The essay below was published by a Ukrainian journalist and blogger Miroslava Berdnik in LiveJournal on the 7th of November 2014. It covers the history of attempts to replace the Cyrillic alphabet both in the lands, presently known as Ukraine, and also – after the revolution of 1917 – in Russia.

Before going on to the translation, I want to highlight a few points that the reader should keep in mind (some coming from the comments after the article).

Throughout centuries, the main argument for replacement of the Cyrillic alphabet in the Slavic lands was that it would bring those lands closer to the Western European culture. How? Will writing Russian using Latin alphabet make an Englishman understand Russian or vice versa? No. Will it make easier for the Russians to learn English? Partially, but not significantly. Will it tear away the new generation of Russians from their historic roots by not allowing them to read their own literature. Yes. Here you have it.

For an example, look at Croatian and Serbian. These are one and the same language. Croatian is written in Latin, Serbian in Cyrillic. What did it achieve? A split of the one people into two and easier implementation of divide and conquer strategy.

Secondly, Cyrillic alphabet maps exactly the soundscape of the Slavic languages – one letter, one sound. Slavic languages, which got Latinised at various points in time – like Polish, Czech or Slovak – had to resort to dual, triple, and quadruple letters to depict a single sound. Example: letters “Ш” can be Latinised, transliterated, in various ways: “SH” or, as in Polish “SZ”. In some cases, additional “latin-like” letters need to be introduced. See for example Polish “ś”, “ł”, “ę”, “ą”; or the Czech “Ú”, “Ů”, “Č”. So Polish, with its essentially close-to-Russian pronunciation, ended up having more letters, than Cyrillic Russian. Interestingly, the same sound comprising the word “Czech”, would have been written in Cyrillic using only 3 letters: “Чех”.

Read also Lada Ray’s extended commentary to the article here: How to Reformat People’s Consciousness and Keep them as Obedient Slaves.

There will be a few more comments after the translation, but now, the historical article itself. Enjoy.

The idea of ​​replacing the Cyrillic alphabet in the Ukrainian language with the Latin one for the sake of “Eurointegration” is very close to heart of the Galician thinkers. Round table on the topic will be held on November the 9th (2014) in Lvov.

On the 9th of November, in the famous cult cafe “Dziga” in Lvov, there will be a discussion on whether it is possible to transfer the Ukrainian language from the Cyrillic to the Latin alphabet. News program “Facts” of the Ukrainian TV channel ICTV reports about it.
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