#Cyrillic

[thyinum]

Please, when you see something written in Cyrillic, don't assume right away that it's russian. Russian is not the only language that uses Cyrillic. There are also Ukrainian, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Montenegrin, Serbian, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Tajik, Mongolian.

It's a sensitive topic especially for us Ukrainians because russian language is a weapon. It's a colonial language, it's presented like one and only true slavic language, it erases and replaces other languages. Belarusian is literally on the verge of extinction because of russian. Ukrainian has been banned 134 times throughout history, it is still called a "village language", a dialect of russian. Russian colonialism is literally the reason why there are so many russian speaking people in Ukraine (I was one of them btw). Ukrainian is banned on russian occupied territories and people are getting in trouble or even killed for using it there, Ukrainian POWs in russian captivity are getting brutally beaten for speaking Ukrainian.

Like okay, I can get why there's this confusion, so here's a clue to understand that the language you're looking at definitely is not russian — the letter і. If you see ї (like i but with two dots) it's 100% Ukrainian. If you see j it's Serbian. Russian alphabet also doesn't have such letters as Ђ, Љ, Њ, Ў, Џ (dont confuse with Ц ). Yes, it's not always gonna be easy to detect that the language in front of you is not russian, but when you have trouble with it just ask or run it through any translation app and it'll probably tell you the language.

Hope this will be helpful.

[degeneratedworker]

"When the fighters for peace are strong, then the god of war is powerless." Soviet Union 1987

[ikuzeminna]

I need your help with a hypothesis!

For context: My linguistics professor and I got into a discussion after a test she did with us, and I was of the opinion that the reason for the results was different from the one she offered, so she encouraged me to test my theory.

What I need

All you need to do is draw a coffee cup (with a handle, not the disposable stuff) and then answer three questions.

I don't need to see the coffee cup. You can draw it wherever you like; on a piece of paper, digitally, in the sand, on a foggy window. Anything works. It does not have to be good. A doodle is fine.

You have to draw the coffee cup before you see the questions. This is very important. If you decide to help me with this, please doodle the coffee cup before you keep reading.

Assuming you have drawn the coffee cup, I now need you to answer these three questions:

On which side did you draw the handle?

Are you right-handed or left-handed?

Do you primarily write using the Latin alphabet or a different one? (please specify which)

More context

Most people will draw the handle on the right side. My professor says it's because most people are right-handed, so they draw the handle in the direction that would be comfortable for them to pick up.

I said drawing it on the right side just felt more comfortable to my hand and argued it's probably because we write a bunch of letters like that. B, b, D, P, p, R all look like a tiny "handle on the right side" and are all a straight line followed by a round one (so "cup first, handle second," like most people draw cups). The Latin alphabet doesn't have letters like that that face the other way, except maybe d, depending on how you write it, so it makes sense to me that people writing mostly Latin letters would go with the handle on the right side.

Which means that I need to know what Asians, Arabs and Greeks do and if the distribution of left and right sides of handles differs from the Latin alphabet group. Cyrillic seems to favor right, too, though it'd be interesting to see if there are differences.

If there are, my theory is right. Doubly so if there is a sizeable increase in a group whose alphabet has letters that benefit the left side choice.

So feel free to spread this to as many people as you like and put the answers in the comments or the tags of a reblog. The more answers I get, the better I can assess whose theory is better.

Thank you for your help!

[dontforgetukraine]

80-year-old stencils of OUN and UPA uncovered in Volyn. They contain slogans such as “Long live the independent Ukrainian state,” “For the independent states of all oppressed nations,”  and “Death to Hitler and Stalin!”

Source: chytomo_eng

[artifacts-and-arthropods]

Doodles Made by a 6-year-old Boy Named Onfim, from Russia, c. 1240-1260 CE: created nearly 800 years ago, these drawings were scrawled onto the homework/spelling exercises of a little boy in Novgorod

Over the last 75 years, excavations in and around Novgorod, in Russia, have led to the discovery of hundreds of documents dating back to the Middle Ages. These documents were made using pieces of bark from the local birch trees; they include letters, notes, spelling exercises, shopping lists, receipts, and legal documents, among other things.

