Comm on Coll and pre-Coll Russian data base

[Ralph Cleminson]

On 23 Jan 1996 Dr Yoshimasa Tsuji wrote:

> the word 'Cyrillic characters' is always
> >confused with modern Russian typeface, which is Latinized though
> >not so completely as in Polish. Why not just say 'Russian characters' or
> >Ukrainian characters? That will be simpler to understand.
> >People say 'English letters', but not 'Latin letters' because they
>
And Max Pyziur commented:
> This is a presumption which I don't share with you.  As a speaker of
> American English, generally, I believe that I say "alphabet" before I would
> begin to say "English letters", but I can't extrapolate with certainty (to
> the degree with which you apparently can) on what is generally said/written
> here in the US or the UK -- "alphabet", "English letters", or something else.
>
I agree.  In fact, one would normally talk about "the Latin
alphabet", not "the English alphabet".  (Admittedly the Poles do talk
about the Polish alphabet, by which they mean a particular subset of
the Latin alphabet, with the particular diacritics and letter-
combinations used for Polish.)  The point is, of course, that the
Latin alphabet is common to all the languages that use it, as is the
cyrillic to those which use that.  One can then talk about "Russian
letters", meaning something like jery (which would also be a
"Belorusian letter"), in the same way that a w with a circumflex
would be a Welsh letter, but the answer to the question "What
alphabet is Russian written in?" would still be cyrillic - and Welsh
uses the Latin alphabet.  Otherwise one has not term to denote the
common character set which is used (with modifications) by a
multiplicity of languages.

> >know even the most recent Latin characters that had the lower case as well
> >didn't distinguish U,V,W, for example. And in the same vein people don't
> >call Latin characters Greek because they know that whatever the origin
> >they are different. Therefore, whatever the origin, let us call Russian
> >characters Russian and not Cyrillic (let the term 'Cyrillic letters' refer
> >to the hand-written script of the Middle Ages).

Origin has nothing to do with it (otherwise cyrillic would be Greek
and Greek would be Phoenician).  And in any case, there was
considerable variation in mediaeval cyrillic.  A Bulgarian MS would
not use precisely the same characters with the same values as an East
Slavonic one, still less a Bosnian one.

> You can call them whatever you want crafting a justification using logic
> more approproiate to higher levels of mathematics; my use of the terms
> "Cyrillic letters" and  "Cyrillic alphabet" reflects my usage of the term
> "kyrylytsia" when I speak/write/communicate with others in Ukrainian.  Other
> terms which I've heard used are:  "azbuka" and "abetka"; nowhere have I
> heard or seen the use of "rosij's'ki litery" or "rosij's'ka azbuka".
>
True, but actually you *can't* call them what you like.  The whole
point about scholarly terminology is that it consists of terms with a
definite meaning so that when you use them, other people know exactly
what you mean.  In the present case, the terminology is perfectly
well established (except in some of the finer points of
palaeography), and should be adhered to.









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Ralph Cleminson, Reader in Slavonic Studies, University of Portsmouth
ralph at hum.port.ac.uk
http://www.hum.port.ac.uk/Users/ralph.cleminson/home.htm
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