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.
Yes, problems are not unique to Slavic languages, but at least for _some_ Slavic languages, Cyrillic has been taken to the most simplified form that is _accidentally_ easy to process on a computer too.
But yes, I was a bit too absolutist, I agree — as ever, everything is more nuanced, so perhaps not "trivially provable", but in "closer to full differentiation in graphical representation while being simple and unambiguous to process on a computer"?
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?
Perhaps people misunderstood me: it is not a _technical_ property of Cyrillic (vs Latin) script per se, but a combination of historical setting and ability to adapt the script to the (smaller) group's language. This has led to Cyrillic scripts being _developed_ to be technically more suitable for Slavic languages, because where Latin script was used, there was not as much liberty (perceived or real).
I mean, either is just a set of pictograms representing parts of spoken words, and obviously, if developed similarly, there is no difference between them. But for Slavic languages they were _not_ developed similarly, which is my point.