> Cyrillic scripts like Russian and Ukrainian are supported via GNU Unifont, along with Arabic and Hebrew.
So much for proper typography...
I guess it's still useful for an ocasional Cyrillic word inside an English text, but reading a book set in GNU Unifont is not going to be a pleasurable experience.
You're confusing a language (the way people speak) and a literary tradition (the way people write).
When ancestors of Russians borrowed Church Slavonic writing, they were already speaking another Slavic language, Old East Slavic. For the time being, they were writing in one language (Church Slavonic) and speaking another language (Old East Slavic). Later, they dropped Church Slavonic and started writing what they spoke.
Modern Russian language is a continuation of Old East Slavic, not of Old Church Slavonic.
Our Belarusian teacher actually ш/т wrote it like that, I got it from her. It’s not very common in Belarus, either.
I think the real strongholds of this style are Serbia and [North] Macedonia. They even underline и and write a line over п (they can do this since they use ј instead of й).
I like writing in cursive, but I don’t see backtracking as a problem. I backtrack quite a lot in Cyrillic, even in Russian, e.g. I always underline ш and write a line over т (which looks like m) to distinguish them (otherwise they look quite similar, see the famous example лишили лилии — you might want to google it if you haven’t seen it yet). I also normally write д as ∂, which breaks the flow.
Belarusian Cyrillic requires more backtracking: we have і, ў, obligatory ё, apostrophes. Never saw it as a problem.
So what? Old French Bretaigne referred both to Britain and Brittany, Old French Russie referred to both Russia (maybe, haven't done research on this) and Ruthenia.
But we're not speaking Old French, we're speaking 21-century English. In 21-century English, Russia ≠ Ruthenia, Brittany ≠ Britain.
> But adopting Latin script would help Ukraine "move away" from Russia even more.
That might be true, but Latin script is not a neutral option. It has its own problematic history in Ukraine.
Historically, Latin script for Ukrainian (abecadło) was associated with polonisation. While Ukrainian-Polish relationships are quite good now, this history is not easy to discard. This history still affects politics (the recent debacle with the Order of the White Eagle is a good example).
So, I don’t see Ukrainian ditching Cyrillic anytime soon.
I do, however, expect Ukrainians to eventually develop their own style of Cyrillic. I totally expect Ukrainian fonts to drift away from Russian ones. There are already steps in that direction. E.g. the font e-Ukraine Head seen on many official websites introduces Latin-like к (curiously, that’s how my great grandmother used to write к — she went to a Polish school in Western Ukraine) and ȣ-like у. I expect to see more of that. There’s a enough of interest in a distinct visual identity for Ukrainian, and there are talented designers working on it.
Ukraine traces its lineage to Ruthenia (Русь), not to Russia (Росія). These words are related etymologically, but so are Brittany and Britain, or Cornouaille and Cornwall. You can’t just treat Ruthenia and Russia as the same thing — just like you can’t treat Brittany and Britain as the same thing.
Oh come on, the term itself is political. It has always been political everywhere: same in Russia and Ukraine.
You can't "politically charge" a term that has always been political. The concept of "native language" is 100% political, always.
As for "mother tongue", it has the same problems and more. "Mother tongue" brings in an implicit idea of 'less prestigious ethnic language', "mother tongue" as opposed to "father tongue" (even in ex-USSR: e.g. you would say that Belarusian is "матчына мова", but you'd never say that Russian is someone's "матчына мова" even when speaking about ethnic Russians — because Russian carries higher prestige, so can't be "mother's" language)
We should not try to replace "native language" with a different term, we should avoid it in serious discussions. Instead, we can speak of proficiency, parents passing language to children, the role of education, the ethnic language, the national language, etc.
And if we do so, we see that there's nothing wrong or unusual about Ukrainian.
If anything, it's huge languages like Russian or English that are unusual. They're different from 99% languages of the world. After all, bilinguals are more common than monolinguals. It's Russian that is a weird outlier, not Ukrainian.
"Native speaker" is not a very useful term: it combines a lot of criteria (first acquired language, language you know best, language you identify with, language of your parents, language of your ethnic group etc.), and each of these criteria is further very fuzzy (e.g. I know plant names better in Ukrainian, but programming terms better in Russian, which language I know better? Competency is not a single value, ethnic identification is malleable and people can have several of these, etc.)
These criteria usually coincide in speakers of big languages (usually languages of [former] empires), so it's relatively easy to say who is a native speaker of Russian or English. There are a lot of people who fulfill all the criteria at once.
But they rarely coincide for speakers of smaller languages (usually colonised people). When most people are bilingual, it's often harder to say who is a native speaker of Ukrainian or Belarusian. Most people fulfill some criteria but not all of them.
So, the term "native speaker" is not neutral and not very useful.
The problem is, most of these bindings are out-of-date. Delphi from 2012, Basic from 2002, D from 2016. wxRuby is a dead link. wxAda was already dead in 2009, as the discussion I can google suggests.
So, if you use wxWidgets, you probably have to use either C++ or Python version, others are unlikely to be supported.
LibreOffice Calc has an option to force English function names regardless of the current localization. I guess Excel should have something similar, too¹.
Fun fact: in European and Brazilian Portuguese, the same function names can refer to different things. European SUBSTITUIR² is REPLACE (Brazilian MUDAR), Brazilian SUBSTITUIR³ is SUBSTITUTE (European SUBST).
It kinda is? Most Classical Chinese and Egyptian words follow the principle "deficient phonetic + semantic part", it's just that Chinese characters are split into neat squares because most Classical Chinese words are exactly one syllable long. But the general principle is similar enough.
Some modern adaptations of his transcription do, however. E.g. Modern Japanese Grammar: A Practical Guide uses the transcription “sensee” (they consistently don’t use macrons in this book: e.g. they use oo for ō, etc.).
Hepburn didn’t write “sensē” himself because it 1880s it was still pronounced “ei”, not “ē”. If it were pronounced like it’s pronounced nowadays, you can bet he’d spell it with ē.
> Having a one-to-one romanization for each Hiragana phonetic is far more logical for learners
It depends on the learner’s (and textbook author’s) goals. Sometimes, having a phonetic transcription of the more common pronunciation is a more important consideration.
Historically, Hepburn’s transcription pre-dates Japanese orthographic reform. He was writing “kyō” back when it was spelled けふ. Having one-to-one correspondence to kana was not a goal.
So writing sensē is kinda on-brand (even if Hepburn didn’t write like this, because in his times it still wasn’t pronounced with long e).
Also, forbid apostrophes, quotation marks and non-cp1252 characters in the message text, like my bank's website does. Apparently to prevent SQL injections.
Russian writer Leonid Kaganov had this idea back in 2021, with an added twist that he also put the printer in his bathroom: https://lleo.me/dnevnik/2021/11/30
So much for proper typography...
I guess it's still useful for an ocasional Cyrillic word inside an English text, but reading a book set in GNU Unifont is not going to be a pleasurable experience.