matter, the schism between East and West Christian churches.
2. The stance of Putin and some politicians against the West nowadays.
Spreading the alphabet back then meant spreading it in clerical writing. IIRC, Catholic church back then required doing services in Latin, while Constantinople allowed it in local languages -- hence the need for translation and that's why
Cyrillic developed from Greek, the primary language and writing system of the East church.
I don't see what Putin has to do with this at all.
There is a third aspect where the bulgarian kingdom used the alphabet as a way to limit the Eastern roman empire and to consolidate its political claims. Putin is involved to the extend where he tries to consolidate russian imperial claims over all of eastern europe.
"using alphabet for geopolitical purposes" sounds a bit exaggeration to me. It's like saying that Gothic script serves neo-nazi purposes. Sure they do print some stuff in Gothic. But should we now shame a German-cuisine restaurant that's branded in Gothic script?
An alphabet is connected to a language. And controlling the language and its writing, especially related to religion is a very powerful tool. How you do communication, what culture is relevant for you, etc.
And that happens even today - just think of the role English plays, and then American cultural artefacts. And compared it to French at the turn of the 20-th century
Yes, spreading the language creates a lot of opportunities. But not the script. Tadjiks are taught Russian. Both languages use Cyrillic, but in another country with different language but same script, you'd be almost as helpless as transitioning between Cyrillic and Arabic (Iran, which has Farsi, which is almost identical to Tadjik).
And in this regard, the west should be happy: Russia has poor culture of spreading its education. In Central Asia, Turkey has put a lot more effort in building and financing its schools and universities, where they teach English and Turkish. Putin's Russia is just ridiculous in this sense: it keeps "Houses of Friendship" with balalaikas, bear mascots and free vodka on holidays.
One of my friends hitch-hiked from Russia to Iran in the mid-2010s. Despite the countries being sorta friends, he had to speak with the local in broken English, not Russian. That's just ridiculous. Another friend hitchiked to Tajikistan, and there they do learn Russian at schools and can have a bare minimum of a conversation.
During the USSR, the Soviet government pushed the cyclic script on populations that speak very different languages, sometimes forcing them to abandon other scripts, i.e. arabic. Same during the Russian Empire.
Some Central European countries adopted the Latin script as a part of their alignment with Rome, and thus making a stronger political alignment.
Scripts and languages are very powerful political tools. In many cases what script a language uses is not a coincidence but a result of conscious choices and policies at some point.
In these examples, political will and power came first and brought scripts after them. And in all examples, literacy was miniscule.
Also, this would mean that countries using latin, like Indonesia, should be more pro-Western. I guess there might be a correlation, but a tiny one.
Although, same script does help readability and translating things, I'm sure current emphasis on Cyrillic by Russian government (while I lived in Russia, I haven't noticed it at all) is just because it's another occasion to remind the narratives. Not because it's such a super powerful tool. At least, in Russia, in late 80s early 90s, pro-Western narratives spread easily, despite everything.
I do see it as a reason to remind some political dogmas (and btw geopolitics is pure pseudoscience), but that'a whole different topic than creation of Cyrillic. I don't want to mark every item as pro- or against Putin.
The article claims Cyrillic alphabet was made to opress people and help Putin invade Ukraine. That it was made to help lords, rulers and politicians and ordinary people didn't have any advantage from using it. Also, Cyryl and Methodius were diplomats not saints. Also the alphabet was used by people from the East in their political fights against the West.
Quite laughable for anyone who knows a bit about the Cyrillic alphabet and the history of Eastern Europe.
"Unlike the Churchmen in Ohrid, Preslav scholars were much more dependent upon Greek models and quickly abandoned the Glagolitic scripts in favor of an adaptation of the Greek uncial to the needs of Slavic, which is now known as the Cyrillic alphabet."
* Finally this argument of rulers in Bulgaria speaking Turkish is very funny, given the fact that Bulgarians list tribes such as trace, proton-bulgarians and slavs as ancestors, and not the turks. The names of rules before Boris are Asparuh, Krum, Kahn Omurtag, Khan Tervel...etc. none sound Turkish to me, for all I care there may be something persian in the ancestry, which explains why so many Bulgarians look Iran so often.
And if you have reached reading here, take a look at this coptic alphabet from ... 2cent AD. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coptic_script and try to convince me scholars in Pliska didn't use it as foundation for cyrrilic. Many believe the actual cyrillic, used today, was influnced by the greek alphabet, but given the fact that this all was done by church people it gives some impression it was this Coptic Orthodox script, rather than Greek alphabet at the time which influenced the change. Which was done by Clement of Ohrid https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clement_of_Ohrid and his fellow scholars.
Finally, I really dispose such arguments of whether Nikola Tesla, for example, was Slavic himself, or Serbian or Croatian or whether, which you can find in history books. The fact that Tesla took American citizenship and his work flourished in the U.S.A. (because it was not possible to do so in Serbia/Croatia!) gives to the fact that the environment where genius works may be more important than his origins.
Not totally, only partially. At the time the Bulgarians were already a mix of the Slavic, Byzantine, and other peoples - including, of course, the Bulgars who, too, settled there, in the process of their migration from the East. The Bulgarian language and the Bulgar language have little (if anything) to do with each other.
Unless you suspect Mirela Ivanova to be a child, it's pretty disrespectful to refer to the author as "this Mirella girl". But I'm guessing that the disrespect was intentional.
It fails to mention the fact that, if you compare the earliest forms of Cyrillic to the contemporary Byzantine Greek alphabet, it's 100% identical to the Greek alphabet. The only difference is that Cyrillic added a few letters for Slavic sounds originally not found in Greek: sh, ch, nasal sounds, etc. Cyrillic was originally nothing more than the Greek alphabet with extra characters. Cyrillic and Greek diverged from each other much later, for purely technical reasons (e.g. letter H in cursive was often written as И and later became the norm).
So I'm not sure what the point of the article is.