Originally Posted by tedrlord

I don't think using Cyrillic for Russian is an especially artificial way of adding a written component to language....

Originally Posted by stingc

Korean is similar, but even more synthetic. The spoken language is natural, but the written language was entirely designed by scholars commisioned by the king in the 15th century or so. They had used chinese characters before (and they're still used sometimes), but it was very awkward. The resulting writing system is I think considered the most efficient for any real language (only 24 characters and completely phonetic).

Originally Posted by The_Jazz

Latin developed from the Phoenician and Greek alphabets, so it was sort of an organic growth. English used the Latin alphabet because that what was used in the churches.

Cyrillic was flat out created by two monks. They invented letters for certain sounds (Sh, Ch, Ts, Ya, etc.) that don't exist in Greek. There are also a lot more letters in Russian than Greek (30 vs 24), and not all of the Greek letters are in Russian (there's no Greek Zeta, Psi or Omega, among others).

Russian is definitely an organic language, and there are a lot of similar, related languages in Eastern Europe. Ukranian speakers can usually muddle through Russian without too much trouble, as can a lot of Poles and Bulgarians. I know several Polish guys that don't have real talents for languages that can converse pretty easily in Russian. The way that my friends have described it is like an English speaker from the deep South talking to someone that speaks Cockney English. There are a lot of words in common, but understanding them can be very hard.