Several countries have other writing systems besides Latin (Rovás in Hungary, Glagoljica in Croatia, Elbasan and others in Albania, Ogham in Ireland…), yet all of the mentioned countries have completely abandoned their now former writing systems in favor of Latin. Only Serbia kept Latin with Cyrillic. Why is that?
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Why would we? We are alright with latin alphabet, any word can be phonetically written with it.
Maybe some very smart guy will find me a Polish word (used like 20 times in history) that cannot be properly written, but it doesn’t change that we dont need digraphism.
Due primarily to their relative isolation under Ottoman rule, the Balkan nations retained the use of the Cyrillic script, which was never actively suppressed. The Orthodox Church played a significant role in this preservation; following the fall of Constantinople, various autocephalous churches operated independently and continued to employ the script.
In contrast, the Roman Catholic Church actively suppressed the use of all non-Latin scripts. It is important to note that literacy was largely confined to the clergy during this period, making such suppression relatively easy to enforce.
The Albanian Elbasan script represents a distinct case. It emerged comparatively late, in the 18th century, and was never widely adopted, primarily due to the absence of any compelling incentive for its widespread use.
You’re mentioning some much earlier, medieval scripts for languages that gradually transitioned to using different scripts. That’s a natural process of written language evolution that’s happened pretty much everywhere in the world.
Serbian is digraphic but it’s not comparable to using some ancient script either. It uses modern Cyrillic and modern Latin, it’s not like they use Classical Cyrillic or some medieval Latin script. A better question would be why Serbian is digraphic, and then I’d speculate it’s at least partially political because languages in the region are a politically sensitive issue, see the disagreements about the classification of Serbo-Croatian and its variants.
There is no evidence to suggest that rovás in Hungary was ever widespread. I think there are exactly 2 pieces of credible artefacts with Hungarian runes from the middle ages, the vast majority date from the 1500’s or later and for the most part are short inscriptions of names or short blessings, not full texts. Latin was the language of the church and culture and we can see already in 1055 people attempting to write Hungarian using the Latin script. We even have the first full Hungarian text from 1196.
Since the Hungarian alphabet was created with it’s 44 letters to match all sounds of the language, runic has become completely obsolete and useless beyond a minor novelty.
In comparison both the Latin script and Cyrillic script are fully developed and widely used alphabets and it makes sense for Serbia to utilize both given its past history with Yugoslavia, the still existing minorities like Voivodina Hungarians who have always used the Latin alphabet, and Serbia’s location in Europe.
Hungary doesn´t really have the rovás-alphabet (runes). It is known by a couple of thousand peolpe and used by a handful. That´s it.
Having more than one script seems kinda pointless ngl
They are completely different situations, though. Also, most educated people in medieval and early modern Europe used Latin and then, during the Enlightenment, French. Both of these languages are written down in Latin script.
Also, most countries you listed had almost no literary tradition beyond religious uses. When elites converted to Christianity, so the new script (Latin) triumphed.
By the time the printing press was invented (and certainly by the time of mass literacy), the Latin Alphabet was well established in England and the Futhark was basically extinct. And it’s precisely *because* of the invention of the printing press in the 15th century that a large part of the population would become literate not long afterwards, which also made the language more resistant to spelling reform.
The Futhark might make a bit more sense for the English language than the Latin Alphabet does, but even then, it was designed for how the language was spoken over 1000 years ago so accommodations would still have to be made.
Don’t Bosnia and Montenegro use both Latin and Cyrillic as well?
For the same reason Serbia didn’t adopt trigraphism.
Because once you’ve accepted that Latin won (and if you’re considering using both, you already have) you might as well go all the way.
Using two different scripts needlessly complicates everything.
Everyone living there now has to learn two alphabets, and assuming you’re using the Latin script in order to make interoperability with other countries easier, then at least every official document needs to be written in both, signs need to be duplicated, etc. If you don’t do this, then adopting Latin is a bit pointless. If you do, also keeping your original script around is a bit pointless.
Hungarian rovás script has never been an official writing system. It came back in fashion in the last twenty years or so. It is not taught anywhere in schools or used anywhere. It is simply a curiosity.
Animal depictions and runes went out of fashion with modern continental influences
My guess would be that Serbia always had strong ties to Russia. As i said guess, I don’t know s… about this.
Why don’t other languages have two written forms for accommodating different dialects, like Norwegian has?
Because the political circumstances are different in different countries. Most prefer having one standard. So, they agree one one. Some can’t agree on one standard, so they have more than one.
I guess the simple answer is: both scripts were easily available on typewriters then, and nowadays on technical devices.
So the use of glagolitic script in croatia declined with the ottoman invasion. Country was fragmented, ruled by different kingdoms, all pushing their languages and scripts. Printing press made things even worse, because now you needed custom blocks for glagolitic characters (and there were several styles of glagolitic script, each with their own quirks and special letter forms). So printing press was mostly latin, and glagolitic was left for scribes and hand written books. Couple that with anti-reformation which sought to standardize christian service by educating all priests in the same way, the glagolitic just kind of faded out. By the time croatian language was getting standardized and ortography rules were decided, it was already a thing of the past and latin alphabet was used as a basis.
There are only few places in the world, where one language (or two mutually intelligible) languages with more than one *actively used* script exist.
Croatian and Serbian is one such pair, Hindi and Urdu is other one. Usually there is a cultural reason, often reinforced by past atrocities, why populations using those script tend to stay separate.
Even Serbia tried to abandon cyrillic during the time of Yugoslavia. Digraphism is more so a relic of past
The writing systems you listed aren’t just old, they’re archaic. They’re historical artifacts. People have no relation to these scripts outside of some possible brief mentions in history class. There are only really three major writing systems in modern Europe; Greek, Cyrillic and Latin. It’s not really needed or viable to bring in any more for most people.
Politics and territory also play a massive role. Up until modern times, which writing systems were and weren’t used depended on who had power over a land. For instance, Belarusian was written in the Latin alphabet, called Łacinka, before being absorbed by the Russian Empire who banned it in favor of Cyrillic.
Likewise, Romanian used to be written in a variation of Cyrillic, and Moldovan was written in Cyrillic during the Soviet era. Even today, in the “Russian” area of Moldova called Transnistria, the language is written in Cyrillic.