Friday, September 29, 2006

Enter Cyrillic

The European Commission has recommended admission to the European Union for Romania and Bulgaria. This brings the number of official EU languages to what, 27?
Romanian, being a Romance language, should fit in nicely with its cousins, French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese. But, as The Economist points out, bringing in Bulgarian adds another script — Cyrillic — to the existing mix.
The use of Cyrillic has been challenged in several countries in recent years. The Economist cites Moldova and Azerbaijan, which switched to Latin; and Tatarstan, Uzbekistan, Montenegro (Serbian is written in both Cyrillic and Latin characters). Transliteration is a challenge, especially because “the sh and ch sounds, single letters in Cyrillic, become head-splitting combinations of sz, cz, ci, si” and s or c with various diacritics—so one set of sounds can be transliterated several different ways.

Posted by Laurel on 09/29 at 04:10 PM

(0) Comments• (0) Trackbacks• Permalink • Digg