Hacker News Reader

Comment by culebron21 | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

You don’t see how using an alphabet for geopolitical purposes has anything to do with Putin ?

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.

"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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com