The most famous examples are the panels that contain the writing exercises of a 6-7 year-old boy named Onfim, whose work was often accompanied by drawings of knights, fantastical beasts, battle scenes, and depictions of himself in various forms.

These are just a few examples:

Birch-Bark Document no.199: on the back of a panel that had been used for his spelling exercises, Onfim drew this picture of himself as a wild beast, writing "I am a wild beast" in the center of the drawing; the beast is also shown holding a sign that says "Greetings from Onfim to Danilo," likely referring to a friend or classmate.

Birch-Bark Document no.200: Onfim began writing the Cyrillic alphabet at the top of this panel, but he then stopped to draw a picture of himself as a warrior on horseback, labeling the figure with his name; the drawing shows him wielding a sword while he impales his enemy with a spear.

Birch-Bark Document no.202: the boy's mother and father are depicted in this drawing, which accompanies another writing exercise.

Birch-Bark Document no.206: Onfim began to copy a liturgical prayer (the Troparion of the Sixth Hour) onto this strip of bark, but he apparently got distracted after writing just the first few words, and started drawing a row of people along the bottom of the panel instead.

The examples above are just a few of the many documents that have been unearthed in Novgorod (now known as Veliky Novgorod) and its surrounding areas. More than a thousand birch-bark manuscripts and styli have been found throughout the region, suggesting that there was a high rate of literacy among the local inhabitants. Most of these documents were created during the 11th-15th centuries, when Novgorod served as the capital city of the Novgorod Republic; they had been buried in the thick, wet clay that permeates the local soil, in conditions that allowed them to remain almost perfectly preserved for hundreds of years.

I know that Onfim's drawings are pretty well-known already, but my most recent post involved a very similar writing exercise/doodle from a child in Medieval Egypt, so I just thought I'd post some of Onfim's work, as well.

Sources & More Info:

Institute of Slavic Studies at the Russian Academy of Sciences: Birch-Bark no.200, no.199, no.202, no.203, no.206, & no.210 (the site is in Russian, but can be translated)

Institute of Slavic Studies: Full Database of Birch-Bark Documents

The New York Times: Where Mud is Archaeological Gold, Russian History Grew on Trees

Russian Linguistics: Old East Slavic Birch-Bark Literacy - a history of linguistic emancipation?

[pickaletter]

That ask I got earlier was cool. So here's a poll with the expanded version of Russian alphabet

[kutyozh]

custom keyboards for polyglots

and polyglots in the making

I found this amazing resource of custom desktop keyboards collected by the university of cologne. go wild!!

[maknaasfalti]

I work as a bartender on one art event in Bulgaria.

One artist showed her animation about how Bulgarians are loosing their national heritage by using Latin alphabet instead of Cyrillic.

She used russian Cyrillic, not Bulgarian Cyrillic.

I am going to do something people say is unhealthy to joke about.

[easterneuropeancrafts]

"In 6430 , here passed away God's servant Anton in the month of October (...)"

"В 6430 година почина раб божий Антон през месец октомври (...)"

The oldest Cyrillic inscription in the world, found in the Krepcha Rock Monastery, Bulgaria. 921.

On 24 May, Bulgaria celebrates the day of the Cyrillic alphabet, education and culture.

Bulgarian National Radio

[uwmspeccoll]

Typography Tuesday

A little Cyrillic, anyone? Today we present some Cyrillic alphabets, along with a couple of graphic usages, reproduced in ABZ, edited by Julian Rothenstein and Mel Gooding, and published in San Francisco by Chronicle Books in 2003 (an earlier edition was published by Shambhala in 1993 as Alphabets & Other Signs). Click or tap on the captions for descriptions.

View other posts from ABZ.

View our other Typography Tuesday posts.

[roses-of-the-romanovs]

Tatiana Nikolaevna’s extraordinarily beautiful handwriting and signature ❤️ Letter to Lili Dehn, July 24, 1917.

[apocaloidae]

Making my obsession with the Cyrillic writing system public, pixel art fonts for slavic cyrillic alphabets (with bonus interslavic)!!!

