Do you know that all the alphabets except Stalin Cyrillic are prohibited at Russia and occupied territories? It means that dozens of languages, including Crimean Tatar, cannot develop. So what does "a free encyclopedia" say? -- Nothing. It means that Wikipedia, which fights so bravely for freedom of panorama, agrees with Stalin/Putin's alphabet prohibition.
See uk:Закон про єдину графічну основу | Law on a single graphic basis
I think that Wikipedia can rescue many languages, and literally destroy Putinism and stop the war. I am not saying that those languages have to be switched to the Latin alphabet. I am saying that every nation has the right to decide how to write in its own language.
It is quite important for Putinists to control languages, as it was described in "1984" by George Orwell.
Much depends on whether the special military operation in Ukraine will be successful in such a seemingly distant issue as Cyrillic or Latin in Kyrgyzstan.
This is being done with an obvious goal - rapprochement with the Western world and distancing ourselves from the post-Soviet space, where both the Russian language and the Cyrillic alphabet dominated. Accordingly, we must, based on this, do everything in our power to slow down such attempts or reverse them.
Easier said than done. Whether these steps will be supported in reality depends largely on our weight and influence. Therefore, I strongly support the advancement of our troops in Ukraine. Much depends on whether the special military operation in Ukraine will be successful in such a seemingly distant issue as Cyrillic or Latin in Kyrgyzstan.
This was said by Konstantin Zatulin about Kyrgyzstan's plans to change the alphabet.
The intended trend, which is increasingly used in the practice of Tatar nationalist organizations - the use of the Latin alphabet when writing texts in the Tatar language - causes concern. As is known, this is one of the pan-Turkist projects aimed at alienating the Turkic ethnic groups from the Russian socio-cultural paradigm.
According to Bicheldey, the introduction of the Latin alphabet in Tatarstan would endanger the general security and integrity of Russia, and the precedent could create conditions for the emergence of similar trends in other regions of the country.
The ultimate goal of the reform is undoubtedly political. It brings the Tatars together with their brothers from the independent countries of Central Asia and the Muslims of the Middle East. And most importantly, it destroys one of the few factors of the unity of the Russian Federation: the use of the same alphabet, which allows easy access to the Russian language. This law, worrying in itself, could serve as an example to other nations within the Federation
uk:Закон_про_єдину_графічну_основу | Law on a single graphic basis
it destroys one of the few factors of the unity of the Russian Federation
I think that Wikipedia can say that "every nation has the right to decide how to write in its own language".
If freedom of panorama or #WikiForHumanRights campaign is acceptable, freedom of alphabet campaign is acceptable as well.
So there is no any problem for Wikipedia to say it.
Also, we have the official Crimean Tatar Latin alphabet, which is forbidden in Crimea.
BTW, Volga Tatar Wikipedia was started in the Latin alphabet, but now it is in Cyrillic because of Putin's prohibition!
How does that destroy Putinism?
If Putinists cannot occupy languages, they cannot occupy nations and territories. And vice versa, if we accept that Putinists can occupy languages, we accept that Putinists can occupy nations and territories.
And if we want to overwhelm Putinism, we have to establish the rule of law in Russia. First of all, it means the rights of occupied nations, and first of all, it means their right to write in their own languages freely. So we need something like Helsinki Accords
Not the removal of troops and armor from occupied territories?
Not the repatriation of prisoners of war and children involuntarily exported to russia?
And how can Wikipedia help with it?
I don't know another way to overwhelm Putinism ideologically. We need to initiate the process of democratizing Russia, as it was done by the Helsinki Groups, see Ukrainian Helsinki Group
You can be a Putinist whatever language you speak. Same applies to Maoists, Stalinists, neoliberals, Neo-Nazis or basically any other ideologues.
