Quote:
Originally posted by tedrlord
I don't think using Cyrillic for Russian is an especially artificial way of adding a written component to language. Practically all of the European languages got their lettering from Latin in much the same way.
And I'd love to learn Klingon. I revel in my geekiness.
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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.