What if the Soviet Union under either Lenin or Stalin adopted the Latin alphabet as part of its industrialization and/or modernization process? What would this have changed, if anything, in the world and in the country itself? I read that there were some measures suggested by Lenin to this effect, but they were all reportedly stifled and eventually abandoned during Stalin -- so I'm wondering just how plausible this would be, as well as what impact it might have.
WI: Soviets adopt Latin alphabet
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Russians are Russians and the Cyrillic alphabet is a deep part of their heretige.
They are NOT giving it up to please "Outsiders" and many Russians probably pointed out that there is no reason to make it EASIER for an invader or potential invader to read their secret papers.
The literacy rate would drop tremendously, and Russians would associate communism with people trying to force Russia into being more like foreign western countries. I don't think Lenin would have done more than toy with this idea. Also, SergeantHeretic has a good point that I didn't think about.
whitecrow
Banned
I have never heard of this. Source. ?
What the Bolshevics did do was get rid of several useless letters of the alphabet (i.e.: letters used in very few words & circumstances that could be replaced by other more common letters).
The only way it would happen is if the Soviet Union adopted e.g. Esperanto, as in A Martian stranded on Earth
WHY would anyone want to spell Russian in Roman characters? I could imagine a universe where Russia converts to Catholicism instead of Orthodoxy, and thus uses Roman letters, but that needs a PoD probably before 1000AD.
I could imagine Poland-Lithuania swallows Russia (difficult, but not ASB), and makes Roman characters the official writing system.
But for a SOVIET system to do it? In Russia? And succeeds? Sounds ASB to me, sorry.
WHY would anyone want to spell Russian in Roman characters? I could imagine a universe where Russia converts to Catholicism instead of Orthodoxy, and thus uses Roman letters, but that needs a PoD probably before 1000AD.
I could imagine Poland-Lithuania swallows Russia (difficult, but not ASB), and makes Roman characters the official writing system.
But for a SOVIET system to do it? In Russia? And succeeds? Sounds ASB to me, sorry.
Russians are Russians, and international communists are international communists.
Maybe with different fraction in power...
I posed a similar question to a Russian friend of mine, he responded that there are a lot of characters in the Cyrillic alphabet with no exact equivalent sounds in the Latin alphabet. So what you'd get in a transliteration is a very distorted version of the original Russian that would probably require lots of diacritic marks to compensate for it, and end up being a pig of a thing to actually use.
The Poles, Czechs, and Slovaks seem to manage well enough.
If Poland was incorporated as an SSR, maybe there could be a development of Polish orthography for Russian.
The Russian people would have to learn how to read all over again, and they'll find that they'll have to deal with lots of cases where a sound indicated by a single letter is now signaled by a combination of two letters they've never seen before that make entirely different sounds when they're separate. They're not going to like this, when they were perfectly good at reading before the revolution. So, every time they see a road sign or a propaganda poster, they're going to see something that the government did that pisses them off. Few people would think this is a good idea.
Otis R. Needleman
Banned
Don't know about that. Mandarin Chinese uses Pinyin, romanized with diacritical marks. Many years ago Vietnamese, which was written in Chinese characters, became romanized with diacritical marks. Romanized Russian would be doable in that sense, but agree that most Russians wouldn't see any need to do so. As previously stated, most Russians wouldn't want to make it any easier for foreigners to be in their country.
Once, in a fit of free time, I actually tried devising a system of Russian transliteration with a (nearly) 1-to-1 correspondence between Latin and Cyrillic characters (with a few exceptions for either aesthetic reasons or to aid pronunciation).
This was the result:
So yeah, a bit of a mess of diacritics... I definitely prefer Cyrillic.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latinisation_(USSR)
http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Русская_латиница
And yes - this project was aborted in 1930, almost as soon as it began, but it did really exist as a parn of Latinization campaign. Later it turned other way around - they changed all Latninzed alphabets in USSR into bastardized Cyrillics, so, for example, Kazakh language was written in Arabic script before 1927, in Latin letters between 1927 and 1940, and in Cyrilics after that. Poor schoolchildren.
When it comes to a reformist state with a powerful and popular figurehead single-handedly changing a deeply traditional and culturally significant orthography, let's not forget this actually happened in Turkey, so there are IRL-equivalents.
EDIT: As for the shift from cyrillic to latin, this was accomplished in several post-Soviet republics.
EDIT: As for the shift from cyrillic to latin, this was accomplished in several post-Soviet republics.
You don't understand, the Russian people have a deep and abiding hatred and distrust of outsiders and a deep and abiding love for their own language and culture.
They haven never gone even one generation, prior to world war two without an invasion by some crowd or other of busy body foreigners.
To give up their language and their alphabet in exchange for the alphabet of "Outsiders" would be to threaten cultural death.
It would be the surest way to insure the FAILURE of Communism in RUssia.
von kressenstein
Banned
i wish it had a like button
my second cousin is in charge of Tomsk Oblast..
and i agree 20000000000000567982.2%
Turn this on its head
My Prime minister declares that as from next week my long established alphabet which I learnt at my mothers knee will be changed to suit other countries.
I'm a peaceable man but I think that my only problem is.. when I join the revolution do I take my 12 bore or my .22?
Languages determine how you think ,how you look at the world .It is a large part of who you are.
No government no matter how draconion is going to attempt this, not only is it psychologically impossible it is a logistical nightmare which would cost millions of roubles and slow down the USSR's attempt to modernise to a crawl at best
My Prime minister declares that as from next week my long established alphabet which I learnt at my mothers knee will be changed to suit other countries.
I'm a peaceable man but I think that my only problem is.. when I join the revolution do I take my 12 bore or my .22?
Languages determine how you think ,how you look at the world .It is a large part of who you are.
No government no matter how draconion is going to attempt this, not only is it psychologically impossible it is a logistical nightmare which would cost millions of roubles and slow down the USSR's attempt to modernise to a crawl at best
But those languages didn't abandon their old language entirely in place for a new bastardized one. take it from someone who learned pinyin, these languages are far from perfect when compared to an alphabet that has been refined over centuries.
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