And frankly, this argument reminds me very strongly of Zianon Pazniak and his Belarusian National Front: too preoccupied with the larguage questions (tarashkevitsa vs narkomouka - see, there are two wikis with these orthography variations on Wikipedia - and rarely did I hear the argument that using tarashkevitsa would seriously threaten Lukashenko, because, well, how would it), focused too much on national revival issues, almost 0 ideas on the economy, and look where they are after 1994 in Belarus. Pazniak didn't advance even to round 2 of the presidentials because among the non-educated masses, he was widely seen as a loon.
In fact, you confirmed my arguments.
For Belarusians, their language was not very important, and they lost their freedom and their language. For Ukrainians, our language is very important, and we kept our language and our freedom. Ukrainians refused to use the Stalin alphabet in 1990, it was still USSR. (The Belarusian Stalin alphabet is called "narkomouka".)
This is not a coincidence that in the free territory of Moldova, the Latin alphabet is used, but in the occupied territory, the Stalin Cyrillic alphabet is used.
For Moldovans, it was also very important to have their own alphabet.
On August 27, 1989, hundreds of thousands of people filled the central square of Chișinău. Many walked to the capital from neighboring cities. It was the day of the Great National Assembly of the Moldavian SSR. The participants of this meeting proposed declaring Moldavian the state language and switching to the Latin script. A few days later, on August 31, the Supreme Council of the Republic, after heated discussions, declared Moldavian the official language in the "political, economic, social and cultural spheres" and Russian the language of interethnic communication. A law was also adopted on returning the Moldavian language to the Latin script. The last day of summer in independent Moldova became a state holiday - Limba noastra ("Our Language").
https://www.currenttime.tv/a/ussr-moldova/32067117.html
You can be a Putinist whatever language you speak. Same applies to Maoists, Stalinists, neoliberals, Neo-Nazis or basically any other ideologues.
But you cannot be a Putinist if your language is not controlled by Putin.
It is also not a coincidence that Belarusians who fight with Putinism use the Latin variant of the "tarashkevitsa" alphabet:
see Kastuś Kalinoŭski Regiment
Also, Chechens that fight against Putinism use the Latin alphabet.
So let's imagine that the Republic of Tatarstan had the Latin alphabet. Would Putinism be stronger or weaker?
Obviously, Putinism would be weaker, see 1992 Tatarstani sovereignty referendum
Thus, we can make Putinism weaker just by saying that "every nation has the right to decide how to write in its own language".
Occupation of languages means that Putinists decide how to write in them. E.g., in Ukraine, in the 1930s, Stalinists murdered 4 million people, including almost all poets, writers, directors and philologists, and forced Ukrainians to write in uglified Newspeak.
It was done with the other occupied peoples as well.
So present-day Putinist politics is Stalinist politics, which is well described in "1984" by George Orwell.
When the Volga Tatars decided to change the alphabet, Russians forbade it.
So what do you think? Can Russians decide how the Volga Tatars have to write in the Volga Tatar language?
The guys were murdered more because they potentially could threaten Stalin's stranglehold on the Soviet Union, including on cultural issues, and not really because they wrote in Ukrainian.
they potentially could threaten Stalin's stranglehold on the Soviet Union, including on cultural issues
It means that the independent developing of language threatened Stalin's stranglehold. And now the Latin alphabet threatens Putin's stranglehold.
Ukraine has a long history of orthography prohibitions. The same thing is true of Lithuania: Lithuanian press ban.
So all the Russian history and all the Russian officials say that it is EXTREMELY important for Russians, but somebody is trying to prove that it doesn't matter.
Why did Russians forbid even the letter Ґ if it didn't matter?
The letter ⟨ґ⟩ was officially eliminated from the Ukrainian alphabet in the Soviet orthographic reforms of 1933, to bring the Ukrainian language closer to Russian, its function being subsumed into that of the letter ⟨г⟩, pronounced in Ukrainian as [ɦ]. However, ⟨ґ⟩ continued to be used by Ukrainians in Galicia (part of Poland until 1939) and in the Ukrainian diaspora worldwide, who all continued to follow the Kharkiv orthography of 1928 (the so-called skrypnykivka, after Mykola Skrypnyk). It was reintroduced to Soviet Ukraine in a 1990 orthographic reform under glasnost, just before independence in 1991. A 2017 study of legal documents found that the letter had returned to active usage in Ukraine.
