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.
Nem/нем literally means "mute" in Serbian, perhaps it's a latter evolution per region either way.
Very far from Serbian only. Bulgarian, Russian, and even Balti-Slavic like Latvian is similar enough.
Same in Russian
нем\немой - mute
немота - muteness
But yes, we do use Germany for country's name :)
I wanted to check; are you implying that Russian is not a Slavic language?
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...
So you'd have the Slavs - the people of word - and the Germans - the mutes.
(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)
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-Eur...
I've heard this claim many times but never the reasoning behind it - by what metric is "ш" superior to "š" and so on?
With digraphs (lj, nj, dž + sometimes dj for đ too), it's even worse. Even capitalization is ambiguous: sometimes it's Lj and other times it's LJ. Then you have words like konjugacija where nj is not a digraph.
Interestingly — and not many know this — Unicode includes separate codepoints for all of the digraphs too. While well-intentioned, it only makes the problem worse.
Digraphs are especially sucky when you try sorting strings in a phonebook order as LJ comes after L, so you've got ...LI, LK..., LZ, LJA... With exceptions, it is even worse.
It's the same with Unicode encoding of Cyrillic letters - й (U+0439) can be written as й (и U+0438 + ◌̆ U+0306)
> Interestingly — and not many know this — Unicode includes separate codepoints for all of the digraphs too. While well-intentioned, it only makes the problem worse.
Based on your description it seems that the root cause of the issues is using two letters to represent the digraph - for example N (U+004E) J (U+004A) instead of NJ (U+01CA) - and the sorting issues would be identical if people typed Н (U+041D) Ь (U+042C)instead of Њ (U+040A).
What's the reason for the digraph being substituted by 2 letters in the first case more often than in the second case?
last time I checked we also call them "немцы" (Nemci and sounds exactly the same)
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.
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.
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.
Ђ/ђ
Ћ/ћ
Љ/љ
Њ/њ
Џ/џ
Ј/ј
Various diacritical marks, digraph, a jod... What makes this Cyrillic more unambiguous than the Latin equivalents?