Open to suggestions and updates. I also made some for the turkic languages, check notes for that :0

The alt versions were just for when I was indecisive, but right now I'm pretty happy with the ones I picked.

[bed-wed-behead-your-fave]

the letter Ы from cyrillic

[historynerdj2]

History memes #56

[3oey]

я написал диктанты :) (dictations)

"Моя семья" and "Чистые пруды" by О русском по-русски on youtube. I love this channel. She explains russian grammar - in russian. It's really helpful for me, she speaks very clearly and most of the videos have subtitles available too :)

I always loved dictations in school because i was just naturally good at spelling and I write fast. I'm currently practicing to also get a better flow in my russian handwriting. I like the second one better, but this was A2 so and i didn't know all of the words and made more mistakes :( the first one was really rushed.

[extendedcyrillicblog]

Е́ꙅтендид Сири́лик ѣ́лфъбет фор И́нглиш Юз - Вържън 1.0

Extended Cyrillic alphabet for English use - Version 1.0

Hi, I'm Max. Whoever reads this (thank you!) might have noticed that my blog is currently a complete, confusing mess, which I promise is not intentional. My intention with this project was to create an alphabet that could be used for multiple languages, including but not limited to English, Spanish, my native Portuguese, and of course, Russian, however that's way beyond whatever a potential audience for the blog would even be interested in for the most part. As such, I am making this list of characters and phonemic examples which may be more useful than the previous tactic of throwing a complete list of letters at you and hoping you know which ones you'll want or need to know. You will notice some new decisions that are different from the ones I made before, these were made after much consideration of what has been useful and practical for me, both in my own physical writing and while using a few of the many available Church Slavonic keyboards on my cellphone and computer. Enjoy!

P.S.: As a basis, I've generally used the Shavian alphabet, which has a list of phonemes George Bernard Shaw thought needed to be distinguished through letters. I did take the liberty of slashing most diphthongs, except for those that occur most frequently.

P.P.S.: Sidenote, if you want to evaluate if a letter might have been a good choice or not, try writing the words provided as examples using this alphabet.

Vowels:

This was the hardest part, any corrections and suggestions are welcome :)

А as in Art

/a/

Ѣ as in Axe

/æ/

Ъ as the E in The

/ə/ /ʌ/

Е as in Enter

/e/ /ɛ/

И as in Inner

/i/ /ɪ/

О as in Option

/o/ /ɔ/

У as in the oo in Good

/u/ /ʊ/

Vowel length is marked through use of a macron (ex: “ooze” becomes “у꙼з”) or by simply doubling the vowel letter (ууз), as convenient.

Diphthongs:

Є as the the A in Maid

/eɪ/

Ю as the U in Use

/jʊ/

Ѧ as in Ice

/aɪ/

Ꙋ as the O in Social

/oʊ/ /ow/

——————

Consonants:

This was the easiest part, if you disagree with me you should simply explode :) /s

In all seriousness, it was pretty hard to decide how to present the consonants, and some choices did have to be made (гуудба́і, һ :( ), but in the end this is what seemed best:

Пп as in Peer, Бб as in Bright, Тт as in Trust, Дд as in Dream, Кк as in Care, Гг as in Good, Ꙅ as in NecKS, Фф as in Ferry, Вв as in Veil, Ѳѳ as in THistle or THat.

Сс as in Sum, Зз as in Zoom, Шш as in Sure, Жж as in aZure, Чч as in CHeck, Ꙉꙉ as in Judge, НГнг* as in thiNG, Хх as in Help, Іі as in maY, Ѵѵ as in Work

Лл as in Luck, Рр as in Realm, Мм as in Much, Нн as in Name

* НГ is a tricky bitch. You might ask yourself, why would you use a digraph as a single letter? And the answer is I don't want to! A ligature of these two exists in Unicode! But the Gboard Old Church Slavonic keyboard, which I'm using for the moment, doesn't have it :(. This does highlight the problem of different keyboards not having it as part of their system, so if you want to use them as a ligature or as separate letters, it's fine.