As for me, it is quite obvious, that Italians, but not Chinese have to decide how to write in Italian. As well, Crimean Tatars but not Ukrainians have to decide how to write in Crimean Tatar, and so on.
Meaningless statement is that Russians have to decide how Ukrainians, the Volga Tatars, Crimean Tatars and dozens of occupied nations have to write in their native languages.
But this meaningless statement is the law of the Russian Federation, see uk:Закон_про_єдину_графічну_основу | Law on a single graphic basis
…and also more recent information:
The Kremlin's linguicidal strategy: In Russia, they want to regulate the norms of the Ukrainian language until the merger.
For Russians it is very important to control languages.
At this stage the script used is an academic question
So why for Russians it is not an academic question? I am telling about the real Russian politics of linguicide. They don't only suppress the languages but first turn them into Newspeak.
How will switching the script in which they write their language help Wikipedia?
My point is that Wikipedia should help the languages.
I don't say that Wikipedia should change the language.
Wikipedia should say that every nation has the right to decide how to write in its own language, and therefore Putin's alphabet prohibition have to be repealed.
So, as in the case of freedom of panorama, Wikipedia should fight for freedom of alphabets.
It is called "precedent". It means that Wikipedia can fight for freedom and human rights. So it can fight for the freedom of alphabets, as it fights for the freedom of panorama.
As for me the matter is very clear, and I think that George Orwell described it pretty clear too. I mean Newspeak. As you may know it is not fiction but description of the Stalin politics.
"Stalin Cyrillic"?!?!?
I mean alphabets that were introduced by the Stalin terror.
The law you cite dates to 2002. Are you saying that Kazakhs and Ukrainians, for example, can't use their modified Cyrillic alphabets but must use Russian Cyrillic??? I find that difficult to believe. Are you saying that local languages must be put aside and Russian used?
Ukrainians can use their modified Cyrillic alphabet. But as I mentioned above, Russians are trying to return to the Stalin practice in the occupied territory:
The Kremlin's linguicidal strategy: In Russia, they want to regulate the norms of the Ukrainian language until the merger.
Also, they try to prevent Kyrgyzstan from switching to the Latin alphabet.
Kazakh was planning to switch to the Latin alphabet, but they are still using Cyrillic.
The idea of Stalin Cyrillic is that it is not exactly Russian but controlled by Russians.
Like in the Ukrainian language, the letter Ґ was forbidden by Russians. So the main idea is that Russians know better how to write in other languages. They dream without jokes to switch into Cyrillic all the possible languages!
The law concerns the territory of Russia and the occupied territories. So firstly, it concerns the Volga Tatars because they made an attempt to switch to the Latin alphabet, and also Crimean Tatars because they have the official Latin alphabet, but it is forbidden in Crimea.
Cyrillic is actually very, very good for the printed representation of Slavic languages. Russian is quite phonetic for the most part, although accented syllables get squirrelly. The Poles trying to cram the Latin alphabet onto their language is an alternative case. Not nearly as good. Even that exercise required new letters.
My point is that Russians can decide only how to write in Russian.
Changing representation of a language is hardly inserting Newspeak.
All that Cyrillic alphabets were introduced in 1930s by terror, repressions and genocide. It was officially stated that the only purpose of that Cyrillic alphabets is to make all the languages closer to Russian. So the main point is that Russians control other languages.
Can be done for political reasons, see Serbs vs Croats, but Croats have actually done changes to vocabulary or resurrected archaic words to distance them from the Serbs, which is closer to Newspeak.
The point is that it is up to Serbs and Croats.
As for interfering with other countries' changes to their scripts, that's more flexing muscles than anything else. Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan have close links to Russia and a sizable Russian minority, which Russia claims to be protecting, but the majority population is not even Slav.
Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan were in USSR so they have Stalin Cyrillic. Half of Kazakhs died or escaped to China in 1930s...
