Cyrillic Alphabet

Tradition against Unification

Despite all the problems, many Slav scholars point out that other countries - like Israel, Japan and China - have chosen to preserve their ancient alphabets. It did not seem to affect their economic ascendance. And cyrillic captures better the consonants and vowels unique to Slavic languages, they argue persuasively


By MAJA MILOVANOVIĆ
from Belgrade, SERBIA


If you're in a foreign country looking through a phone book, trying to make reservations for dinner later that evening and you seem to have trouble finding the restaurant section, here's a hint - try under "PECTOPAH"! Found it? Then you're probably somewhere in Eastern Europe, Russia or Central Asia where the Cyrillic alphabet is most used. In case you're wondering, the word means restaurant and is pronounced /rest-oh-rahn/, and not as most of you have just pronounced it!

In this developing, unstable part of the world, where over the past couple of decades countries have fallen apart as a result of numerous conflicts, the Cyrillic alphabet has become more than just a form of writing. For example, in Serbia both the Cyrillic and Latin alphabet are equally used but you may just hear a comment from someone saying you're less of a Serb if you prefer the Latin alphabet. This is because over the past years the Latin alphabet has become associated with the democratic movements which are perceived as an attempt to get the values and specifics of the western world and implement them in the East. In an enormous country like Russia, which spans over 11 time zones and includes many ethnic minorities, dropping the Cyrillic alphabet and adopting the Latin was in some cases considered an act of separatism (as the Cyrillic alphabet is an essential ingredient of the cement that binds the Russian Federation together).

The Cyrillic alphabet was invented sometime during the 10th century AD and is named after St. Cyril, a missionary from Byzantium. It is used by more than 220 million people in more than 10 countries and has been adapted to write over 50 different languages. In many cases additional letters are used, some of which are adaptations of standard Cyrillic letters, while others are taken from the Greek or Latin alphabets.

How important the Cyrillic alphabet is, we could watch live on our television sets just a few weeks ago, as there was uncertainty about whether EU foreign ministers will be able to sign a Stabilization and Association Agreement (SAA) with Montenegro because Bulgaria refused to allow this until the EU leaders agreed to let the name of the single European currency (Euro) be spelled in Cyrillic. The agreement (which allows Montenegro to move one step closer towards EU accession and is for this reason of great importance) was signed and the Cyrillic alphabet will be the third alphabet used on the Euro banknotes. Bulgaria insisted that when deciding to adopt the euro currency, EU leaders also agreed to translate other alphabets, such as the Greek alphabet spelling, which currently figures alongside the Latin spelling on the euro notes.

The main advantage of the Latin over the Cyrillic alphabet in modern society is the trouble-free use of computers and the Internet as an ever-expanding form of sharing information around the world. For example, if a name of a website is in Cyrillic writing, to enter www.<Cyrillic_IDN>.ru one needs to switch keyboard twice, which is quite inconvenient. New solutions are constantly being developed to standardize the way for proper displaying of Cyrillic letters, in a way that the reader does not have to have special version of the software/operating system/browser/fonts to see readable Cyrillic text.

Definitely a huge problem for the modern tourist is the reading of maps and street signs which in some countries can be found written only in Cyrillic. The problem actually becomes greater if the maps have been made in Latin and the street signs are still in Cyrillic - the confused traveler can't even match the letters! After talking to a couple of my friends who have visited Belgrade, I found out that this "problem" actually added to their experience, and that they found it exotic to have to learn some Cyrillic in order to get around the city. However, if you don't have much time - say, a weekend - you might not take the trouble to spend half of your time decoding street signs! The funny thing is that it's not only the foreigners who can get confused by Cyrillic writing, but us locals too! If we take into account the following facts:

- 10 of 30 Cyrillic characters fully coincide with Latin characters in lower case: a, e, j, k, m , o, p, c, y, x

- 13 of 30 characters fully coincide with Latin characters in upper case: A, B, C, E, H, J, K, M, O, P, T, X

- Some characters look similar in some fonts: I and u; P and n then it becomes easy to understand why this is so. Simple example: I was on my way to a soccer match and on my ticket (which was all in Latin) it said that I should enter at gate B. Since there was a long queue, I had time to look around and notice that the gates of the stadium were marked in Cyrillic (the letter "B" in Cyrillic is actually pronounced as V and the letter "B" is the equivalent of the Latin letter B). So it was unclear whether I should enter at "B" or "B". In this situation, you can just hope that the people who made the tickets were consistent with everything on the ticket being in Latin and that you will be able to enter at the gate you thought you should, without having to switch to another long line!

Yet another problem, less important to ordinary people but by no means to the government and country, is that the Cyrillic alphabet may cause some companies to hold back from investing in a country that uses this alphabet. This is because the price tag of opening a branch in a country that uses the Cyrillic alphabet can reach several million dollars more that it would in a country that uses the Latin alphabet. Most of this money gets used to convert the company's global systems to the Cyrillic alphabet.

However, not only do the countries using Cyrillic have costs attributed to their language and alphabet. In the European Union, linguistic diversity also comes at a price. For 2005, the total cost of all language services - written translation and spoken interpretation - in the EU's 20 official languages was €1.1 billion - about 1 percent the total EU budget, or €2.28 per person across the 25-member bloc. With the addition of Bulgarian and Romanian in 2007, along with Irish becoming an operational language, the cost was increased by an estimated €35 million.

Despite all the above-mentioned problems, many Slav scholars point out that other countries - like Israel, Japan and China - have chosen to preserve their ancient alphabets. It did not seem to affect their economic ascendance. And cyrillic captures better the consonants and vowels unique to Slavic languages, they argue persuasively.

So basically, it all comes down to this - should the Cyrillic alphabet, despite the complications and confusion it can cause at times, be preserved as a traditional one and as an important contribution to the survival of diversity in this time of globalization, or should everyone be heading towards unification and encourage the use of the more functional Latin alphabet? I believe that the two can co-exist, but time will tell whether the Cyrillic alphabet can survive the globalization, internet and SMS era.


(Published: 09.11.2007.)

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