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necovekyesterday at 8:15 AM2 repliesview on HN

Indeed: most notably, Croatian, Slovenian, Bosnian, Serbian and Montenegrin are all unambiguous with Cyrillic, but Latin script dominates, even in officially Cyrillic-first Serbia.

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.


Replies

foobarianyesterday at 7:15 PM

The unique quirk with South Slavic languages is the linguistic work e.g. associated with Vuk Karadžić [1] which resulted in a cleaned up purely phonetic alphabet. This was done across the region and ended up getting plumbed through both alphabets, so e.g. the Croatians/Slovenes write in latin but with a handful of special characters for the unique sounds like "š" or the double-letter characters "dž" "lj", which also map 1-1 to stuff on the Serbian Cyrillic side.

It's the kind of legacy cleanup you love to see :-)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vuk_Karad%C5%BEi%C4%87

ymolodtsovyesterday at 8:49 AM

Serbia is still mostly Cyrillic though. It's a very interesting experiment since Croatia isn't and the languages are basically the same.

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