But Russians in Russia will not be harmed much by the transition to Latin script of foreign countries.
You don't know Russians. Russians will be harmed because they think that they know better how Kazakhs should write in the Kazakh language. They don't believe that Kazakhstan or Ukraine are foreign countries.
As I said, the real problem is relatively covert suppression of native languages. They don't outright ban them, just nudge people to use Russian through various means, while technically still allowing some showing of ethnic minority culture but more as an exhibit than real effort to preserve cultural diversity.
But if peoples even don't have rights on their own languages, there is no sense to discuss anything else: it will be decoration in any case. And people will prefer Russian because their languages were made artificial by Russians.
Wikipedia's role is not to preserve languages, it's to summarise knowledge.
But now Wikipedia develops even dead languages! So I think Wikipedia may care about alive languages and alive peoples, given that Wikipedia cares about freedom of panorama and #HumanRights.
Language suppression is a tool of hegemony, and the Russians have never met a tool of hegemony that they didn't immediately and unapologetically adopt for their own use.
Exactly!
And yes, Russians speculates, that "everybody did so," but this is not true. Yes, there were colonial empires and assimilation, but there is only one state in history that is afraid of alphabets!
And as it was said, we are living in the XXI century, not only with the internet, but also with international law and human rights!
To be honest, there was only one precedent in colonial history: the destruction of Mayan writing. But it was considered not normal even in that time. For Russians, alphabet prohibition is the only "normality", and they can now tell it to you using modern communication technologies.
BTW, one of the significant researchers of Mayan writing is from the Kharkiv region of Ukraine: Yuri Knorozov
Also, we know about repressions against Tifinagh
The Moroccan state arrested and imprisoned people using Neo-Tifinagh during the 1980s and 1990s. The Algerian Black Spring was also partly caused by this repression of Berber language.
.........
In Libya, the government of Muammar Gaddafi consistently banned Tifinagh from being used in public contexts such as store displays and banners.
The Wikipedia should make the Freedom of Alphabets campaign the same as it makes the Freedom of Panorama campaign. I think that scripts are just as important to Wikipedia as panoramas.
If Wikipedia can make the #WikiFotHumanRights campaign, it can also fight for the human rights to freedom of script.
E.g. Ukrainian Wikipedia supports EU separatists: uk:Вікіпедія:Проєкт:Тематичний_тиждень/Тиждень_поневолених_народів | Wikipedia : Project: Thematic week/Week of enslaved peoples -- but why can't it support the Crimean Tatar alphabet in Crimea?
It was still random string of letters for the Russians, but that way they didn't have to learn Arabic, Latin, Mongol and other scripts. For some minor languages it was their first codification. Other than that they didn't care less.
But what business do Russians have with these languages? For example, in Ukraine, nobody cares that Crimean Tatar switched to Latin, despite Ukrainians writing in Cyrillic. I think the same thing is true in every normal country, like in Canada, where Indians use Canadian Aboriginal syllabics.
BTW, firstly, all those languages were switched to the Latin alphabet: Latinisation in the Soviet Union -- so Stalin switched them from Latin to Cyrillic.
never changed the alphabets of Baltic States' languages upon occupation in 1940 because too many folks knew the old system.
I think that's because it was after Stalin's Great Terror. In fact, the area of distribution of Stalin Cyrillic is the area of Stalin's terror. E.g. Mongolia was occupied, which is why it uses Cyrillic.
They never changed representation of Georgian or Armenian. The languages have very old literary traditions.
Mongolians also have a very old literary tradition. Maybe Stalin, as a Georgian, had some sentiments about those scripts. BTW, Armenian was reformed: Armenian orthography reform -- but it was before Stalin.
So was there more harm from killing half of Kazakhs or from forcing Cyrillic upon their throats?
The Cyrillic was forced by genocide. So being in agreement with such enforcement means being in agreement with genocide.
But even then they don't really care about ethnic Kazakhs, because they aren't Slavic.
But they do care about the Volga Tatars.
