Janko:
>>>How do you define "historically the same character" please?
>> Both derive directly from Old Slavonic letter tvrdo.
>By this definition Cyrillic and Latin A derive from Greek
Alpha. And all
three are "historically the same character". So what's the
point?
I think it's plain to all of us that there is a categorical
distinction between saying "English A and French A are the
same" and "Russian A and French A are the same". While Russian
and Serbian have different writing systems, I don't think any
of us question the unity of the script - Cyrillic - on which
those writing systems are based. Latin, Greek and Cyrillic
diverged over a thousand years ago, becoming different in
radical ways. The differences between the Russian and Serbian
writing systems are, in comparison, trivial.
Writing systems and scripts are like languages in that they are
not always neatly defined at a point in time (is the speech of
an "English" speaker in New York the same language as that of
an "English" speaker in Inverness?) and that they change over
time. One can alway choose to insist that two varieties of
speech are different in the context of a discussion where
everyone else thinks it's adequate to say they're effectively
the same (for the purposes of that discussion), but since
that's not productive, we choose instead to let our categories
conform to the conventions of the group. Similarly, I think we
all agree to adopt the convention of saying that Russian and
Serbian are written with a single script; there is no practical
reason to say the are different scripts. The differences in the
writing systems are simply not that great.
Peter
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