— But if peoples even don't have rights on their own languages, there is no sense to discuss anything else. — Languages, not ways of representation of a language. Only a tiny minority really cares about purity of language - most just use it, at most being conscious of correctness. Also, the main reason they abandon their own languages in Russia is not because they use Cyrillic alphabets but because Russians made sure that you won't get far using the languages. Which is a much bigger issue.
Russians do care about Stalin Cyrillic. So the problem is that Putin understands the significance of scrips, but we don't.
It explains how Russia has long tried to "bifurcate" the Ukrainian language into vernacular and "sacred" dialects (if that's even the right word), so that it can somehow more easily take control of the vernacular (and gradually make it more Russian) while the sacred is relegated to church documents and dusty old history books.
Pushkin was a real Ruscist, and what he said about Poland it is exactly what Putin says about Ukraine! See To the Slanderers of Russia
But I consider Church Slavonic to be a part of Ukrainian culture. BTW, the first restrictions on language in Ukraine concerned the Ukrainian version of Church Slavonic. Instead, Russians forced Ukrainians to use their version of Church Slavonic.
1720 – Peter I prohibits the printing houses of the Pechersk Lavra and Chernihiv from printing any books, except religious books, and those only using the "Great Russian language", by which one should essentially understand the Russian version of Church Slavonic. In practice, this means a ban on using the Ukrainian redaction of Church Slavonic in print.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronology_of_Ukrainian_language_suppression
But the idea of a very-very-very-right "sacred" dialect for dusty books, it is definitely an idea of Soviet Ukrainian.
How will learning about a writing system remove putin from power and russian troops from Ukraine?
How will not learning about Writing system remove putin from power and russian troops from Ukraine?
My point is that if we can do something, we have to do it. Wikipedia can conduct a campaign against Putin's alphabet prohibition, which means that it has to do it.
— But they do care about the Volga Tatars. — Because Tatarstan is part of Russia? Also, they have a direct interest in suppressing meaningful Tatar revival because Tatarstan is an oil-rich republic which almost broke away from Russia in 1992 and yeah, they waged two wars against Chechnya, which did manage to de facto break away. No Russian politician would let them go, and no Russian politician will allow them to approach that stage.
In fact, it means the importance of what I am saying: Russians need to control the Tatar language to control Tatarstan. But also, it means that Russia is extremely weak, so it is even afraid of the Latin alphabet!
Nor would you let Crimeans declare their "Crimean Tatar People's Republic" if Crimea returns to Ukrainian control, would you?
But why don’t Crimean Tatars declare "Crimean Tatar People's Republic" right now?
— The Cyrillic was forced by genocide. So being in agreement with such enforcement means being in agreement with genocide. — Proof?
If Russians have the right to decide how you have to write in your native language, it means that Russians have the right to everything else. Using Stalin Cyrillic means that Russians "can repeat" (as they like to say), and you agree with it.
[obviously weakens Putinism] The "obviously" part is very debatable. I'd even dare say "not at all"
First of all, it is obvious to Russians. Also, it is well shown by George Orwell in "1984", where he described very detailed this Stalin's practice as Newspeak. So George Orwell also considers it EXTREMELY important, and his book has even a special part dedicated to Newspeak.
So leaders of a multi-ethnic state with active ethnic minority nationalist movements want to make sure they do not blow up the country from within?
That is why this is so important for us. This would destroy Putinism and stop the war.
There's a reason a lot of Russians hate Gorbachev (except those whose main worry were human rights, or who benefitted from capitalism, which is to say, a minority of the Russians), and no politician wants to be remembered for the same reason.
So we need more sanctions to return them to the USSR standard of living to make them happy, like Northern Koreans are happy without capitalism.
PS
BTW, I cannot imagine English in Cyrillic, but Russians definitely can.
PPS
Historically, Russian imperialism is about a great deal more than soldiers, weaponry and land. It's also about cultural extermination, "Make the world England" taken to the extreme. If I'm not mistaken here, the message is that maintaining language and culture in the face of this helps defeat that element of the war, and that Wikipedia should act responsibly in this case.
